Alice Kahn Ladas, a psychologist and psychotherapist The best-selling 1982 book, “The G Spot: And Other Recent Discoveries About Human Sexuality,” created a tipping point for female sensual autonomy by introducing ways for women to experience greater sexual pleasure , died July 29 at his home in Santa Fe, NM He was 102.
His son Robin Janis confirmed the death, adding that Dr. Ladas was still seeing patients in his home office the day before he died.
The book reviewed by Dr. Ladas, co-authored with researchers Beverly Whipple and John Perry, the presence of the G-spot, a patch of erectile tissue that can be felt on the front wall of the vagina, behind the pubic bone. (The tissue is named for Ernst Gräfenberg, a German physician who was the first person to write about it in modern medical literature.) The book compares the G-spot to the male prostate: Each, when stimulated, can produce a similar sexual response. to an orgasm.
For their research, Dr. interviewed and tested. Whipple and Dr. Perry about 400 women in Florida, all of whom found their G-spots.
“My role is to see the connection,” Dr. Ladas said The Santa Fe Reporter in 2010. “There was a vaginal orgasm, there was a clitoral orgasm, but they weren’t exclusive.”
The book, which has been translated into many languages and sold more than a million copies, was revolutionary in helping women understand their sexual role, especially regarding female ejaculation.
However, it has proven controversial within the medical community, as women flock to doctors wondering if they are experiencing ejaculation or urinary incontinence during sex. Some doctors questioned the depth of the authors’ research and whether the book was meant to be a medical tool or simply a handbook for women.
“‘The G Spot’ sounds like a scientific study, when it’s not,” said Dr. Martin Weisberg, then an assistant professor of obstetrics, gynecology and psychiatry at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, in The New York Times after the book was published.
But Dr. said otherwise. Robert Francoeur, then a professor of human sexuality at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey: “Professional jealousy is incredible in terms of sex educators, therapists and doctors. The negative comments from professionals seem to be angry that they didn’t write the book.”
In 2021, published by the National Institutes of Health a review of 31 studies on the G spot and found that they “systematically agreed” on its existence.
However, the review said, “Among studies where it is considered to exist, there is no agreement on its location, size or nature.” It concluded, “The existence of this structure remains unproven.”
Alice Kahn was born in Manhattan on May 30, 1921, to Rosalie Heil Kahn, an early supporter of the Ethical Culture movement, an effort to develop humanist codes of behavior, and Myron Daniel Kahn, a cotton merchant. His parents divorced when he was 2, and he spent winters with his mother in Manhattan and extended summer vacations with his father in Montgomery, Ala.
He attended the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in Manhattan from kindergarten through high school and enrolled at Smith College in Massachusetts, graduating cum laude in 1943 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science and as a member of the honor society Phi Beta Kappa. She received a master’s in social work from Smith in 1946.
While at Smith, met Dr. Eleanor Roosevelt walks while participating in a student leadership program at Campobello, the presidential summer retreat in New Brunswick. Inspired by the first lady’s feminism and activism, Dr. Ladas for civil rights in the South and in Washington.
Dr. Ladas became a follower of the controversial Austrian psychologist Wilhelm Reich, developer of psychosexual theories centered on orgasm, and joined his staff in New York in the early 1950s. In 1956, he helped Reich’s student Alexander Lowen found the Institute for Bioenergetic Analysis, which focuses on the physical underpinnings of mental health.
Intrigued by babies and breastfeeding, Dr. Ladas immediately went to France to study the Lamaze method of childbirth, where women are encouraged to move around and use controlled breathing and relaxation as tools to begin labor. Returning to the United States, he became, in 1959, one of the first to teach Lamaze classes there.
She received her doctorate in education from Teachers College at Columbia University in 1970. Her dissertation on breastfeeding was initially rejected by faculty members until she persuaded anthropologist Margaret Mead to sit on her dissertation committee. The research of Dr. Ladas eventually published in peer-reviewed journals in medicine and sociology.
“That’s what I’m most proud of,” he told a Smith alumni magazine for a profile of him this year. “I believe it influences — in the United States, at least — more women to breastfeed.”
She married Harold Ladas, a psychology professor at Hunter College in New York, in 1963; he died in 1989. In addition to his daughter Robin, he is survived by another daughter, Pamela Ladas, and three grandchildren.
In the 1970s, Dr. Ladas serves on the boards of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality, in Allentown, Pa., and the International Institute of Bioenergetic Analysis, based in Barcelona, Spain. A study he conducted with his wife about the effects of body psychotherapy on women’s sexuality led to his collaboration with Dr. Whipple and Dr. Perry.
Dr. Ladas was a protégé of Adelle Davis, a nutritionist who taught him about organic foods and the importance of exercise. Dr. Ladas snorkeled and played tennis into his 90s and played the piano even when he turned 100, his son said.
Two nights before he died, he and a friend watched the movie “Oppenheimer,” about the developer of the atomic bomb. It was “not history to him,” his daughter said, because “that’s what he lived for.”
