The woman's place in relation to new methods of treatment of male sexual impotence.

New treatments for male impotence are now available, mainly sildenafil (oral) and prostaglandin 1 (intraurethral). These new treatments, which will be easier to use for men, raise problems of acceptability by women. Schematically, women adopt certain behaviours in relation to male sexuality, which can be characterized as "castrating", "infantile", "not interested", or "narcissistically wounded". New treatments, which will certainly be better accepted by patients and their partners, must not mask the ubiquitous participation of a psychogenic component in all forms of male impotence, including so-called "organic" impotence. The management of male impotence can therefore only be conceived in a context of a "couple project" after having defined the contribution of medicine and the patient's personal investment in finding a solution to his problem. The blind prescription and use of a drug wrongly considered to be a "male youth pill" could lead to major and probably harmful sociological changes in the context of the ever-evolving male-female relationships and in a context of ageing of the population.