Contemporary Sexual Behavior: Critical Issues in the 1970's.: Edited by Joseph Zubin and John Money. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973, xx + 468 pp., $15.00.

The compleat psychoanalyst, looking around for ideas, may turn to a collection of papers presented at the 61st annual meeting of the American Psychopathological Association. It is doubtful that the psychoanalyst will be pleased. Here and there he may come upon some food for thought. But in other places he is apt to find—depending on his temperament—more fuel for anger, sorrow, or derision. Biology, ethology, animal and human psychology, neural science, sociology, pharmacology, and psychiatry are all represented, and so is psychoanalysis—in one lone, admirable paper by Robert Stoller. A wide range of approaches, one would think; nevertheless, in the preface the editors apologize for the fact that practicality did not allow inclusion of all the sexual issues of the 1970's. Among those left out is any consideration of love.

Nothing much holds the papers in this collection together, and the result is a kind of potpourri. The tendency to eschew any sort of general psychological theory (or even biological theory) is countered only by Stoller, the psychoanalyst. Some of the papers are narrow in scope but rigorous in the presentation of data. Others are global, loosely pontifical, or faddishly political. A number, including several of the otherwise scientific papers, contain gratuitous attacks on psychoanalysis in general and Freud's person in particular. That these attacks are simplistic and ignorant is comforting in one way and distressing in another. It is comforting to note that they represent prejudices rather than substantial criticism; most of the reports dealing with data rather than mere opinion can be integrated into psychoanalysis as a general psychology with little or no difficulty. It is distressing, however, that psychoanalysis has been so incapable of making itself understood by sizable numbers of other scientists.

One reason for examining this book, then, is to winnow out some of the contributions from other disciplines that actually have relevanc