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This volume consists of a selection of contributions to a conference held in 1977, the subject of which was a multidisciplinary consideration of human sexual development. The disciplines represented were evolutionary studies, biology, psychology, sociology, and anthropology. In 1974 the National Commission on Population Growth and the American Future initiated a project on Human Sexual Development at Stanford University under the leadership of Herant Katchadourian, the editor of this volume. The conference itself was part of the Special Studies Program of the Stanford Project, and therefore represents an important ongoing scientific venture.
It is a fact that there has been a neglect of research in sexuality as reported in the psychological literature, as the editor states, particularly in comparison to the massive research in such other areas as cognitive development. Those involved in the Stanford project are certainly to be congratulated, therefore, for this review of the studies of sexuality which have been carried out. However, the papers they have chosen for this volume are of uneven quality and on the whole do not contribute a great deal that is new to our knowledge of human sexuality.
This results in part from a surprising neglect of contributions from the psychoanalytic field. The editor alludes to Freud's work in his introductory chapter, stating that Freud's well-known views on infantile sexuality and psychosexual development were based on his study of adults. Yet he disregards Freud's (1905) paper on the development of a phobia in a five-year-old boy, and his other case studies which have served as a basic source of our present-day understanding of infantile sexuality. Among other psychoanalytic contributions omitted were Spitz's (1962) work on autoerotism; Jones's (1927), Horney's (1924), Greenacre's (1950), (1958), Kestenberg's (1956), Fraiberg's (1972), Kleeman's (1971), (1976) and Galenson and Roiphe's (1971), (1976) contributions to the unders