Sexual Deviation: Edited by Ismond Rosen. Second Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1979. Pp. 556.

The Second Edition gives a useful opportunity to readers to get the feel of a number of different experts endeavouring to correlate their work at the problem of understanding and then treating persons with sexual deviations. Unlike the First Edition, contributors are drawn from a number of countries, five from the United States of America and one from France. The reviewer has given a good deal of thought to the question of the helpfulness or otherwise of the inclusion of Chapter 12, 'Behaviour Therapy for Sexual Deviation'; Chapter 13, 'The Law and Sexual Deviation'; and Chapter 14, 'Biological Factors in the Organization and Expression of Sexual Behaviour'. Chapter 14 is extremely interesting, but nevertheless one is forced to the conclusion that instead of these three chapters there could have been attempts to co-ordinate a general theory of the perversion and the relationships with the wider one of sexual deviation, a follow up of Gillespie's important 1956 paper. The metapsychology of sexual deviation is still far from coherent whereas the clinical observations are usually impeccably sound.

There are no contributions from workers who use Klenian concepts in this edition. This is quite a serious omission as far as any approach to an overall theory of sexual deviation is concerned. Concepts which include the anti-therapeutic, anti-life, narcissistic organization as a great facilitator and perpetuator of sexual deviation could have contributed to the overall symposium. Klein