Sexuality and Psychoanalysis. Edward T. Adelson, ed. New York:  Brunner/Mazel, 1975.

This book consists of essays by 19 psychoanalysts on the ever crucial subject of interrelations between psychoanalysis and sexuality. These essays were first presented at the sixth triennial symposium of the Society of Medical Psychoanalysts, titled “Sexuality and Psychoanalysis Revisited.” In his introduction, Adelson surveys—from Hippocrates to the present—the history of the concept that sexuality and mental illness are related. (Because masturbation, for the past three centuries, has more widely than not been considered a cause of severe mental disorders, his survey deals at some length with the history of that notion.) Discussing libido or sexual energy, Adelson concurs with Colby, Fairbairn, and others who reject the Freudian assumption that the psyche is a closed system (“Energy only has meaning in respect to a field of forces.”) and concludes that

Freud was right in one respect: all our symbolic operations can, in the last analysis, be traced back to a core of early childhood sensory experiences …. The growing child constantly identifies its somatic functions with the objects of the external world. The infant constantly analogizes external processes with hearing, swallowing, refusing, taking, getting … etc. This is why analysts of the various schools have about the same success rate. [p. 9].

The range of views and content among the other essays can be suggested by citing a few topics they cover: for example, influences of sex hormones on mood and behavior (Lunde), “Nativism vs. Culturalism in Gender-Identity Differentiation” (Money), psychoanalysis in relation to findings of experimental primatology (McKenney), biosocial roots of childhood sexuality