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In his medical student days Havelock Ellis was annoyed that he was taught much about the human body and its ills but nothing about human nature. In gynecology lectures he learned that sex was only
a physical matter of health or disease. He reacted to the prudery of Charcot's time by becoming an artist in the Ellisian sense—an artist of life who blends with scientific light the 'sweetness' of aesthetic penetration—and has since devoted his life to research and education in the sexual field. His vocation for this task is witnessed by the monumental Studies in the Psychology of Sex, the fact that he was one of the very first to introduce Nietszche and Freud to English readers, and by his reputation as one of the great sanative influences of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The present volume is a concise manual for the general physician and medical student.
The tenor of the book does not always reflect Ellis' declaration in its preface that his attitude to psychoanalysis has been sympathetic though never partisan. While, in general, his attitude toward psychoanalysis is very friendly, his attitude to psychoanalytic theory is a sympathetic acceptance of its pregenital concepts and a rejection of its genital concepts that seems partisan, for instance, in his preference for quoting Rank as the supporting authority for his own bias against Freud's theories of the Oedipus and castration complexes.
The chapter entitled The Sexual Impulse in Youth gives a lucid account of the pregenital stages and of their contributions to sexual life. But Ellis is dubious of the Oedipus complex which 'might be present in constitutionally neurotic subjects, especially under the influence of injudicious parental behavior such as favoritism or careless neglect', and he warns against such 'generalization from a single case or even from many cases'. As supporting authority for this doubt, he quotes from Rank that 'the Oedipus complex is not so clearly found in practice as mythology