Sexual Pathology. A Study of Derangements of the Sexual Instinct: By Magnus Hirschfeld. (Revised Edition). New York: Emerson Books, Inc., 1940. 368 pp.

Magnus Hirschfeld's 'Sexual Pathology' has been condensed into one volume in this new edition. The shadow of fin-de-siécle psychiatry lies over its pages, as the tides of dynamic psychology failed to sweep the eminent sexologist off the shoals of his humoral prejudice. The book is replete with keen and accurate observations in the tradition of classical psychiatry, but these are uncorrelated save by the rigid organicism which characterized Hirschfeld's viewpoint. He was content with the hypothesis that such sexual abnormalities as fetishism, nymphomania and impotence may be explained by the aberrant functioning of the endocrines or the presence of special sensory end-organs, assisted perhaps by the effects of 'limited [conditioned] reflexes'. He makes short shrift of Freud in an early chapter and never mentions him again thereafter, even when he finally admits that impotence is chiefly a psychogenic phenomenon. A quotation, by no means exceptional in its turgidity, sums up his point of view: 'And thus it goes, from without on the sensory track outwards and then always further centripetal sensory, centrifugal motory, now known, now unknown, now interrupted, now not interrupted, in steps, until through the summation of the stimuli there is an increasing erotization of the brain cells and so gradually the peak of desire is reached unless a stop has been called on one of the lower steps by the interference of some external influence.'

With the concepts of the unconscious and of infantile sexuality ruled out a priori one is not surprised to find the numerous case histories lacking in the most elementary detail and full of naïveties. These deficiencies are not pardonable when one considers the profound changes that were taking place in methods of psychiatric