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This is a brilliant, though highly involved and overextended (thirty-four pages) study on circumcision culminating in the formulation that foreskin and femininity, circumcision and rebirth, are unconsciously identified. Anal and oral regressive fantasies are also found in the identification of glans and mother's nipple, and foreskin with smegma, and breast with milk. 'The former represented to him [the patient] the masculine principle, the latter the feminine one …, he restored the unity of his masculine and feminine parts, of himself and of his mother, he became again bisexual, a man and a woman in one person' (p. 157). Nunberg's deduction has the advantage of contributing an answer to the anthropological puzzle of why an injury to the penis (puberty rites of primitives) makes a man more masculine. If circumcision means elimination of femininity in the boy, there is less of an enigma.
Nunberg touches on a great many tangential problems such as those arising from masculinity and femininity in general, activity and passivity, religious attitudes, and even the question of German war guilt. It is at these tangential points—especially the first two—that doubts arise. It should be stressed, however, that Nunberg's main thesis, with its wealth of corroborative material, is