L'Ipersessualità Come Fattore Degenerogeno (Hypersexuality as a Degenerative Factor): By Marino Benvenuti. Pisa: Edizioni 'Omnia Medica', 1950. 208 pp.

The interrelationships of psychology and endocrinology are so intimate, and the understanding of the endocrine function can make so great a contribution to psychological and biological understanding, that every study of the correlations between endocrine factors and personality, especially its sexual aspects, is apt to arouse the greatest interest. In fact, the writer of this book presents his investigations as a contribution to the understanding of the 'relationships between sexuality and psychic phenomena', which—'always recognized'—are still considered to be 'obscure, notwithstanding the discoveries of endocrinology'. The reader, however, is soon disappointed when he realizes that these relationships are studied only from the point of view allegedly played by endocrine secretions in personality formation and structure. Organic, constitutional elements and heredity are considered the only causative factor, while psychological implications are described only as effects.

Following this line, the writer describes sexual deviations in the members of two Italian families (middle class and working class). He follows the two families through four generations, attempting to show that the deviations tend to increase in severity and to be accompanied by a progressive deterioration of the personality in the descendants. Eventually, by fundamental deviations in the 'moral and mental sphere', they reach the point of overt psychopathological manifestations and 'moral and mental defectiveness'. The pathogenic factor is 'an endogenous, biosomatic process of endocrine character'. In the subjects in question 'the sexual abnormalities are of a purely organic origin and show the degenerative importance of a deviation in excess of the internal secretion'. (In many of the cases, however, there is no evidence that chemical