This book is fascinating, provocative, confusing, and intriguing. Jaime P. Stubrin sets himself the nearly impossible task of elucidating the nature of human sexuality in a mere 142 pages. He writes in a highly impressionistic style, with sudden shifts of topic and frame of reference. The awkwardness of the prose may be due to the translation from Spanish, or may represent a studied effort to go beyond conventional modes of psychoanalytic thinking and writing. It is never dull, but rather, poetic and filled with textual and conceptual surprises.

Stubrin presents us with what are really two separate essays in rather idiosyncratic form, reflections of a compassionate, seasoned clinician on the deeply moving, terribly difficult issues of sexuality that arise in his work. Brief patient vignettes and reviews of past literature are interspersed with lengthier efforts at theoretical