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Dr. Moses was one of those rare and brilliant medical specialists who, psychoanalytically informed, can offer additional dimensions to our work. While I could not readily determine whether he or Dr. Rollman-Branch was the source for some of this material (a footnote on the title page promises that “the contributions of each author are discernible”), one is grateful that Dr. Moses' observations—both historical and clinical—on the powerful attraction, magnetism, and meaning of the female voice in a male body and of the reverse paradox have been made available to us.
It is interesting to note that Hermaphroditos, the son of Hermes and Aphrodite, was himself of only one sex, the male, while his name has been taken to signify a scientific impossibility. Every human being is either male or female except for the intersex, who is the victim of an embryological defect. Surgical exploration of the intersex will always reveal the correct gender dominance so that reparative intervention can be properly directed to alleviate the developmental fault. The concept that anyone can innately be a combination of both sexes (as has been perpetuated in erroneous theories advanced in behalf of so-called transsexualism) must finally give way to oblivion, the repository of all scientific mythology.
The conclusion that Freud described the development of preoedipal sexuality as identical in the girl and boy is not borne out by his writings. In the New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (Freud, 1933, pp. 112-135), he contrasts the differences between them as he does in his (1931) paper on “Female Sexuality.”
While it is true that some women patients express “the desire to have children all by themselves without benefit of male fertilization,” and a counterpart desire exists in some men, it is incorrect to assume that this per se indicates the presence of “hermaphroditic wishes.” The interpretation of such desires depends, of course, upon the patient's motivational state and total developmen