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This excellent book is the well-matured fruit of the early pioneering endeavours of Michael Balint, and later and more intensively, of Tom Main. It seems very fitting that it has been published at much the same time as Michael Balint—Object Relations Pure and Applied by Harold Stewart (, Routledge). The reader interested in the development of applied psychoanalysis would gain much from reading the books together.
The first page of Blocks and Freedoms in Sexual Life sets out the concern of the author, which is with the search for some truths between the body and the mind. The search is a joint undertaking of doctor and patient, in clinical situations where the patient is distressed by a sexual problem, and may expect a physical aetiology, which is not present.
The book is in three parts, and Part One, Aspects of Doctoring, describes the skills that doctors practising psychosexual medicine need to acquire. The clinical setting in which the majority of patients present their sexual problems are: family-planning clinics, general practice, gynaecology and sexual transmitted diseases clinics and urology clinics; and primarily the book is addressed to doctors and nurses working in