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This work offers a serviceable survey of variant forms of erotic behavior together with a recapitulation—chiefly from the standpoints of description, corrective measures, and criminological medicine—of the main work done in this field. The present printing is a revised edition of the authorized English translation by Jerome Gibbs. In it may be followed, through excellent forms, the extent and pioneering qualities of Hirschfeld's contributions to the study of human eroticism.
Hirschfeld considered the work as a bringing to date of the advance in a specific field begun in 1844 with the publication of Heinrick Kaan's Psychopathia Sexualis and continued later by the monumental contribution of the same title by Krafft-Ebing. In his long experience of medico-criminal work Hirschfeld had unique opportunities for the collection of an extensive range of clinical material which in time became the objective nucleus for the present work. To the report and interpretation of this material—of marked value from the summary standpoint—have been added numerous correlations from the literature. This, together with the enlightened objective approach as contrasted with the older obfuscation of an automatically projected moralistic strabismus, has made for a book of source dimensions which the psychoanalytic student and worker will find most useful.
Such definite values make all the more regrettable certain interpretative vantage points which, against the background of dynamic psychoanalytic conceptions, must appear as limitations. Thus may be mentioned the stated aim of isolating the pathological phenomena from the full picture of the behavior development, with the subsequent effect of stress on the surface features of the pathology; and the consistently held misconception that in psychoanalysis constitutional factors are neglected in the study of the individual case. The latter view at several points leads the text not only to misstatements of the psychoanalytic position but to fresh dis