BOOKS

Notices and reviews of books, ar. ticles, plays and poetry dealing with homosexuality and the sex variant. Readers are invited to send in reviews or printed matter for review.

Boo

HOMOSEXUALITY by Irving Bieber, M.D., and associates. Basic Books, N. Y., 1962, 358 pp., $8.50.

This is a psychoanalytic study of 100 male homosexuals and 106 male heterosexuals, all of them having undergone psychoanalytic treatment. The study began in 1952 when a Research Committee, under the chairmanship of Dr. Bieber, was formed by members of the Society of Medical Psychoanalysts. The group ultimately included eight medical psychoanalysts and one clinical psychologist. A number of other individuals are listed as having served the Committee in some capacity at various times.

With its twelve chapters, two appendices, three-page bibliography and adequate index, it is probably the most formidable presentation of the psychoanalytic approach to homosexuality in print. Its sober tone and generally fair statement of opposing views will undoubtedly serve to make the work extremely persuasive to many. If so, it will be because they have allowed fair-seeming to substitute for more important considerations, for this reviewer does not hesitate to characterize the work as essentially unscientific and therefore socially irresponsible. It is the work of individuals who cannot be spared the classification-intellectually naive. In support of such charges readers are referred to the devastating cri-

tique of the whole field of psychoanalysis in a symposium edited by Professor Sidney Hook, Psychoanalysis, Scientific Method and Philosophy, New York University Press, 1959. This work, by a group of distinguished scholars, exposes seriatim the essentially unscientific character of psychoanalytic methodology.

Illustrations from the current volume amply support this position. For instance, the authors state, "All psychoanalytic theories assume that adult homosexuality is psychopathologic," and proceed to erect the rest of their structure on this shaky foundation, quite as if well-known data which seriously damages such an assumption, were not available.

Again, they write, "We assume that the dominant sexual pattern of the adult is the adaptive consequence of life experiences interpenetrating with a basic biological tendency toward heterosexuality." A number of other similar passages could be quoted. This is precisely what, on the basis of our current scientific knowledge, cannot be assumed.

During the nineteenth century biological study was far more unsophisticated than it is today and would have permitted such statements to pass by unchallenged. Today, this is not possible. Too considerable a body of cytologic, genetic and endocrinological information is at hand which throws considerable doubt on any such teleologically-oriented generali-

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