they are betrayed. It is a truthful and sad story with a lot of admiration implicit in its telling, admiration for the courage it takes to survive, whether one is a famous novelist with a mind full of spilled intellectual sequins, a famous chanteuse whose records are part of the lives of millions of lovers she will never know, or just an ordinary mortal trying to make the best of the common, and often unkind, business of living.

-James Colton NYMPHOMANIA by Dr. Albert Ellis and Edward Sagarin, Gilbert Press, New York, 1964, $5.95, 255 pp.

The introduction to this book declares that "an understanding of the causes of nymphomania can lead to an adjustment of negative social attitudes and prejudices that cause society to castigate unfairly the compulsively promiscuous woman." There can be no quarrel with this. except from Puritanical fanatics, as oversexed in their view of life as the so-called "nympho" is in hers.

Unfortunately, the authors do not appreciably bring about the promised understanding in what the jacket calls "the first book ever devoted to a fulllength, forthright study of nymphomania." Rather, they tend to dump the burden of proof and of clarification on society, and to equate promiscuous homosexuals with "nymphos" in motivation and behavioral patterns. They even suggest, as one possible solution to the common problems of compulsive promiscuity in both homosexuals and nymphomaniacs, marriage between two such individuals preferably arranged and guided by a psychotherapist like Dr. Ellis.

The book is provocative, as promised on the jacket, but it provokes more frustration than clarification. Presumably Dr. Ellis does this to drum up further business for psychiatrists. He dismisses as so rare as to be

one

practically negligible any physiological cause for compulsive promiscuity, since he has never treated one. Instead, he attributes such promiscuity, on the basis of a dozen cases which he has treated, to what he calls "basic irrational ideas such as the dire need to be loved and the need to conquer other human beings. . . Nymphomania is not basically different in this respect from other emotional ailments, and it has the same causes."

The most valuable service rendered by the book lies in its efforts to make valid distinctions among various types of female promiscuity, all crudely lumped by the public at large under the name of "nympho." The authors dismiss summarily the folk notions that a nymphomaniac is a woman unable to reach satisfactory sexual climax, and that most hardworking prostitutes are merely working off their nymphomaniac tendencies. From the few cases cited by the authors, it is evident that many women become more compulsively promiscuous after they have achieved regular climax. And the true nymphomaniac makes a poor whore, for she inevitably tends to give away what she should be giving a greater market value to. The folk belief that only a lesbian can truly satisfy a nymphomaniac is also given the lie by the case studies. presented.

Unfortunately, there is not a sufficiently wide range of these studies, nor sufficient documentation by other authorities. In the extensive bibliography, by far the greatest number of sources listed by any one author are the 16 previous works by Dr. Ellis. His constant references to his own preceding statements refute the jacket's claim that this is a "full-length study," which would presumably involve extensive research requiring far more than a mere 250 pages, much of it a mere repetition of the Ellis dicta on open sex life versus the closed society.