choanalysts persist in patterning their concepts of what is psychologically natural in the area of gender-identification and gender-role upon the narrow limits of what is biologically possible in terms of procreation. Why this tendency should continue to prevail is a mystery explainable only by the enormous influence exerted by religious and other moralistic disciplines upon our legislative bodies and upon public opinion generally. This influence forces the clinician-simply as a person in modern society-toward conformity with the prevailing valuejudgments on "natural" and "unnatural" sexual behavior, while as a scientist he automatically tends to try to fit all clinical phenomena into a framework of pathology. Thus, the clinician either actually believes that homosexual orientation is, per se, a form of psychopathology, or he actually believes that it is not, but is hesitant or afraid to say so publicly. Perhaps no clinician (certainly none represented in Sexual Inversion) can claim to be absolutely free from the traditional moral bias against homosexual behavior, or claim to be concerned solely with the homosexually-oriented person's attitude towards and adjust-

ment to this orientation, rather than with his "cure." Even Dr. Marmor, who in his introduction, allows that a homosexual

adaptation can Occur "without some anxiety-provoked inhibition of heterosexuality" nonetheless hedges on this point elsewhere, by stating that "in our time and culture" it can appear only in connection with "fear of intimate contact with mem-

a scientist as Dr. Marmor can be led to depart thus far from logic and from scientific objectivity and consistency, the awful weight of moral prejudice on this subject, and its insidious effect on scientific investigation, can be appreciated in its full and alarming proportions.

The signal service offered (whether or not intentionally) by this book is that it highlights so boldly the ominous extent to which modern psychoanalytic positions on homosexuality lag behind those of the biological and sociological sciences, and that it also highlights for the perceptive reader the reasons for this lag. While reading the stereotyped clinical viewpoints, one can almost see the spectre of Torquemada in his robes looming out of the dim past, in the glare of the blazing funeral pyres of his victims, pointing a skeletal finger, and forbidding-

at the risk of some nameless and dire peril the modern researcher in sexual behavior to face facts, and to spell out for the benefit of society what these facts actually mean. Here takes form the great and central error, which must be uprooted before lesser errors of definition or procedure can be permanently corrected. To complain that psychoanalysis uses inadequate or erroneous terms to define sexual orientation and behavior, or that it generalizes about homosexual behavior from a too-narrow and non-representative a sample (both of which criticisms are cited by Dr. Marmor) is to complain justly. Yet these are minor errors compared with that of allowing moralistic

bers of the opposite sex." And again, dogmas from the past to direct mod-

after speaking of exclusive heterosexuality as a "culturally imposed restriction." he apparently sees no inconsistency in concluding his introduction with the hope that society will be able "ultimately to institute more effective means of prevention (of homosexual (of homosexual behavior) than now exist." From the fact that even so eminently objective

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ern scientific investigation and to mold modern scientific opinion. If Sexual Inversion accomplishes no more than to help expose this central error so that scientists and laymen alike can correct their own positions, and work toward more equitable social and legal attitudes, it will have done much more than most other scientific publications of its kind up to the present time.