BOOKS

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

HOMOSEXUALITY:

ITS CAU-

SES AND CURE, by Albert Ellis, Ph.D., Lyle Stuart, Inc., New York, 1965, 288 pp., $7.95.

That this book is a polemic designed to prove the thesis of the author is indicated from the very outset by the title Homosexuality: Its Causes and Cure. Cure refers only to disease and thus homosexuality is assumed to be a disease before the discussion begins. The author, Dr. Albert Ellis, has had such a terrific amount of training and experience, both individually in practice and in connection with organizations, that he may well be termed the foremost sexologist in the country at this time, the list of his writings in the field alone being formidable.

The thesis of the book and the core of Dr. Ellis's position is clearly stated by Donald Webster Cory in an introduction as follows: "homosexuals, in this society, if they are exclusive or near-exclusive in their erotic interests in their own sex, are disturbed individuals, and the state of being a confirmed homosexual is hence a disturbance. These people, Dr. Ellis insists, are not sinful, they are not immoral, they are not antisocial; but they are compulsive, neurotic, have poor sexrole identification, have rigid fixations, tend to be goofers, to be self-destructive, to make poor relationships with fellow human beings, and, in fact, they are frequently borderline psychotics...

Fear of and flight from heterosexuality, which characterizes these deviant persons, can be diminished and entirely removed. This would, in the word of Dr. Ellis, constitute a 'cure.'" (9-10) It but remains to see how well Dr. Ellis has sustained his thesis. It must be said that many other writers and students in the field do not accept his interpretations which have required much courage on his part to express especially against the bitter opposition of those whose prejudices he has offended.

The first chapters of the book cover the discussion of the causal factors of homosexuality, constitutional or environmental, normal, neurotic, or psychotic. Then the possibilities of treatment or change are considered. The latter half of the book is taken up with verbatim transcripts of actual psychotherapeutic sessions and interviews between the psychiatrist and certain patients. It is presumed that there is here given certain exemplary or model procedures with some notion of success in the "cure" of the so-called neurosis. The discussion closes with an essay entitled Homosexuality and the Mystique of the Gigantic Penis by Donald Webster Cory. The reason for the inclusion of this essay in the book remains somewhat obscure.

One can only refer to some of the points that Dr. Ellis makes. One of his first contentions is that fixed or exclusive sex relations, either heterosex-

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