Book Description

"It does not matter from what angle the work of Stekel is approached. Any consideration of it reveals rich material. Stekel is a writer who handles his subjects in a lavish manner; lavish, but with that restraint which bends all to the urgency of his themes. He evidently approaches his clinical work with the same exuberant interest. There he reaps through psychoanalysis a rich harvest of results. He has collected these results and presented them for the dissemination of such knowledge of the sexual disturbances as he thus obtained. Facts are there in great number. They cannot be gainsaid. Stekel's own evaluation of such facts and his earnest plea for their consideration, both by the medical profession and by the society of men and women where these facts exist, can speak only for themselves to the truly conscientious reader. There is not much in these books that the psychotherapist can afford to pass over." New York. Medical Journal. "If the details of our sexual life were not so endlessly manifold; if they did not belong for the most part and in their most important aspects to the realm beyond ordinary consciousness; if it were not a peculiarity of love continually to throw the cover of mystery over our sexual feelings, so that all normal persons of strong feeling, particularly during the period of their sexual ripeness look upon frankness in sexual matters as untruth (women and shy young men feel insulted if one speaks about love even scientifically, in other than romantic or poetic and false, metaphorically veiled, language); and if we did not have to consider the tremendous hypocrisy, and falsehood of society in all matters pertaining to sex, so that even the abnormal and the perverse, who no longer need to lie and assume ignorance, are inspired to assume a similar 'chaste' attitude; in short, if we could analyze our eroticism in its physical as well as in its psychic aspects down to the last details, we should then probably discover with horror to what a small extent we truly belong to our own sex."Leo Berg.