Page:The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis II 1921 1.djvu/153

 BOOK REVIEWS 145

edifice of psycho-analysis will be blown down, and that from now all neuroses will be treated only by chemical or operative means. We shall await these attacks with equanimity and not follow the bad examples of our opponents. On the contrary, we are quite willing to admit the great biological significance of the new discoveries; but we shall not give up the hope that ±e meritorious investigators of the new physio- logical territories will acquire so much psycho-analytical knowledge that they will recognise in time the real limits of their competence and not overstep them.

We should like to state at the beginning, however, that this reproach of one-sidedness and tendenciousness cannot be brought against the author of this work. He expressly and repeatedly declares, "that the psychosexual conduct of man cannot be explained alone from the effects of the internal secretion of the sexual glands". But he takes into con- sideration only the effectiveness of factors other than those of internal secretion in as far as "external factors produce changes in the central nervous system on which the sexual glands act through their internal secretion". Lipschiitz does not seem to know that psychical factors can oppose the biochemical sexual activities as an independent force, that they can re-enforce, inhibit or even completely suppress them, and that the final and manifest sexuality of man proves to be the result of libidinous and other (especially egoistic) impulses, as psycho-analysis has taught for the last twenty years. And yet it was his master, Professor Steinach of Vienna, the discoverer of the puberty glands, who, stimulated by psycho-analysis, was able to produce proof from experiments on animals that purely psychical effects could inhibit or re-enforce the development of the puberty glands (in an anatomical and functional sense). The finer processes of these psychical inhibitions and re-enforce- ments of sexuality will not for a long time be the object of physiological experiments; the psycho-analytic path is still the only one to their recognition.

This limitation, which corresponds with the facts, of the importance of the new discoveries certainly does not deny their great significance. On the contrary, we do not hesitate to assert that Steinach's discoveries may be regarded as the most important event in the sphere of human and animal physiology since the discovery of the functions of the thyroid gland, suprarenals and pituitary gland. The importance of the subject for psycho-analysts induces the writer to give the readers of the Journal a more detailed account of the content of this book.

The most important result of the more recent investigations, which were carried out under Steinach's guidance in the biological experimental institute of the Academy of Science in Vienna, is the establishment of the fact that no internal secretory effect can be ascribed to the sperma- togenic part of the testicle and its small canals, and that it is the so- 10