Page:The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis II 1921 1.djvu/155

 BOOK REVIEWS 147

maturity. "What has hitherto been generally denoted as the period of puberty is probably only a "second great phase of puberty, which sets in about the middle of the second decade". "The age of childhood, reckoned from birth to the beginning of the second great phase, can be denoted as the 'intermediate phase of puberty' " (p. 170). Apart from differences in nomenclature and certain relations in time, these passages contain the biological corroboration of the developmental history of sexual maturity (infantile sexuality, latency period, puberty) postulated by Freud.

Sooner than one ventured to hope, tlie view expressed by the reviewer concerning Freud's "Theory of Sex" and its scientific and historical significance begins to be verified. He maintained that Freud's sexual biological discoveries have an originality of a peculiar order. While hitherto psychologists had to start from the experiential facts ot physiology, here for the first time it happens that conclusions were arrived at concerning unknown biological facts from pure psychological investigations, and these conclusions awaited the corroboration of biology. A second confirmation of this nature is that proclaimed by Steinach of the influence of sexual biological processes through the purely psychic influencing ol animals.

In any case these gratifying agreements point to a future, though certainly distant, in which biologists and psycho-analysts will be asso- ciated in a common work.

The new knowledge of the functions of the puberty glands we owe to a great number of experiments on animals carried out by biologists with much patience and care, for instance, observations on castrated and cryptorchidic animals and human beings, transplantation experiments of female and male sex glands, experiments of over-feeding and injection of gland substance, elective Rontgenisation of the germ glands while sparing the interstitial cells, artificial atrophy of the germ cells and hypertrophy of the interstitial cells by ligaturing the vas deferens, etc. From the mass of facts presented we will only call attention to a few that are of particular interest to us. Lipschiitz states (p. 23) that "the connections recognised by Tandler compel us to assume that during the ontogenetic development the soma passes at first through an asexual stage, that an asexual embryonic form exists, sexual differentiation being only brought about later through the formative action of the sex glands". He then says (p. 127) that some infantile components of sexuality re- present asexual impulses, which only later become attributes of the sexual whole. This assumption is built up chiefly on the experience that castration results in the approximation to a form of youth common to both sexes (the "asexual" form). Reference must first of all be made here to the double meaning of the word "sexual": a form ot youth which is asexual in the sense of the sexual dimorphism can very well