Psychology of sex - Total No. of Records in System :: 2032

PREFACEphysical processes of sex, their liability to disturbance, ortheir hygiene. Ancient superstitions still prevailin our medicalschools, and the medical students of today are for themost partstill treated with almost the same misplaced reverenceas the school children of a century ago,whom it wassometimes considered indecent to instruct in so sexual a subjectas botany.After long hesitation I have decided to prepare the littlemanual here presented to the reader. There is scarcely needto say that it makes no claim to supplant, or even to summarize,my larger work. It has sometimes been stated thatthose larger volumes deal chiefly with the pathological sideof sex. That is an error. I might even claim that my Studiesdiffered from all previous work on the subject by a mainconcern with the normal phenomena of sex. The same mainconcern is preserved in the present book. While my experienceis partly derived from the abnormal persons who havecome to me from widely varied quarters,it is chiefly foundedon my knowledge of normal men and women and their problemsin ordinarylife. At the same time I have always soughtto show that no sharp boundary-line exists between normaland abnormal. All normal persons are a little abnormal inone direction or another, and abnormal persons are stillguided by fundamental impulses similar to those felt bynormal persons."The goal of scientific inquiry," it has been truly said, "isthe representation of experimentally demonstrable data withthe aid of mathematical symbolism," We are far from thegoal here. In this field we are only in the first phase but it isa necessary and helpful phase of regarding sex psychologyas a department of natural history.I make no apology, therefore, for the fact that this littlebook is simple and concise. It may thus indeed the betterreach the medical readers and students for whom it is primarilyintended. There are certain essentials with which allshould be familiar. I furnish the dues to those who desireto go further and to master problems which still lie ahead,and cannot in any case be adequately dealt with in an elementarymanual.Those problems stretch afar. Sexual sciencesexology, as[viii]