SEX IN MAN AND WOMAN: Its Emotional Variations

With social commentators deploring the disappearing line of distinction between the sexes, with advertising promising to restore the distinguishing characteristics of masculinity and femininity, it is refreshing to find a voice which asserts that the difference is still very much in evidence. In fact, Theodor Reik, author of Of Love and Lust, asserts it is a difference which is basic and as constant as the sun. In an informal text, the Viennese psychoanalyst draws richly on his many years of experience presenting instances from infancy to senility in which man and woman, in their typical response, manifest that which is proper to their sex, as in a humorous example of a girl child's flirtatiousness, an example of masculine fetishism, the temptations to which each sex succumbs, sublimation in men and women. Here Dr. Reik does not employ the tools of scientific measurement or precision. Rather he focuses the breadth of his experience, the depth of his humanism upon observed behavior, and, in a manner thoroughly Viennese in its heavy-handed playfulness, reassures his reader that the Phoenix still defiantly retains its two heads.