Books by Professor Wilhelm Stekel

Wilhelm Stekel was a follower of Sigmund Freud, though Freud was not particularly enamored with him. Sex and Dreams was intended as a guide to the interpretation of the Unconscious for those who are concerned professionally with nervous disorders. The present work is devoted almost entirely to correlating the subjects' dreams with the neurotic character traits which confront the psychotherapeutist, the general practitioner, and the specialist alike, and which often baffle their best efforts in the absence of the kind of knowledge revealed thought this very art of interpretation."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 psychotherapeutist can afford to pass over." - New York Medical Journal

By the 1920s, when Wilhelm Stekel wrote Bisexual Love, the erotic capacity to desire both males and females could be envisioned as universal, if likely to be outgrown by adulthood. Stekel holds that homosexuality is a psychic disease based on the fear of love, and as such is curable This 1922 book was an important work in the history of psychology and psychoanalysis showing how this "science", while contributing to the growth of human understanding, also has blocked understanding and human growth. Stekel was a follower of Sigmund Freud, though Freud was not particularly enamored with him. In this general overview of bisexuality, the work exposes the author's differences with Bloch, Moll, Krafft-Ebing, Ellis, and Hirschfeld. The book is quite representative of 1930s thinking on sexuality.