Customer Reviews

The Psychology of Sexual Orientation, Behavior, and Identity: A Handbook

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This is a great book, although one probably needs to have an upper college level education when reading it due to all of the scientific information presented. It's a very dense book but if you can get through the numbers and statistics, it's pretty good. It details the scientific (including biological and genetic) and psychological advances made in the 1990s regarding the study of the origin of sexual orientations and identities. The later parts of the book also take a look at the darker forms of sexuality, including pedophilia and incest, and how society can combat them. It also takes a detailed look at the history of how psychologists viewed alternative sexualities, and the profound shift that occurred in the 1970s when homosexuality was officially declassified as a mental illness. It helps explain how and why this happened. In the years that followed, mainstream psychology and psychiatry lead the way in helping society understand sexuality in a new way. The only flaw about this book that prevented me from giving it 5 stars is the fact that it is outdated (things have changed a lot since 1995 when it comes to biology and sexuality). Hopefully a more updated edition will be written soon.