Male and Female

• Sex and Fantasy: Patterns of Male and Female Development by Robert May
  Norton, 226 pp, £7.50, February 1980, ISBN 0 393 01316 2

‘One theme of this book is that there are significant psychological differences between the sexes.’ The trouble is that from where we are standing the task of distinguishing differences which are or might be programmed, differences due to learning, and differences which are not differences but stereotypes is not operationally feasible. Dr May does not attempt it. He is probably right. As a clinical psychologist, he is concerned with feelings and attitudes, and a feeling or attitude which was not overdetermined by any or all of the possible sources of difference would exist on paper, like an ideal gas, not in the head of a man or a woman.