Abstract
Odor has a decisive role in the sexual development and mating behavior of infrahuman animals. It is reasonable to assume, therefore, that man, too, would have a similar inborn sensate guarantee for heterosexual arousal. Yet, until recently, aside from literateurs, among them Shakespeare, Shelley, Huysman, and Zola, and a few clinicians who wrote about the sensual response to certain human odors, relatively little attention has been given to the relationship between olfaction and sexuality. In an inclusive review of the subject, Gibbon (1986) commented, “Odors reach into all our emotional life. Odors suggest, stimulate associations, evoke, frighten and arouse us, but they seem to lie below conscious thought until someone like the poet, Baudelaire, parts the curtain” (p. 327).
The editors mourn the loss of Dr. Irving Bieber. His contributions to psychoanalysis and to the field of olfactory sciences were outstanding.
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Bieber, I., Bieber, T.B., Friedman, R.C. (1992). Olfaction and Human Sexuality: A Psychoanalytic Approach. In: Serby, M.J., Chobor, K.L. (eds) Science of Olfaction. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-2836-3_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-2836-3_14
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