Book Notices

THE DOGMA OF CHRIST AND OTHER ESSAYS ON RELIGION, PSYCHOLOGY AND CULTURE. By Erich Fromm. New York, Chicago, San Francisco: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1964, x + 212 pp., $3.95.

The title essay comprises more than half of this book—it appears here in English translation for the first time, having first been published in German in 1930. In his Foreword Fromm says he was "a strict Freudian" at the time he wrote the essay and if he were to revise it, he would make many formulations different from those in the essay. While today he believes that "the history of religion reflects the history of man's spiritual evolution," in this essay he "one-sidedly stressed … the social function of religion as a substitute for real satisfaction and as a means of social control." In any event, he regards his emphasis in the essay on the analysis of the socioeconomic situation of the early Christians as a key methodological approach in the application of psychoanalysis to historical phenomena.

The other essays in the book, some of which are published in this country for the first time, are "The Present Human Condition," "Sex and Character," "Psychoanalysis—Science or Party Line," "The Revolutionary Character," "Medicine and the Ethical Problem of Modern Man," "On the Limitations and Dangers of Psychology," and "The Prophetic Concept of Peace."

CRITICAL ESSAYS ON PSYCHOANALYSIS. Edited by Stanley Rachman. New York: A Pergamon Press Book, Macmillan Co., 1963, xiii + 284 pp., $7.50.

This book may fairly be described as a violent attack on psychoanalysis in all of its aspects. The criticisms are the usual ones—the charge of cultism, of inadequate scientific method, the accusation that psychoanalysts have a vested interest in maintaining the validity of their theory and technique because they make a living through the practice of psychoanalysis, insufficient attention to reality, etc. The personal accounts of two analyses, that of Carney Landis and Edwin Boring, are cited to show the in