Edited by Robert Jay Lifton with Eric Olson. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975, 372 pp., $9.95; paperback, $3.95.

This interesting volume contains a series of papers and discussions from the Wellfleet Conference where, for a number of years, an outstanding group of intellectuals have struggled to forge a new alloy, the discipline of psychohistory. Although many of the participants from the psychological side of the dialogue were not psychoanalysts, the theoretical framework of most of these contributions is that of psychoanalytic psychology. It is, in fact, this circumstance that lends coherence to this book, which is otherwise quite heterogeneous in its contents.

The senior editor contributes the opening chapter which