Children of the Desert: By Géza Róheim, edited by Werner Muensterberger. New York: Basic Books, 1974, xix + 262 pp., $8.50.

An important task for psychoanalysis as a general theory of human psychology is to show its usefulness for understanding personalities and psychic phenomena outside the European cultural orbit. As psychoanalytic movements grow in countries such as Japan and India, this becomes increasingly a practical question as well. From early on, Freud diligently pursued the task with what materials he had at hand. Unfortunately, much of the anthropological material available to him was not of the most reliable. Frazer's compendium, for example, while brilliant and organized in a very convenient form, is not only based on sources of uneven accuracy, but, much worse, contains bits and pieces of ethnographic data torn from their cultural contexts, rendering them as opaque for anthropological understanding as an isolated dream shorn of its associations or information about the dreamer would be for clinical interpretation. Despite this, Freud's ideas in "Totem and Taboo" stand as important insights into the psychological functions of ritual forms, although anthropologists have been slow to accept them because of their faulty documentation and because they are