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The conceptual origins of Freud's anthropological opus, its development, its relation to the discoveries of clinical psychoanalysis, the reactions it created in the world of anthropology, its merits and its shortcomings, and the present evaluation of his work in this field are detailed with the greatest care in this extremely well-informed and scholarly book.
Wallace feels that Freud's anthropological concepts are not peripheral, but an integral part of his total corpus, and that they "even influenced some of his clinical-psychological tenets, in particular his concept of projection, omnipotence of thoughts, and neurosis as atavism or survival." On the other hand, his psychological discoveries and the development of clinical psychoanalysis exerted a very strong influence on anthropology by calling attention to certain previously ignored phenomena such as childhood behavior, dreams and projection, by permitting a better understanding of the main operating tools of anthropologists, and by bringing about a mutually fruitful collaboration between clinician and anthropologist.
The author describes in great detail the many influences that participated in the formation of Freud's anthropological thinking, particularly the works of Darwin, where he became acquainted with his Lamarckian views, the biogenetic law (ontogenesis recapitulates