Rituals of Manhood: Male Initiation in Papua New Guinea: Edited by Gilbert H. Herdt. New York: Univ. Calif. Press, 1982, 367 pp., $42.00; paperback, $12.95.

Psychoanalytic studies have from the beginning dovetailed with those of anthropology, as with history, biography, literature, and every discipline studying the behavior of man. As archeology has not only "fitted in" with psychoanalysis but contributed one of its enduring metaphors, so has anthropology also nestled in comfortably with the goals and spirit of psychoanalysis. All three study and point to an understanding of older forms of current human behavior.

In an imaginative leap, Freud, in Totem and Taboo, speculated from the living individual back to the oldest conceivable forms of human society. Since then, anthropologic studies of living forms of primitive human social organizations have, just as child developmental studies, enabled psychoanalysts to understand and theorize prospectively and developmentally, complementing the retrospective and genetic approaches of the psychoanalytic procedure. Such studies, proceeding from both directions and meeting each other, have gone a long way toward providing further scientific conviction of psychoanalytic postulates.

This book is a collection of papers presented at a symposium of the Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania held in Florida in 1979. The essayists are part of a current brand of "New Guineasts,"