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A short but somewhat violent attack on psycho-analytic work in folklore. Freud, the author tells us, 'assumes certain instinctive modes of reaction and certain hereditarily transmitted impulses towards symbolisation, which are foreign alike to any serious psychologist's conception of instinct, or to the knowledge of the man in the street as to the origin of symbols' (Why—as is apparently implied—the man in the street should be regarded as an authority on symbols, though by definition an authority on nothing else, is not made clear). These claims, 'in themselves utterly preposterous' are 'bolstered up' with the help of the anthropology of Wundt and Frazer, both of whom are largely influenced by the teaching of Bastian and Tylor as to the independent origin of similar myths and customs in different parts of the world. This teaching however, we are told, is rapidly being undermined by the work of the ethnological school, which has been accumulating evidence to show that these similarities are due to the transmission by early migrations; myths, in particular, being 'due to the diffusion from one centre of an arbitrary tale which had a definite history differing vastly from that postulated by either Freud or Jung'.
Prof. Elliot Smith seems to imply that, in so far as the 'ethnological' view of the transmission of culture is correct, psycho-analytic interpretations of the elements of this culture necessarily become invalid. And yet it is surely clear that the psychological meaning of an element of culture cannot be explained entirely in terms of its history. For instance, even though we were perfectly acquainted with the external history of a story that had been used time after time by poets of different ages and places, this external history would never by itself show us wherein lay the perennial attractiveness of this theme for the poets and their readers. From the psychological point of view it is not sufficient to dismiss any tale as 'arbitrary', and it is most c