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This is in more than one respect a remarkable book. To begin with, it is written in English by a Hungarian, a fact for which all English students of anthropology and psycho-analysis should be extremely grateful. In the second place, it was written in Budapest in the period immediately following the Great War, where, as the author reminds us, opportunities for consulting the original literature dealing with the subject were far from favourable. In the third place, it contains in a very high degree all the merits and defects with which readers of Dr. Róheim's previous works will be acquainted. Here, as in those earlier works, the author exhibits throughout the greatest erudition, studies each question as it arises with immense detail, patience and profundity, displays great psychological insight backed by sound appreciation of psycho-analytic doctrine, and at the same time reveals ever and anon a surprising wealth of fertile and suggestive theory. The great advantages which the book thus enjoys are, however, to some extent offset by a lack of form, by serious defects of presentation and by certain literary blemishes that would be fatal to the readability of any lesser work.
Partly owing to these deficiencies and partly owing to the thorough and detailed method of treatment and the complexity of the subject-matter itself, it is a book which makes very considerable demands upon the reader and which is difficult both to summarize and to review. It is a book which really demands a fairly full knowledge of psycho-analysis for its full appreciation, though Dr. Eder's apposite and sympathetic introduction (welcome to all readers as a means of preliminary orientation) will be particularly helpful to those who are bold enough to attempt its assimilation without such previous knowledge.
Since the difficulties of the book may, it is to be feared, tend to limit the number of its readers, it seems worth while to attempt here a fairly full summary of some of the more important