You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This prolific writer whose characteristic views on primitive man are well known has now contributed what is in effect a postscript to his book on The Soul of the Primitive. Nearly all the book is taken up with an extraordinarily interesting and valuable collection of individual data and
there is very little in the way of resulting generalization. The author's conclusion about the attitude of primitives to the supernatural essentially is that it consists of what Freud has termed 'free floating anxiety.' This becomes attached to all manner of ideas and objects, souls of the dead, an inchoate hierarchy of supernatural beings or powers, and so on, and the author insists that it is primarily independent of a specific content. To psycho-analysts this is as much as to say that the true object of the danger generating apprehensiveness is situate in the unconscious mind, but the author has apparently no knowledge of such conceptions.
The author correlates very closely the ideas of witchcraft and incest, as the present reviewer has done in another connection, and considers that the horror of incest is that such acts can only be committed by some one bewitched by a malign power. He points out therefore that the extirpation of such offenders against the social code is, strictly speaking, not so much the punishment as a protective measure designed to remove a source of danger. Incidentally, it is interesting to note that in New Guinea the same word 'knou' is used for both incest and endogamic cannibalism; in other words, coitus with a member of the family is equated with eating that person. It is evident that the main value of the book resides in its collection and co-ordination of important psychological material which will no doubt prove useful to those adopting a more interpretative and dynamic attitude towards such data.