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Professor Flugel has given us a number of excellent books, but this must surely be his magnum opus. It is primarily addressed to psychologists and sociologists, to whom it should be of the utmost value, but psycho-analysts would also greatly benefit from the orderly arrangement and classification
provided of many of their data and conclusions. For a psycho-analyst it is always a liberal education to read one of Professor Flugel's books because his wide range of reading and intimate knowledge of so many branches of psychology brings to our attention experiments and observations from other fields that are often of very great interest to us.
The correct procedure in reviewing a book is said to consist in giving some account of its contents and then adding comments of appraisement. It is extremely difficult, indeed impossible, adequately to fulfil the first condition here. The contents of the book are so rich and are so closely and systematically grouped as to defy abstracting. The shortest summary of them would be to say that the book is a study of the ego-ideal and super-ego, conceptions which Professor Flugel very properly distinguishes, together with the numerous ramifications of their influence in social life. Among nineteen chapters are the following: Psycho-Analysis and Morals, Origin and Function of the Ego-Ideal, Nemesism (Aggression turned against the Self), The Infantile Origins of Aggression and the Super-Ego, Vicarious Punishment and the Projection of Guilt, Projection of the Super-Ego, Wishful Thinking, Autism and Unrealism, The Psychology of Moral Progress, The Problem of Religion, 'Left' and 'Right' as Social Attitudes, The Problem of War and Peace. One can refer to only a few of the many topics dealt with.
In nomenclature Professor Flugel proposes the term 'Polycrates complex' to denote the tendency to sacrificing something precious from the fear of success being followed by ill-luck (punishment), and he adopts Rosenzweig's word 'nemesism' to de