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The title of this book implies that Mr. Hayley's purpose is to give the anatomy of Lango Culture and to avoid the more speculative field of its morphology. Nevertheless, a simple morphological idea underlies the system of classification he adopts—namely, the idea that all Lango ceremonies, apart from their specific function, have the wider function of maintaining the unity of a complex social structure of interlocking groups.
To the psycho-analyst, who is more accustomed to regard a primitive ceremony as an institutionalized obsessional symptom, this tendency, so characteristic of modern anthropology, to explain it in terms of social purpose must be necessarily suspect. He will remember that patients often react to interpretations with a renewed attempt to rationalize their symptoms, and may conclude that anthropology is reacting in much the same way to the interpretations first given it by Freud. But while a rationalization implicitly denies, or at least minimizes, the importance of a truth, it may well be true in what it explicitly affirms. That primitive (and civilized) customs and rituals do often fulfil the social purposes ascribed to them by modern anthropology is incontestible. What is needed therefore would seem to be not so much a decision between rival theories as a more comprehensive theory which can combine them.
Mr. Hayley's theory of what might be called 'Social Self-Preservation' could perhaps itself be extended to meet this need. It implies that the ultimate motive for those integrative rites which cement the unity of groups is fear of the internal forces of disruption. Analysis knows something of these forces in the individual, how they are aroused, or increased, in infancy by frustration, how they may develop to enormous proportions under the influence of an unfavourable interplay between experience and phantasy, and how they are continually revived by the inevitable tensions of later social life. They threaten the integrity both of what the