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Although it contains no reference to Freud or Psycho-analysis and attempts no psychological interpretation of its subject-matter, Mr. O'Dea's history of the Mormon sect can be wholeheartedly recommended to anyone interested in the psychology of social groups. Mr. O'Dea is a scholar of rare quality, who commands his material and writes with a justness and economy that compels admiration. Precisely because it has not been psychologically 'processed' his account confronts us like a well-taken case history in terms of which the validity of explanations can be tested.
The Mormon church was founded by Joseph Smith in 1830 as the result of religious experiences undergone during several preceding years. Perplexed as a young man by the babel of conflicting religious opinions around him, he went one day into the woods to seek divine guidance as to what he should believe. There God the Father and God the Son appeared to him and told him to prepare himself for important tasks. So began a series of revelations which included the miraculous discovery and translation of a set of gold plates. These Joseph received from an angel, Moroni the son of Mormon, and translated 'by means of two special stones set in rims, making what must have appeared like strange spectacles, to which a breastplate was in some way connected.' These plates, known as the Book of Mormon, and purporting to be a history of pre-Columbian America, its settlement by Hebrews and their subsequent destiny and apostasy, became the scripture of the new church. The sect founded on this farrago of revelation not only succeeded in establishing itself as a considerable and respected denomination which continues to thrive, but also in the course of its development virtually colonized the semi-desert State of Utah.
To the psycho-analyst this book presents the story of how certain 'psychotic' ideas were actually worked out in a specific social context. It brings home, in a way clinical studies of individual patients se