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This work is a collection of theoretical and field experimental studies which vividly illustrate various psychoanalytic and ethnographic perspectives on man's capacities and proclivities to externalize his unacceptable urges. The book's contribution to this topic is made through the presentation of many lucid examples of the ways man has devised and used diverse cultural conventions, myths and idioms to externalize highly conflictual inner experience.
Across the book's seven essays, the reader is exposed to many cultural groups that differ greatly (e.g. in religion, race, ethnicity, place in historical evolution, and kinds and degrees of 'cultural' psychopathology). Likewise, many different cultural forms of externalizing tendencies are presented (e.g. exorcism of dybbukim in medieval to early twentieth-century Jewish communities; the uses of shamanism in an American Indian and a New Guinean tribe; the charismatic leader as the externalized conscience of various groups; the search for a new, or retreat to an old culture as expressions of the failure to mourn; perverse and compulsive uses of the telephone for distancing and controlling of sexual and aggressive impulses). The methods of study represented also have range, i.e. from a theoretical update of classical psychoanalytic theory (e.g. on the function of