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Fifteen learned papers are here grouped under three headings: ‘Mythology and folklore’, ‘Anthropology and sociology’ and ‘Art’.
In the first section there are six papers on the application of ego psychology to mythology. Some are theoretical studies which use abstract argument alone; others add clinical material as in ‘The Madonna's conception through the eyes’ by Arlow or assemble amplificatory material from Jewish symbolism as Almansi does, while Mark Karger's ‘On interpreting the Oedipus plays’ introduces the value of careful study of the role of the artist in society.
Section two contains a part of Géza Roheim's field work on ‘The Western tribes of central Australia’. It is full of meat. There is an illuminating discussion of the Jones-Malinowski controversy in ‘Is the Oedipus complex universal?’ by Anne Parsons, whose observations on culture patterns in southern Italy are both careful and thought-provoking; an article on the ‘Psychological problems of the Apaches’ and one on ‘Ego and orality in the analysis of West Africans’ proceed to a concluding essay, ‘Some dynamics of unconscious symbolic communication in present-day television’. The last section is composed of one article by Anton Ehrenzweig on ‘The undifferentiated matrix of artistic imagination’.
These selections from the book's contents will give an impression of its diversity and the rich source of theory and observation which will appeal to varying interests. Its uniting theme is the application of the rather rapid developments in psychoanalytic metapsychology of the ego to social and anthropological fields.
The recurrent emphasis on symbiotic fusion (primitive identity) and the role of myth in the development of group and individual identity (individuation) may incline analytical psychologists to brush aside much that is useful with ‘Well, haven't we known this all along?’ This would be a mistake for, although the broad outlines are almost identical, the detailed working-out of themes invariably clarifi