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Dr Sandner, a psychiatrist and member of the Society of Jungian Analysts of Northern California, has spent at least the past ten years visiting the Navajo on their vast reservation in south-west U.S.A. On those visits he accumulated a varied and wide repertoire of facts concerning their cosmogony, pantheon, symbolic canon and ethical system. To this firsthand acquaintance he has added, judging from the pertinence and frequency of his citations, a broad and scrupulous reading into this particular nation as well as primitive healing rituals and religion in general.
The text of this book is bracketed, as it were, by first and final chapters on symbolic healing. In the first, Sandner establishes the thesis that for any society the ‘heart of all cultural-psychological’ methods of healing is a ‘symbolic structure that explains, or at least provides a context for’, the suffering of the members of that society. He develops this theme with apt and economical reference to Jung, especially as concerns the function of symbols as transformers of energy. The book's final chapter recapitulates the thesis of symbolic transformation and draws a summarising parallel between modern psychotherapy and ancient, especially Navajo, systems of healing.
Between these opening and closing chapters, Dr Sandner has organised an interesting