You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Dr. Goldenweiser's book can hardly be said to satisfy the anticipations that it may have aroused. Far from being a comprehensive survey of the relations between history, psychology and culture, the book, in the author's own words, "has no other unity than that implied in the term 'social theory' and in being the product of one head". The book is largely a collection of reprints dating from 1910 on, though the author tells us they have been either rewritten or subjected to merciless revision.
The book contains a critical review of anthropological methods and schools of thought, the author's own essays on totemism, and a group of semi-popular essays on religion, race and related subjects. The various parts are of unequal merit, the critical exposition of anthropological methods being by far the best. Those who have studied with Professor Goldenweiser will recognize in this work the discipline which he so effectively propounded in the classroom. The book commends itself to the analytic reader for many reasons, the most important of which is the author's sympathy for a psychological point of view in anthropology. It is, however, to be noted with regret that his approval of psychoanalysis is grudgingly bestowed and is essentially inconsistent with his criticisms.
In one of the essays "Is Freud a Psychologist?" the author contends that Freud cannot really be taken seriously. "The failings and exaggerations of his system are largely due to the fact that it is not rooted in a systematic and comprehensive exploration of the mind" (p. 430). One cannot, the author objects, transfer the mechanisms of the neurotic to the normal, and he blames Freud for not concerning himself with sensations, perceptions, mechanisms of vision, learning and memory processes, creativeness and such common traits as temper and courage. Hence Freud is only half a psychologist, which may or may not be better than none at all. Moreover, Freud is declared to have oversimplified matters by leaning