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This book is a coöperative project which serves the valuable purpose of bringing into sharp focus the vital rôle of frustration and aggression in social problems. It does so by drawing on certain observations concerning frustration and aggression made by a number of authors, including Freud, systematizing these into a series of propositions, and then applying the theory to observations of the authors and also of many other workers upon a variety of sociological phenomena. One anticipates much from the application of psychoanalytic knowledge to these problems but some disappointment is perhaps unavoidable, for this is one of the first attempts by sociologists to apply to their own subject knowledge taken over from another field. The discussions of the various sociological themes, while stimulating, interesting and provocative, suffer from the attempt to set up and apply deductively a system which not only is not adequately proven or tested, nor based upon well-established psychoanalytic knowledge, but is even at certain points contrary to it.
The subjects reviewed are: Socialization in America; Adolescence; Criminality; Democracy, Fascism, and Communism; and A Primitive Society—The Ashanti. Although analysts will find little that is new in the interpretations, the application itself is interesting and illuminating, particularly as it is made in connection with the observations of many sociologists, psychologists, and other nonanalytic workers. For example, the discussion of criminality brings out its aggressive elements as arising from frustrations in connection with economic, vocational and educational status, with the adolescent and postadolescent period, with inferior size, the position of minority groups, illegitimacy, the form of government, and so on. Some errors and omissions are perhaps unavoidable where considerable sections of work on such large fields are reviewed. For example, analytic writers on criminology are represented as concluding 'that all