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This publication represents the result of field work done by the authors and a group of other investigators in Bali over a period of three years. Great quantities of linguistic, ethnographic and photographic data were collected and new methods in field work were developed.2 The subtitle of the book is 'a photographic analysis', the meaning of which is explained as follows: 'In this monograph we are attempting a new method of stating the intangible
relationships among different types of culturally standardized behavior by placing side by side mutually relevant photographs. Pieces of behavior, spatially and contextually separated—a trance dancer being carried in procession, a man looking up at an aeroplane, a servant greeting his master in a play, the painting of a dream—may all be relevant to a single discussion, the same emotional thread may run through them… By the use of photographs the wholeness of each piece of behavior can be preserved while the special cross-referencing desired can be obtained by placing the series of photographs on the same page' (p. XII). Although this photographic method is a stimulating way of presenting the findings of a psychological investigation, psychoanalysis is responsible for having made an investigation of this type possible.
This is not a book on Balinese customs but on the Balinese as people.
The nucleus of the whole thesis is the correlation between adult ritual and personality on the one hand, and a typical infancy situation on the other. This is what I called the 'ontogenetic trauma' as I first discovered in the 'alknarintja situation' in Central Australia in which the desired and dreaded object of adolescent fantasy was the alknarintja (eyes turn away) woman who in dreams appears as cohabiting with the dreamer in the coitus inversus position. This is the sleeping position of the