The Origin and Function of Culture: By Géza Róheim. New York: Nervous and Mental Disease Monographs, 1943. 107 pp.

In one hundred pages divided into three chapters, the well-known psychoanalyst and anthropologist, Géza Róheim, formulates his views of the origin and function of culture. In the first chapter, The Problem of Growing Up, the author proposes the thesis that neurosis and culture are based on the same mechanisms and owe their existence to the prolonged infancy ('delayed infancy') of the human species. One of his arguments, that the central figure of primitive cultures, the medicine man, is 'either neurotic or psychotic, or at least his art is based on the same mechanisms as a neurosis or psychosis' is, to say the least, a generality of little consequence. It is, of course, true that neurosis and psychosis are the products of the same human mind, the same fantasy activity which underlies the practice of the medicine man. The fundamental principles of unconscious fantasy activity are the same in normal and abnormal processes; the same in neurosis, psychosis, in art, in dreams, and rituals. The specific nature of rituals, as well as of culture in general as distinguished from neurosis and psychosis, is one of the crucial problems of social anthropology.

Another thesis of the first chapter is that every culture has certain 'dominant ideas' which are determined by the infantile situation. It would be more correct to say that these dominant ideas are determined by the infantile situation and other factors. Róheim rejects Ruth Benedict's formulation that: 'Different cultures differ because they are orientated as wholes in different directions'.1 Rejecting this view, Róheim cannot give an answer to the question: what determines the specific infantile situations typical for different cultures? This question is almost entirely evaded except for a brief reference to Kardiner's work. The infantile situation is the starting point of the author's whole thinking. It is a kind of deus ex machina or causa sui which cannot be further reduced by causal analysis. In the revie