Bristow Rogers: American Negro: A Psychoanalytical Case History. By Else P. Hillpern, Irving A. Spaulding, Edmund P. Hillpern. New York: Hermitage House, Inc., 1949. 184 pp.

The color and complexity of human personality as revealed by psychoanalysis have quite escaped the authors of this 'case history'. These quotation marks, too, are more than nominal in intention, unless one considers it excusable to present a psychiatric record with hardly a word about the patient's life history before plunging into his 'free associations' (many of them written down à la self-analysis), beginning in the third month of treatment. As for these associations, they are singularly weighted with the histrionic abstractions of an obsessive intellectual, and most of them are far from 'free'. Thus they are hardly calculated to convey to 'students of human nature' fair samples of what goes on in analytic sessions, this being the stated intention of the authors. Thrown in for good measure is the particular problem of the psychology of the 'marginal man'. Presumably the above-named students are to study this record with such an end in view. If they seek any assistance from the authors, they are doomed to disappointment. Their only contribution to this vexing problem is the sage assertion that being a 'marginal man' only adds to one's personal problems. It is true that they dissociate themselves from any large attempt to deal with this problem by claiming in the preface that there is not yet enough material on the subject to arrive at adequate conclusions. But