Psychoanalysis and Culture. Essays in Honor of Géza Röheim: Edited by George B. Wilbur and Warner Muensterberger. New York: International Universities Press, Inc., 1951. 462 pp.

The appearance of this collection of essays, gathered in honor of Dr. Géza Róheim, is more than a personal tribute to the fertility and industry of the long acknowledged leader of psychoanalytic anthropology; it provides us with some measure of the progress of this particular branch of applied psychoanalysis during the past forty years. Indeed it is impossible to assess the quality of this very book without some understanding not only of the development of the psychoanalytic approach to anthropology but of the impact on psychoanalytic anthropology of controlled methods of 'field observation'. Looking back from this distance it is clear that the psychoanalytic pioneers were primarily concerned to secure corroboration from anthropological sources of their discoveries regarding the function and content of the individual 'unconscious'. As time passed, however, psychoanalytic forays into anthropological territory developed into a concerted invasion having the explicit object of establishing the significance of 'primary mental processes' in the hierarchy of anthropological elements. Not unnaturally the more stalwart defenders of school anthropology counterattacked, asserting that psychoanalysts ignored the importance of cultural patterns and employed no scientific controls. This latter criticism was strongly reinforced when modern sociologists began to apply more rigid statistical disciplines to their observational data. And, strange as it may seem, it was perfectly true that in their almost exclusive concern with unconscious derivatives, psychoanalysts had neglected to control their observations by close study of the actual environmental settings of infancy and childhood. Incidentally, their latter-day efforts to rectify this omission have led to a somewhat hasty alliance between the techniques of analytic interpretation and those of child observation, a combination which, however ideal in theory, often arrests the progress of discovery. The existence of repressi