Personality in a Communal Society. An Analysis of the Mental Health of the Hutterites: By Bert Kaplan and Thomas F. A. Plaut. Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Publications, 1956. 116 pp. The interdisciplinary team that studied the mental health of the Hutterites, and whose findings have already been published by Eaton and Weil in Culture and Mental Disorders, has now released another report. The earlier book attempted a survey of Hutterite mental illness and a comparison of the incidence rates with those found in other groups; the present volume deals with the relationship between Hutterite personality and culture. The results, in terms of method and data, are most inadequate.

Written by two psychologists and relying heavily on the Thematic Apperception Test and a modified Sentence Completion Test, this book provides only another Pisgah-view of the area under study. A bolder application of psychoanalytic concepts would have led closer to the Promised Land.

It is this reviewer's impression that there is more mental illness among the Hutterites than the observers appreciate. Some of it, whether diffuse or periodic, blends deceptively into the cultural landscape of this archaic and repressive Utopia. On the other hand, even severe psychoses go unstigmatized by the society, and they are not massively disabling (or socially disruptive) in every instance. This is probably related, in part at least, to the unusual exclusiveness and simplicity of the Hutterite sect.

As among the theocratic Pueblo Indians, rigid and supernaturally sanctioned ties of kinship and community result in dependency, intense noncompetitiveness—and the attendant passivity, headaches, depressions, etc. In an abstract sense, it may be that even the well-adapted Hutterite is paying too dearly for his 'belongingness'.