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This collection (published in both cloth and paper cover) is part of the increasing attention that the field of the humanities is giving to psychoanalysis. This is a gratifying indication of the reduction of gaps between various areas of learning. There are however frustrations for the native, as the foreign visitor reports at home to his constituents the manners and morals of the country based upon his observations of the particular part of the culture with which he became acquainted.
Professor Mazlish states that historians seeking facts that signal man's motives and conflicts often select events that appeal to generally accepted opinions of human nature and human behavior. In studying man's collective past, they have usually ignored the particular method that psychoanalysis applies to the study of an individual's past.
The first section of the book considers the meaning of history and religion in Freud's thought, totem and taboo in retrospect, Moses and monotheism, Freud and the ambiguity of culture, and Geza Róheim on the evolution of culture. This section is intellectually stimulating but offers many interpretations of Freud's philosophy with which the psychoanalyst will disagree. The second section of the book is largely devoted to psychoanalytic commentaries on historical figures and is less scholarly and of less interest.
William L. Langer's presidential address to the American Historical Association, The Next Assignment, is an exciting review of the lasting psychological effect of great events upon peoples, and a plea for psychoanalytic understanding as one of the necessary implements for the historian. In Personal Identity and Political Ideology and Young Man Luther, Erikson is applauded for the insights that he contributes to political science and history. The question is raised whether psychoanalysis will ultimately be valued less as a means of understanding and altering man than as a means of understanding and changing history.
There is a well-chosen