The author relies on the remote mythology about darkness rather than the everyday material about the unique and extreme reaction of present-day Americans to differences of skin color. However he may press his point about the deep-rooted antiquity of this 'mythological' reaction, the reader is left wondering about modern mythologies and about the very marked difference in reaction to the Negro man compared with the Negro woman therapist. The reviewer offers the example of a white woman patient referred to a Negro woman analyst. The initial transference was already formed (not a pretransference, as the author would have it in coining a new term) and the patient was enraged at being referred to a Negro. This turned out to be the repressed wish for a Negro mammy