Personality and Social Life. Text and Readings: By Robert Endleman. New York: Random House, 1967. 624 pp.

Aside from several anthologies on psychoanalysis and the social sciences, there is really not one advanced or introductory volume that can be considered representative of the position of psychoanalytic anthropology (or sociology). Dr. Endleman, in editing and discussing a number of papers in Personality and Social Life has attempted to provide such a volume, primarily, as he notes in the preface, in order to make available a source book for cross-disciplinary courses in the social sciences.

The introductory and first chapters establish an evolutionary and psychoanalytic approach to the study of culture, based partly on the work of La Barre and Róheim, two of the writers whom Endleman refers to as his 'exemplars' for a psychoanalytic anthropology. Chapters Two and Three bring together a number of papers on the socialization process within the family and extrafamilial institutions, bridging the issue of cross- and intrafamilial variation, and the questions of modal personality and national character. Chapter Four focuses on the meaning of initiation rites and ceremonies, a problem which has been given serious attention by some psychoanalytic writers. Here Endleman tries to broaden the scope of the problem by juxtaposing more or less classical freudian hypothesis (Róheim and Bettelheim) against the modified freudian approach of Whiting, and then sets the general question in the context of contemporary periods of transition in character development such as the American military experience and the adolescent subculture. Chapter Five is devoted to the role of work and play in personality formation, and ranges from two papers on the social psychology of the professions, the artistic personality, the primitive shaman, to an account of the modern comic. The sixth chapter, which is largely taken up by a review of the author's own work on psychological reactions to disaster, deals with the psychodynamics of extreme