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By William H. Blanchard. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1967. 300 pp.
REVOLUTIONARY IMMORTALITY. MAO TSE-TUNG AND THE CHINESE CULTURAL REVOLUTION. By Robert Jay Lifton. New York: Random House and Vintage Books, 1968. 178 pp.
THE REVOLUTIONARY PERSONALITY. LENIN, TROTSKY, GANDHI. By E. Victor Wolfenstein. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967. 330 pp.
The three books reviewed here deal with revolutionary leadership. The three authors come from diverse academic disciplines though they are all sufficiently acquainted with psychoanalytic psychology to apply it in their investigations. Their work shows, on the one hand, how psychoanalysis has become—for better or worse—common property in the social sciences and, on the other hand, how important it is for psychoanalysis to develop an adequate theory of group psychology in order to become useful to the various disciplines in the social sciences.
An example of this need is E. Victor Wolfenstein's The Revolutionary Personality. Wolfenstein is a political scientist and his aim is to derive empirically the psychological qualities of a revolutionary by studying the biographies of Lenin, Trotsky, and Gandhi. Because of his choice of material, he, in effect, studies the characteristics of revolutionary leaders, and not merely revolutionaries. He uses Erikson's epigenetic developmental schema as the basis upon