The Panic of the Gods and Other Essays: By Géza Róheim. Edited with an Introduction by Werner Muensterberger. New York: Harper Torchbooks, Harper & Row, Publishers, 1972. 227 pp.

The writings of Géza Róheim are widely disparate in their evidence for authorly discipline. His succinct and trenchant essay, The Origin and Function of Culture, now fortunately in paperback, is, in this anthropologist-reviewer's opinion, the most penetrating we have on the subject: culture represents the defense mechanisms of a society, part ego-oriented toward environmental adaptation, part id- and superego-oriented toward inner anxieties. This formulation is a brilliant extension of Ferenczi's view of perigenesis: that the mortal metazoan body evolves as a safer steady-state environment for the immortal germ plasm. Society and culture are thus farther outposts of the same life-protective function.

Róheim is capable of exhilarating aperçus into mythology: 'The lizard penis symbolism is a negation of the castration complex [it grows a new tail], just as neurotics frequently symbolize the penis by parts of the body that grow again, such as hair and nails' (Primitive High Gods, p. 33); 'the origin of supernatural being [comes] from infantile anxiety' (p. 87); 'The woman with the penis is the woman with the nipple, and also the woman who has deprived the child both of the nipple and the penis and now has them both' (Aphrodite, or the Woman with the Penis, pp. 196-197); 'The opposite of fetishism [protective reduplication of the penis] is transvestitism with the transvestite representing the phallic mother' (p. 201); and '[The Panic of the Gods] is a nightmare in which the many and helpless gods, as well as the many devouring demons, are