Psychoanalytic Socilogy. An Essay on the Interpretation of Historical Data and the Phenomena of Collective Behavior: By Fred Weinstein and Gerald M. Platt. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1973. 124 pp.

This book is a major contribution to interdisciplinary studies involving psychoanalysis and the social sciences. Its authors are respectively a historian and a sociologist who have labored for a number of years in the vineyards of such interdisciplinary work. The authors have taken great pains to make themselves very knowledgeable about psychoanalytic theory. Their book contains, in effect, a review of a good deal of the psychoanalytic literature of the last few years, a review that itself is of value in summarizing certain trends within our field. At the same time, it is an extremely difficult book. For this reviewer, it required several close rereadings, plus a consultation with a colleague1 who is well versed in the sociological framework, a version of Parsons' theories, to gain an adequate appreciation of this rather compressed material.

Of great importance in their work is their delineation of five theoretical models for the application of psychoanalysis to problems in the social sciences. The first two models are to be found in Freud's work; the third is exemplified by The Authoritarian Personality2;