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Weston La Barre is a 'psychiatrically oriented anthropologist' who debunks the entire social anthropological school in so far as it reifies behavior as social fact. He finds in psychoanalysis the best systematic orientation to the understanding of human behavior yet developed, designating it the first and only psychology to consider the whole growing human body as a place to live in and experience. In The Ghost Dance, he shows that 'the emotional predicaments of this body-experiencing profoundly shape the adaptive personality, the historical character of groups, and human institutions alike' (p. xii).
According to La Barre, the comprehension of religion, one of the vicissitudes of human drive derivatives, may be the key to the understanding of the nature and function of culture in general and thus to the survival of our species. It is an entirely human phenomenon that cannot be explained in terms provided by religion. To understand it, man himself must be studied as must society and the human mind 'both in waking and dreaming, in serenity and under duress' (p. xi).
The Ghost Dance is a sophisticated anthropological and psychological study of religion. Since the social structure and socialization processes that shape the personalities of people and the ways in which they handle drive derivatives ultimately have their roots in the need to adapt to ecological and biological exigencies, The Ghost Dance also deals with archeology and the history of man. It should be read with a complementary article by La Barre, an almost encyclopedic