The Inability to Mourn. Principles of Collective Behavior: By Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich. Translated by Beverly Placzek. New York: Grove Press, 1975. 322 pp.

Alexander Mitscherlich, a recent Vice President of the International Psycho-Analytical Association, is the Editor of Psyche and the Director of the Sigmund Freud Institute in Frankfurt. His very significant earlier volume, Society Without the Father,1 was published in 1963. He was awarded the 1969 Peace Prize of the German book industry and, until recently, was Professor of Psychology and Social Psychology at the Frankfurt University. Margarete Mitscherlich, his wife, is also a practicing psychoanalyst as well as the author of Must We Hate?, a study dealing with conflicts between internal and external reality.

The Inability To Mourn, first published in West Germany in 1967, had an unusual impact. More than one hundred thousand copies were sold in the original cloth edition, and the book was on the best seller lists for more than a year. Sections of it have found their way into German school books. Now it has been translated and published in the United States.

R. J. Lifton's Preface to the American edition and the authors' Foreword comment briefly on events that have occurred in Germany and the United States during the eight-year interval between the German and the English editions. The Mitscherlichs indicate in the new introduction that 'it is a study of collective social conduct which is indebted … to the methodology of psychoanalysis'. As we learn in the book itself, the volume is based on the authors' clinical observations during psychoanalytic treatment of their patients as well as on the earlier work of Alexander Mitscherlich in the sociopsychological aspects of German political behavior. Although the Mitscherlichs are writing of their research in post-Hitler Germany, the principles they evolve apply to today's world as well as to that of societies preceding this century.

The Mitscherlichs' book remains 'strictly within the context of