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Paul Pruyser must have enjoyed writing this book. He created an arena for himself in which he could be imaginative, personal, and playful while attempting, as indicated by the subtitle, to contribute to the literature on a psychoanalytic theory of culture. In the book, he tries to update and broaden the Freudian view of the imaginative facets of personal and public cultural processes. Like a kind and learned mentor and guide, he leads us through an intellectual journey that takes into account the early developmental base of what he calls the "tutored imagination." The reader is treated to a review of the epigenesis of the affective, cognitive, identificatory, spatial, and object relational aspects of the imagination, that land of magic and imagery. As the imagination flourishes in a nourishing surround, the individual's inner needs for pleasure, play, love, and comfort reach for their counterpart in the culture's symbology. Pruyser illustrates this in an ambitious survey of the visual, literary, and musical arts, scientific creativity, and a field in which he has had a long-standing interest, religion.
It is an ambitious book, written by a wise and literate psychoanalyst who has much that is worthwhile to say about the imaginative, creative process. It also is a problematic book, an all too typical