The flowering of psychoanalysis in France since 1968 has had a creative impact on French intellectual and academic life. Le Masque is one such synthetic essay in the genre of psychoanalytic application. Jacques Bril is a professor of literature at the University of Paris and at the University of Tours and the author of four previous books. His erudition is quite impressive: he has mastered the anthropological, sociological, and psychoanalytic literature on mask phenomena. In writing an archaeology of the mask, Bril grounds the sociocultural dimensions of masks within a psychoanalytic perspective.

Bril explicitly acknowledges his debt to Freud's Totem and Taboo. Freud's emphasis on the revolt of the primal horde against the father becomes a subtext in Bril's work. He argues that the universal complex of rebellion, murder, guilt, and reparation are