This book by the Harvard-trained and psychoanalytically oriented anthropologist Stanley Kurtz, should greatly appeal to all psychoanalysts, despite its focus on a non-Western (i.e., Hindu Indian) culture. It confronts some of the basic questions of child rearing and socialization from an interesting “culturally reshaped” psychoanalytic perspective and in the process suggests various cogent research projects and hypotheses.

Kurtz's thesis is clear: psychoanalysis—unique as it may be for understanding the deepest realms of the human psyche—is essentially culture bound. It needs, as he puts it, to be “reshaped