Loathsome Jews and Engulfing Women: Metaphors of Projection in the Works of Wyndham Lewis, Charles Williams, and Graham Greene by Andrea Freud Loewenstein New York:  New York University Press, 1993,  xvi + 384 pp., $35.00

This is not a book for the intellectually timid reader. Connecting the three disciplines of history, literary criticism and psychoanalysis, it makes a grand attempt to understand the effect of literature on the minds and self-understanding of those who are depicted as alien and undesirable. Among the alien and undesirable, the author singles out those who are like herself: Jews and women.

In an introductory chapter, she traces the history of English attitudes toward Jews, showing an overall pattern of demand for assimilation and refusal to accept assimilation without conversion. In the second chapter, she describes attitudes toward Jews in English literature, as seen by critics. Here the stereotypical Jew is a man with a large nose who is greedy, crafty, fawning, and ingratiating, whose intent is to sexually invade “pure” Aryan women and murder or mutilate Aryan men and boys, in order to debase the Aryan race.

Her third chapter shows how psychoanalytic theorists have accounted for men's fear of women and need to differentiate themselves from all things feminine. Here she uses ideas from several modern theorists to develop her own three part thesis. She believes that misogynistic men react to the experience of having been nurtured by women and have identified with them as a result of that nurture. Secondly, she believes that adults who were abused as