Imago

1. Jones, Ernest. Psychoanalysis and Anthropology.

2. Róheim, Géza. The Sedna Saga.

Jones, Ernest. Psychoanalysis and Anthropology.—Dr. Jones delivered this paper before a meeting of the Royal Anthropological Institute at London. The first half of it describes the nature of the unconscious and its mechanisms, the study of which has brought psychoanalysis and anthropology so close together in many of their discoveries. The second half is devoted to a discussion of certain convergences in viewpoint within the two fields. These convergences are concerned with the humanization of primitive man, to which a number of English anthropologists, notably Elliot Smith, Malinowski, Perry and Rivers have made contribution. The most important point of correspondence is the tendency to interpret data in terms of purely human and self-centered motives. For psychoanalysis, symbolism denotes the process whereby one idea is used (unwittingly) as a substitute for an unconscious idea. The number of unconscious ideas is relatively small, far smaller than the number of symbolizing ideas. Psychoanalysts have long remarked that objects possessing a fancied resemblance to the female pudenda, such as cowry shells, function as symbols of the latter. Elliot Smith quotes two eighteenth century writers who pointed out this attribute of cowries, and he comes to the conclusion that the whole of the complex shell cult was based on this circumstance. A common mode of representation is by the mechanism of a part for the whole, or its opposite, the whole for a part. Thus the cowry shell comes to represent the Great Mother Goddess. The identification of the Mother Pot with the Great Mother, or rather with her womb, is a similar example. “At first it was merely a jug of water or a basket of figs, but elsewhere it became a witch's cauldron, the magic cup, the Holy Grail, the font in which a child is reborn into the faith.”

Every individual passes in early life through a stage of bisexuality and the u