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To the psychoanalytically minded the science of anthropology is a basic one and fits essentially into his scheme of things. Thinking genetically, even if ontogenetically, he must needs sense the phyletic background of the evolution of human beings from their earliest beginnings.
We have had occasion to recommend in no unmeasured terms an earlier sketch by Dr. Goldenweiser, entitled Early Civilization, which
by a gradual and thorough re-editing, rewriting and revision has come to be an essentially new and original work, here under consideration.
Its 500 octavo pages are filled with illuminating material. The beginning chapters, four in number, discuss man, physically and psychically in his relations to lower animals and to the beginnings of cultural precipitates in the forms of their art, religions, industry and organization. This is not purely descriptive and the author has most satisfactorily included matters of theoretical interest, thus giving to description that binding interest that unifies and renders alive the more static features of simple description.
Quite entertainingly Dr. Goldenweiser sketches a bit of his own development in the transition period of his writing the earlier text and the present one. Whereas, he writes, “he used to think that the heavier, pedantic Hegelian style, in which a sentence was considered grander the less it was comprehensible—a not isolated phenomenon in scientific writing—he has come to a radical modification of this literary style and, through lecturing and other activities, has developed a much simpler, direct and lucid form of presentation.” The present work shows this and therefore is the more welcome.
And so as we scan his chapters, Animal, Man, Culture; Primitive Life and Thought; Art; Society and Politics, and The Ways of Culture, we have spread out before us those earlier stages through which the human race has developed.
It is a delightful and satisfying book, and fits into the rubric of psychoanalytic conceptions, even i