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The word psychoanalysis does not occur in the index of this book, but there are six references to Freud, one to Roheim, and that is all, strictly, of what might be utilized for the author's general argument. Had he wished to expand the freudian suggestion that race animosities are due to narcissism in respect to minor “differences,” he could have illumined many of his pages, even had they needed it.
Instead, the general foundations are anthropological and historical. Race, as widely written upon is one of those “blab” words that Stuart Chase has recently pointed out for so many abstractions. It really has little meaning. It is, as the author concludes, a fiction, yet one around and about which there is much heat and not a little conflagration.
We find it, in spite of its neglect of the fundamental light of psychoanalysis, apropos of the aggressive components of the id, an excellent historical and anthropological discussion of the racial superstition, which, like all superstitions, have a basis in reality which the freudian conceptions go far into understanding.
It is for us nevertheless, an entertaining, well written, scholarly work and well worth reading.