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Despite Freud's “Totem and Taboo,” clinical psychoanalysts and psychiatrists until lately often regarded anthropologic facts as far-fetched hobbies and curiosities which could only startle or amuse them slightly. They always had the feeling that anthropology was not a part of their legitimate curriculum or obligatory knowledge. All of this has changed considerably since Dr. Roheim published the results of his fieldwork in Australia in 1929-31, two years of exploration financed by our French colleague, Maria Bonaparte, Princess George of Greece. Roheim's psychoanalytic approach to anthropology has had the result that his famous report, “Psychoanalysis of Primitive Cultural Types,” published in Imago in 1932 and in the Roheim Australian Research Number of the Int. Journal of Psychoanalysis in 1932, has become one of the basic papers on psychoanalysis.
Since that time every book of Roheim has been something like a sensation, bringing forward facts, facts, and more facts. He draws far-reaching theoretic conclusions from his fieldwork; his material seems inexhaustible. We can only marvel at the wealth of facts and clever evaluations. This holds true also for his latest book, “The Origin and Function of Culture.” In this monograph Roheim focuses his attention on the manifestations of Eros in cultural development. He takes one aspect of cultural development, clarifies it, fully conscious that the inner aggression is a partner equal to the erotic tendency, the role of which Roheim promises to discuss in a later volume:
“As we are by no means trying to give an exhaustive interpretation of the cultural process by only following one trend, a certain onesidedness is unavoidable. Therefore I may as well state in so many words that I do not claim that our prolonged infancy is the only biological faotor behind the cultural process. Also I fully admit that we have an inborn trend of maturation, and in discussing the problem of growing up I am envisaging only one, viz., the regressive