As Dr. H. Barak indicates in the preface to this volume, Dr. Aubin is a well-trained psychiatrist who has had long experience as a military psychiatrist in the French colonies of North Africa and India. To this long and close familiarity with the mentality of more “primitive” peoples, he had added a fecund psychiatric and psychological approach of the Western clinician. It was to the problem of magic in these societies that he was attracted many years ago. In the course of twenty years, he often noted in his native patients the extraordinary elaboration of special types of behavior which highlighted the evidence and importance of “magic” to these peoples. Much of their psychotic or neurotic behavior and productions (which appeared at first to be absurd or paradoxical) became far more intelligible in the light of the influence of “magical” thinking and practice. The present volume sums up the author's work previously reported in monographs and papers.

He gives us careful discussions of divinatory, magical practices, preliminary rites of