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This volume is a most interesting one to psychiatrists since it is really a lecture delivered at a meeting of the Royal Society of Medicine, attempting an anthropological interpretation of sadism, masochism, and lycanthropy. The author attempts hi a relatively short space to “suggest the possibility of a historical, or rather prehistorieal, evolutionist derivation of all crimes of violence, from the individual attack on life known as murder or manslaughter to the collective organized killing which we call war. The author has tried to show that the mute witness of the fossil archaeological remains of prehistory—the period before articulated human thought found the means of permanent expression in word and writing—can be made intelligible on the basis of Jung's theory of archetypal ideas surviving in the ancestral subconscious strata of the human mind and revealing themselves all over the world in the legends, myths and rites of historic man as well as hi the fleeting dreams and lasting delusions of contemporary humanity.”
He has arranged his book in a somewhat unusual fashion, beginning with the text of his address to the Psychiatric Section of the Royal Society of Medicine, reproduced as best he could remember it, and this lecture takes up only 29 pages. The next 250 pages or so represent the notes from which the actual material of his statements were based. The author has attempted with bracketed reference numbers to supply supplementary information for every word or sentence that might raise an objection or question in the reader's mind. The result is a short and stimulating discussion with a wealth of accessory information to be used as desired. This is certainly a novel treatment, and permits the student to assimilate the entire discussion in less than an hour, and then check the various source materials at his leisure. It also provides in this source material a storehouse of information ordinarily unavailable to any but the skilled research worker who also is pr