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Work of this quality is all too rare in the field of applied psychoanalysis. Too often we find that when psychoanalysis is wedded to the social sciences, it is used to support special pleadings or to serve reactionary political purposes.
Dr. Feldman is a genuine liberal with great erudition in the fields of history, philology, political economy, and psychoanalysis. He finds fascinating illustrations of analytic postulates in the realm of history and political science, and enlightens both disciplines thereby.
This book has the form of variations on a theme by Freud.
When Freud worked out the principles of his science in The Interpretation of Dreams, he kept severely to himself his opinion of the extent to which these principles might be applied for individual to mass mentality. Nevertheless the book implicity upholds the author's belief that repression and transference, the incest wish and the impulse to parricide, with their attendant symbols, images, complexes, and defense mechanisms, might serve to explain all human society. Thus in elucidating the distinctions in psychosexuality between Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus and Shakespeare's Hamlet, Freud referred to the ages of metamorphosis of repression—known as culture—which divided the two tragedies. Culture meant to him systematic mass repression and its inescapable consequences … what is true for the individual, in other words, is fundamentally true for the folk. (pp. 82-83)
There are six variations on this theme, three of which have appeared as articles in this Journal. “What follows is an attempt to answer the challenge to psychology in the light of the social psychoanalysis of Freud, as expounded in his Totem and Tabu, Mass Psychology and the Ego, and Moses and Monotheism. Lest anyone should charge me with Freudian dogmatism, I confess that the essay was made to test the teachings of these three books, in partibus infidelium” (p. 6). In “The Birth Crisis of Christianity” Dr. Feldman examines what contribution analysi