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Dr. Leo Schneiderman, who has been teaching psychology at Eastern Connecticut State College for many years now, has a high reputation for making the most abstruse features of different schools of psychology available to his students. His students and colleagues have particular respect for Dr. Sch-neiderman's ability to use psychology to illuminate humanity's past experiences, particularly of the oral period, that have been preserved in myths, folklore, and religion. He inculcates in his listeners a reverence for the past while making it possible for them to view the present as an outcome of the past. What he does for his students in his lectures, Dr. Schneiderman does for his readers in The Psychology of Myth, Folklore, and Religion, but more comprehensively and with freer use of his vast scholarship.
Dr. Schneiderman, of course, is not the first to apply the tools of psychology and anthropology to study the subjects mentioned in the title of his book: Sir James Frazer, Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, Robert Graves, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and others have already done so. What makes his book valuable is that it is, among other things, a strong demonstration that the paths his predecessors have opened for the study of myths, folklore, and religion are still open to intellectual traffic. This is so despite the efforts of academic psychologists and anthropologists to turn their disciplines into