Page:The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis II 1921 1.djvu/139

 BOOK REVIEWS 131

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analysis. Interspersed throughout the book is a very readable and the whole trustworthy account of the main psycho-analytic discoveries. He repeatedly insists on the wide-spread importance of sexuality in life in general, and religion in particular, and seems prepared to accept the exclusively phallic origin of the latter. He points out the enormous importance of the (Edipus complex, especially as a source of the sense of sin and guilt. Many illustrations are given of unconscious motivation, and there are two appendices on dreams and birth dreams respectively! The relation of mythology to religion is not overlooked, though if the author were acquainted with the literature in German he would have been able to extend this part in a valuable degree.

Perhaps the most interesting and valuable part of the book is the indication it affords of the way in which religion as previously known will gradually become replaced by other forms of human activity and as the author points out, has in the past twenty years already been so replaced on an extensive scale in America. As with all great changes in human thought, this comes about not, as one might logically expect through the detailed refutation of preceding beliefs, but through a gradual loss of interest in them; one thinks of the various scholastic problems of the middle ages, the witchcraft epidemic, and so on. To the author as to many other religious people, it is rapidly becoming a matter of indifference what actual beliefs are held on the great religious topics of salvation, of the next life, of the nature of God or Christ, and the like. Bibliolatry, for instance, he positively inveighs against. Such things belong to the past, not to the future. Care about individual security, salvation and consolation is being replaced by interest in the relation of an indi- vidual to his group, essentially to his fellow man; the supernatural aspects are falling more and more into the background. On this phase of the evolution of religion there can be no doubt that psycho-analysis must have a far-reaching effect. This the author sees clearly enough, and he is in the vanguard of progress in laying before his fellows such considerations in this very stimulating, challenging, and at the same time helpful work.

In the next edition, which we trust will be called for, we suggest to the author that he reconsider the following points. As a criticism of Freud's view that the sense of blood-guilt emanated originally from the crime of parricide (for which, by the way, the term of patricide has been coined in the American translation) he says (p. 13): "Again, it must be borne in mind that the primitive evinces no sense of blood- guilt To kilt an enemy is merely to rid oneself of his hated presence". He here seems to us to have for a moment forgotten, what he never forgets elsewhere in writing the book, that blood-guilt has nothing to do with enemies, but with one's near relations. The important discovery of a connection between relief of a symptom and the tracing of its for-