BOOK REVIEWS (Edited by Mary Welch)

C. G. JUNG: Psychological reflections. Bollingen Series XXXI. Princeton, New

Jersey, I970. pp. xvi + 391. $8.50.

In a world where' disposable' is good sales talk, and even books float on their paper backs down the flood of expendable matter, this is an anthology, solidly bound, to stand against the tide.

The book appeared, first, over twenty years ago, and provided a conspectus ofJung's writings; this second edition, revised and containing as it does many selections from the work of his later years (1945-6I), is much more than a reappearance.

To call it a 'digest' would be gravely to misjudge it; its excellence lies not only in its fine printing (it is a good book to handle) but chiefly in the content, and in the careful editing which gives a depth and a form to the numerous quotations. These are arranged under four main headings: the nature and activity of the psyche; man in his relation to others; the world of values; and ultimate things. They form a coherent statement of his experience ofliving and show how greatly his outreach into fields other than psychology enriched his thinking and formulation. Indeed, for anyone asking what Jung was like, these selections could serve as a distilled self-portrait more satisfying than biographical data.

For students ofJung the book holds an added value, since the extracts, grouped around each theme, are clearly linked to sources so that they can be quickly identified in the Collected Works, and lead the more specialized reader into a reconsideration of his work.

Perhaps to call it a bedside book for analysts is not uncomplimentary to either book or analyst: for an acceptance of the insoluble nature of all the greatest human problems, expressed as Jung so often did, with a rather special dry humour, might make our nights more restful to us, and our days in consequence less hazardous to our patients.

It is to be hoped that an early printing in England will make the book available. It will commend itself as an admirable gift book, but only the neurotically unselfish will go on to give it away.

MARY WELCH

FRANCES SMART: Neurosis and crime. Edited by B. Curtis Brown. London, Gerald

Duckworth & Co. Ltd, 1970. pp. xx + 178. £2'25.

This publication, written by a Jungian analyst, is considered by the Director of Prison Medical Services in his foreword to be the first book about psychotherapy in prison. The book was unfinished at the time of Dr Smart's death, and has been structured and completed by a friend of hers, Miss Curtis Brown, a journalist. It is directed towards the general public and aims at demonstrating the possibilities offered to offenders by psychotherapy, in particular by 'long-term individual psychotherapy in depth'.

It contains a lucid account of social, biological and psychological factors inherent in the etiology of crime together with examples taken from Dr Smart's experience with 213

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prisoners during her ten years' work as a visiting psychotherapist at Wormwood Scrubs prison. Special emphasis is laid on the psychopathology of jealousy and emotional immaturity as manifested in sexual offences. Of particular value for the general reader seems the importance attributed to childhood experiences and respect for personality in early development.

Dr Smart distinguishes between those prisoners whose delinquency is a symptom of a neurotic or psychotic state and those who choose to live by crime, the professional ones. For the former, she thinks, there is the possibility of treatment; as for the latter she expresses herself in a somewhat vague, even contradictory, way. She argues that these cases are not 'susceptible-or at least much less susceptible-to treatment by psychotherapy' (p. 6). In any case, this category-and she does not raise the question whether a homogeneous category like this exists-is no challenge to her. She also does not seem to do justice to the complex case of the recidivist.

Dr Smart stresses rightly that the actual circumstances of prison life contribute to the effectiveness of treatment and that many inherent disadvantages, such as the time limit, can be 'turned to useful account by the therapist'. (p. 10).

She accepts as criteria for selection for psychotherapy the usual ones, intelligence, willingness to co-operate and age-criteria which do not seem to stand up to thorough examination. However, it is gratifying to read that she does not consider lack of psychological sophistication to be a disadvantage (p. II). It is also gratifying to learn that there was a more immediate response to treatment among prisoners than among patients in the world outside (p. 8).

Half of the book consists of fragments. It is particularly disappointing that the fmal chapters are fragmentary, since they were considered by Dr Smart the most important ones. They are largely concerned with the archetypal basis of treatment and its implications.

Despite severe obstacles-details concerning the process of treatment were lacking altogether, case material was lost-the editor set out to gather together any material left which was relevant for the various headings stipulated by the author, even using extracts copied by Dr Smart from books which she consulted during her work. Although the material, collected with care, diligence and devotion, does not present the reader of this Journal with anything basically unfamiliar, the author's notes are liable to arouse interest, and, at times, doubts and opposition, particularly concerning the problem of transference.

Included in the material are recollections of Dr Smart by patients who were still prisoners at the time of preparing the material. Despite unavoidable idealization and occasional sentimentality these recollections form an integral part of the book and may be considered, though this was not the editor's intention, as a memorial for Frances Smart.

Miss Curtis Brown's work as editor deserves high praise indeed. However, I feel critical in two respects. Apart from one serious misprint (p. 13, tenmos for temenos) the style is disappointing in so far as there are frequent unnecessary exclamation marks; neither is the book helped by the editor's decision to add, as a fmal chapter, a lecture 'On being oneself', given some years ago by Dr Smart.

This lecture compares badly with the broad conception which is noticeable throughout her discussion of causes and treatment of anti-social behaviour where much use was made of the fmdings of authors such as Kate Friediaender, Melanie Klein, Michael Fordham, Karl Lorenz and others. However, Dr Smart's development from 'a very reserved provincial young woman' into a caring and devoted analyst is well conveyed in an appendix written by the editor.

F. H. STRAUSS

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GERARD BORG: Le voyage it la drogue. Editions du Seuil, Paris, 1970. pp. 248. 20 F. Anybody who is interested in what by now has been dubbed the 'youth scene', the 'drug scene' or the 'underground' will find this book exciting.

Gerard Borg is not an analyst, nor is he a psychiatrist. He seems to be something of an inspired adventurer who, after a series of peregrinations-which took him also to Brazil, where he studied native psychotherapeutic methods-decided to journey along the drug addicts' 'route' which goes from America and Europe to the Middle and the Far East. He travelled on this route as a 'participant observer', sharing the life of his research subjects as fully as possible but without losing his capacity for observation and reflection. He succeeded in getting the confidence, and even the friendship, of the young and this has enabled him to draw for us a very full and very living picture of them.

The facts he discovered both confirm and fill out the impressions and experiences of those who have been involved in one way or another in that particular 'scene'. Thus, the fact that the drug addicts do not form a single and uniform block.

There are at least two important sub-groups: the one is made up of those who seek thrills and excitement or some dramatic form of suicide-these are the junkies; their choice of drugs falls on the amphetamines and the hard drugs and for them the end of the journey tends to be Turkey and the Middle East. In the other group, the hippie group, are those who seek to 'expand the frontiers of the spirit' and who want to experience the mysterious. They choose drugs like marijuana and L.S.D. in order to bulldoze the ego out of the way to 'enlightenment' or 'paradise'; and their geographical destination is India and the Far East.

The hippies, whose ethical values lie on the side of love, non-violence and tolerance, are often profoundly contemptuous of the Junkies'. As one of them said to Borg: 'The junkie is a tragedy. I have hardly ever seen a junkie laugh. They look as if they were at their own funeral.' Borg himself was primarily concerned with the hippies.

Both drug groups share a profound distaste for the modern Western world. They tend to come from different social backgrounds, but share an almost identical psychological history: a broken family and as a consequence a disturbed childhood. Could it be this which has lent particular passion to the cynicism which they share with so many modern men who no longer, as Malraux has suggested (Encounter, September 1970), merely ask the question, 'What is man?' but have instead moved on to the much more deadly question, 'Why is man? Why is his failure so total?' (Borg, p. 185).

It seems to me that these young men and women, as Borg describes them, demonstrate most convincingly man's deep-seated need to make sense of life, to discover its meaning, to discover God (p. 23 I), a need to which Jung was particularly sensitive and which he believed to be ubiquitous. Young men and women having emerged from childhood but having not yet been contracted into a defined place and role in their society may in fact be in a state of heightened sensitivity and thus carry and express more readily the half-formulated, half-submerged fears, frustrations and dissatisfactions experienced by many of the older members of their community.

If the 'grown-ups' could listen carefully to the more timid and hesitant voices of their own hearts they would perhaps there fmd an echo of some of the things that have prompted the young to embark on their search-however strident the expression they give to it, and however crazy the form it sometimes assumes. However, most 'grownups' fail to hear this echo, fail to recognize the validity of the underlying premises and pressures; or else, in their anxiety to be seen to be 'with it' and to 'understand', they collude and even encourage the expression and the forms the search takes, however mistaken, inappropriate and self-defeating these may in fact be.

The young, inadvertently, resort to means which often caricature the predominant assumptions and techniques of the society against which they intend to rebel: Borg's hippies, for instance, in their search for instant enlightenment readily exemplify Western

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man's fascination with speed. They also basically, even if unknowingly, remain ensconced in that hedonistic and technological tradition in which the engineering of the psyche by chemicals is regarded as valid because it is apparently efficient.

Borg has written this book in simple, direct and evocative language. He uses no specialist terms, except the hippie and junkie slang-and for these he provides a glossary for the uninitiated.

ROSEMARY GORDON

KARL MENNINGER: Number words and number symbols: a cultural history of numbers. Translated by Paul Broneer. Cambridge, Massachusetts, M.I.T. Press, 1969. pp. xiii + 480. £7.

If anyone would like to become aware of his lack of education he could do no better than to leaf through this tremendously learned book by a distinguished German scholar (nothing to do with the Menninger Clinic, so far as I can make out). A very readable, well translated text of the revised German edition (1958), beautifully printed and with nearly 300 illustrations will make this chastening experience a pleasure-if taken in small doses.

It is essentially an archaeology and a history of numbers, but the cultural connections interwoven with ethnology contribute also to the history oflanguage (number-words) and of thought processes. Although the author states in the preface that the area of symbolic and mystical interpretation is not even included, I shall try to show, with the help of a few very small examples, that he does, in fact, provide the material which could be exploited by analytical psychologists.

We are familiar with Jung's recognition of the archetypal significance of numbers, as shown in 'A psychological approach to the Trinity'.Jung (1948) supports his statement that two is the first real number by quoting Roman sources (Marcobius), who, in tum, borrowed much from Pliny. 'A hesitant first step' after which man stopped to catch his breath: 'the number two is a frontier in counting' (Menninger). 'Two is the first number because, with it, separation and multiplication begin, which alone make counting possible' (Jung, op. cit. p. lIS).

Menninger also demonstrates that this development has remained somewhat incomplete: in Arabic 1 and 2 are still adjectives (like 'beautiful' or 'big') while subsequent numbers are nouns. Abstraction of number sequences from the things counted (like fingers) has, in fact, presented great difficulties for the human mind. English, of course, retains traces of , two ness', like 'a brace of pheasants' and 'a couple of days'.

Using Egyptian and Chinese ideographs, Menninger demonstrates that the discovery of three marks a new conceptual stage: it expresses the plural as in 'many'. Three Egyptian tears means to weep, three women in Chinese = gossip! He also cites a South Sea Island tribe which has got no further than the concept, 2, but can count further by using 2 + 1,2 + 2,2 + 2 + I, and so on. Analysts know, of course, about the difficulty of grasping 'two' after the original unity and of being able to contain the precariously poised concept of three, through their study of infant and child development. They know about it because of the emotional complications and educational difficulties which follow if anything goes wrong and development becomes arrested.

But who would have thought that Western mediaeval mathematics had no means of expressing zero and that it came to us from India? Are these intimations of how to express something that is present by its absence, like a 'negative hallucination'? It is fascinating to fmd such clues in a study of cultural developments undertaken for its own sake.

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Menninger's knowledge of Chinese, Sumarian, Slavonic, Greek, Roman, Mayan, Celtic and Babylonian sources indicate the range of the book. It is impossible for a mere analyst to do him justice or to criticize him.

JUNG, C. G. (1948). 'Psychology and religion', c. w., 11.

A. PLAUT

ALVIN R. MAHRER. (Ed.) New approaches to personality classification. New

York/London, Columbia University Press, 1970, pp. 425. £1"65.

Professor Mahrer is a Professor of Psychology and Director of Clinical Psychology at Miami University in Ohio. He has collected together the contributions of ten clinical psychologists, all of whom have different approaches to the problems of psychodiagnosis and personality classification. They indicate very clearly their dissatisfaction with their attempts to relate their test results to psychiatric diagnostic categories. Their contributions give a very clear indication of the complexity of the problem, of the present-day doubts and uncertainties of clinical psychologists, about their techniques, and shows the different ways, and in what directions, the subject is opening up.

The three first papers demonstrate the structural approach, with an account of modern factor analysis research of surface and source traits, with the use of the computer, by Raymond Cattell, and an account of the dynamic calculus model for the measurement of motivation in an objective way, by John Horne and Arthur Sweney, with finally, a typological analysis of hospital psychotics, by Maurice Lorr.

H. J. Eysenck presents his views on the dimensions of extraversion-introversion, neuroticism-stability, and his theoretical ideas as to excitation-inhibition balances, and stresses the importance of the inherited neurological, physiological, underlying structures. He links his experimental findings with those of behaviour therapy.

A contrasting paper is that of Timothy Leary presenting an existential transactional approach, stressing the need of flexible testing methods related to the changing psychological situation of the patient, and measurement of such factors as the degree of the patient's commitment and involvement.

Two papers are perhaps of particular interest to analysts and analytically-orientated psychiatrists. The first is that of Reuben Fine, putting forward the view that therapeutic accessibility is perhaps one of the main guides in the choice of patients for analytical treatment, and that this capacity to learn about oneselffrom another human beingjustifies further research, and could provide a valuable method of classification. There must be a certain openness in an individual for therapy to be successful and for there to be a continuing process of increased self-understanding. He feels that psycho-analysis has developed its own philosophy ofliving and that the criteria contained in this have to be borne in mind at the time of assessing the personality of the prospective patient and his capacity and potential for development.

He gives as his criteria-

A. Acceptance of a therapeutic attitude as part oflife. This involves the willingness to face whatever comes to mind and to communicate on a meaningful basis with other people.

B. A pleasure-oriented attitude. c. A rich feeling life.

D. Acceptance of sexual gratification as an essential part of life.

E. Love as the basis for warm, interpersonal relationships.

F. Capacity to work.

G. Release of creative potential.

H. A satisfactory role in the family.

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I. A good sense of identity that serves as a base for satisfactory social role.

J. Reduction of hostility and other negative emotions.

K. Freedom from symptoms.

He stresses that the most important factor in assessing any patient is the ability to establish a relationship, and he feels that conventional psychiatric classification and diagnosis are of little help here. He believes that an intuitive kind of factor analysis might emerge from the researches of psychoanalysts and refers to the work ofF. Thome (1965), whose scales involved similar ideas. He had listed an integration-level test series, which included a personal health survey, a sex inventory, personal development study, ideological survey, social status survey, life style analysis, and existential analysis.

Finally, there is the very interesting paper of Mahrer himself, in which he classifies patients admitted to hospital on the basis of their motivational needs for hospitalization. His first group consists of those for whom admission is an avoidance of threat, which may be a sexual threat, the threat of loss of a significant figure, the threat of punishment, or the threat presented by adult responsibilities.

His second group are those whose motivational need for hospitalization, is either that of punishing themselves or other people. His third group include patients who need hospitalization to seek a safe accepting environment, in which frightening impulses can emerge in states of developing regression. In a fourth group patients seek some kind of structure and control of their states of primitive disintegration, and of emerging aggressive and sexual impulses. His fifth group includes all the various groups of patients who see the hospital as a source of dependency gratification.

Lastly come those for whom the need for hospitalization is to enable them to undergo an identificational journey with another significant figure in their lives. This admission will often tend to occur at points of psychological similarity between the life of the patient and this other figure.

Mahrer, in this summary of present trends in clinical psychology, ends by saying that he feels that there is a very real understanding of personality emerging from all these different approaches and an eagerness on the part of clinical psychology to be able to facilitate optimum functioning and constructive personality change, at a time of rapid social change.

A. M. EDWARDS

CURATORJUM C. G. JUNG INSTITUTE (Eds.) Conscience. Trans. R. F. C. Hull and R. Horine, Evanton, U.S.A., North Western University Press, 1970. pp. x + 2II. $6.50.

The seven lectures which comprise this book were given in Ziirich 1957-8 under the auspices of the C. G. Jung Institute, Zurich. The original German version was published in 1958. The English edition loses nothing of its point and significance by appearing twelve years later.

Those for whom the German was inaccessible will be able to read the English with an awareness sharpened by world trends in the intervening period. Analysts and all who are concerned with the application of the insights of depth psychology will have become more acutely conscious of the confusion of standards and values and the disruption that this causes within the individual psyche. Others who are more concerned with collective expressions of conscience, especially in the international setting, will appreciate that 'this is where we see an ever-deepening void stretching before us, a kind of no-man's-land which gives back no echo, in which the voice of conscience dies away without effect' (Zbinden, p. 7).

The lectures deal with conscience as a phenomenon intrinsic in human life. Seven eminent exponents express their views, together representing aspects of sociology, economics, religion and depth psychology. Religion is subdivided into Judaism, and

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Protestant and Catholic Christianity; depth psychology is divided between a Freudian analyst and Jung himself.

Each contributor is at great pains to define conscience, which like many fundamental attributes of the psyche and experiences of life can never finally be caught in the nets of linguistic analysis nor rational thought. So much is this so that each lecture could be regarded as an extended definition of the concept of conscience, amplified in all its aspects by the study of biological, cultural and historical associations.

The unity of the book is maintained by several factors which are common to all the lectures. These are, first, an awareness of contemporary confusion, uncertainty and failure in the place of conscience in the society and culture in which conscience is contained; secondly, a familiarity with the Judaeo-Christian ethic such that although conscience as a phenomenon is considered to be more fundamental than any ethical system, nevertheless the Judaeo-Christian values are the ones which inform each lecture; thirdly a psychological insight which in every case is relevant to and compatible with the psychology of Jung; and finally, a tendency in each of the lectures to climb out of the flux of relativity to some point of knowledge or insight in which either conscience can be seen to be rooted in what is unchanging, or alternatively conscience can be viewed from a vantage point which is superior to historical change.

Just how much the magnitude of the subject challenges each writer to an holistic approach, and therefore to a response not only from his intellect but also from his personality, is evident in the comment of the Freudian contributor who says, 'If, from the beginning to the end of our exposition, we have to break through the framework of a purely psychoanalytic presentation, this is not due to a play of ideas but springs rather from an inner necessity' (Blum, p. 164).

Indeed, each of those contributors who are not specifically writing from the ground of formal religion, looks finally beyond the scope of his own discipline for hope in the future of man. The sociologist looks to the individuals who are the moral leaders of mankind, hoping for 'an elite in whom knowledge and skill might combine with an unshakeable power of conscience. To prepare the way, to plough the ground for this kind of aristocracy, is the task of our epoch, the supreme goal of those who are aware of their responsibilities. The summons is issued to all' (p. 39).

The economist, on the other hand, hopes for the direct application of Jungian principles in the inner life of key members of the industrial society: 'In Jungian terms, for both employers and workers acceptance of "their own shadow" is the unconditional premise for the recovery of conscience' (p. 67).

Jung himselflooks to the 'unus mundus, the unitary world, towards which the psychologist and the atomic physicist are converging along separate paths' (p. 198). So allinclusive will be the reality of the unus mundus that it will reconcile not only the psychology of conscience but also its theology:-'The mythical assertion of conscience that it is the voice of God is an inalienable part of its nature, the foundation of its numen. It is as much a phenomenon as conscience itself' (p. 199).

Thus each of the secular studies turns to non-rational sources for creative new developments; just as the religious studies, grounded in revelation and history bring their existential truths into the idiom of the twentieth century by rational sociological, anthropological and psychological exposition.

The order in which the lectures are presented gives some food for thought. First come sociology and economics, then the three religious lectures, and fmally the ones on depth psychology, ending with Jung as climax. This order at first appears strange. Surely it would be more correct to begin with the historically most ancient, Judaism, and then through Catholicism and Protestantism to sociology and economics, ending with depth psychology as culturally the youngest branch of knowledge?

But on closer examination the inner reason for the given order becomes more apparent. Not only do sociology and economics present the contemporary scene in all its p

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anxiety and ethical fragmentation, so that someone who doubts the importance of the study of conscience today may have all doubts dispelled; but also these two first lectures, by the very nature of their material, consist in a subtle and penetrating analysis of the present sickness rather than in an examination of the possible sources of health. The impact of the religious lectures, which might otherwise suffer from appearing uncontemporary, then consist in a deep reassurance of the continuity of the spirit of man throughout the centuries, as also the continuity of the cultural heritage which in the past has at times seemed about to founder but has not in fact done so. Not that this faith is lacking in the authors of the first two lectures; but it is present more as faith than as history; and this criticism, if it is a criticism, is applicable more to the economist than to the sociologist.

The lectures on conscience in terms of depth psychology, with which the book ends, present the dimension which is peculiar to the twentieth century: psyche turns upon itself to examine psyche. Each exponent describes the nature, function and experience of conscience as it is inherent in the model of the psyche that he can construct. Each sees conscience as the essential and characteristic feature of the mature and integrated personality, having its origins so deep in the nature of man that it is possible to speak of 'biological conscience' (p. 165, Blum quoting Monakow) or the 'psychoid essence' of the archetype with which consciousness collides (p. 199, Jung).

Each defmes the maturity of conscience as something other than adherence to an external code. This is a remarkable approximation in the views of a Freudian exponent and those ofJung: but differences in the two models of psyche appear in the scope which is assigned to the non-rational components out of which conscience in all its complexity and sensitivity grows.

It is possible that this book would make a different kind of impact on every reader, so widely is the net cast, and so erudite and compelling each communication. Nevertheless, as Dr Hillman says in his preface, there might be many more contributions of a similar calibre without exhausting the subject. The unity of certain underlying assumptions adds strength to the whole presentation. But at the same time there lurks the knowledge that other quite alien views with different frames of reference might be put forward: and the exclusion of the alien 'other' leaves a certain uneasiness.

Perhaps above all its other merits this book is an invaluable spur to reflection.

FAYE PYE

JOACHIM FLESCHNER: Childhood and destiny: the triadic principle in genetic

education. New York, International Universities Press, 1970. pp. 349. $10.

Fleschner writes to guide parents, and to describe dual therapy, a modification of analysis in which male and female analysts work alternately, allowing them to deal separately with maternal and paternal transferences and resolve the oedipal conflict. He also describes the triadic principle, in which parents work as a pair, forming a triad with the child. Each parent relives his own inner drama with his child, writing a part, a genetic script, for him to enact. By letting their scripts correct each other, a repetition of error from generation to generation will be prevented, and mental illness and war obviated, by minimizing oedipal difficulties.

He shows how dual therapy avoids some transference and countertransference problems in classical psychoanalysis, and enables a more reliable reconstruction of early life to be made.

He warns against the swing in education from too much to too little discipline, and the dangers of' good mothering', because of the underlying valence of hatred. This latent attitude can invalidate current ideas on child rearing.

The main part of the book describes sixty patients, many of them psychotic, where the triadic principle was broken, often through assortative mating. General principles

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and rules of genetic child-rearing follow, including simple and widely held ideas, and controversial items such as limiting physical touching and allowing neither nudity at home nor the sharing of beds by siblings.

From a parent's point of view, this book is a doubtful blessing. While it contains some sound common sense, this is presented in a way liable to increase morbid selfconsciousness and guilt, especially when ambivalence is also considered. Arguing, as Fleschner does, from case histories of very ill patients to rules for handling normal children, the inescapable lesson taught is that if a parent acts in such a way then such a result will follow. We know that the outcome of early experience depends not only on the objective reality (including the latent attitudes), but more specifically on the child's perception of reality in terms of its own inner fantasy. Consequently one child may react little, or use for its benefit, a situation which in another may have caused grave illness. Ambivalence is hard doctrine when presented as a destructive unknown divorced from its constructive aspects.

This book raises several points of great interest to analytical psychologists, especially about countertransference. This is here classified into reactive, a response to the patient's transference, and defensive, which is the analyst's common reaction with all patients. The two together seem to correspond to illusory countertransference.

A third type, suggestive or induced countertransference, resulting from 'empathic interplay between analyst and analysand, who each take over some role assigned from the unconscious of the other', seems to have echoes of syntonic countertransference. There are also parallels with sustaining affects and incarnating inner figures, and problems of introjection and reprojection of these. Talking of a case where reprojection evidently got stuck, he says: 'The main task of dual therapy was for both therapists to guard against the need of the patient to put the woman therapist in the role of the interfering mother, they refused to go along with her need to repeat in transference the oedipal triumph.'

Fleschner believes that the main source of both neuroses and psychoses is oedipal, and pre-oedipal roots, if present, are reactivated by the later conflict. He suggests that when oedipal conflicts hold up analysis, this is due to the analyst's genetic script, and may be resolved by diluting and correcting the transference by dual therapy. He implies that resolution of pre-oedipal levels is hard and unnecessary.

It is debatable whether inner figures can be brought together if they are put out to unrelated recipients, and if ambivalence cannot be constellated in relation to a single figure. This is immediately important in looking at group dynamics.

The idea of a genetic script is evocative of the personal aspect of archetypal imagery, and it would be interesting to hear in more detail how the scripta worked out.

This is an interesting book, but in the reviewer's opinion it would be better in two versions: a brief account for parents, uncomplicated by questions of analytical teclmique, and a fuller version of countertransference problems for analysts undertaking dual therapy.

NORAH MOORE

KENNETH KOCH: Wishes, lies and dreams. New York, Chelsea House Publishers;

London, TABS Educational. 1970. pp. 309. £3'75.

Kenneth Koch is an American poet, playwright, and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, and his book is about an experiment he conducted from 1968 to 1969, in teaching boys and girls to write poetry at a lower class New York primary school.

Wishes, lies and dreams is in two parts. The first is a long introductory essay, and the second is a selection of the children's verse, grouped under the headings of certain poetry themes, with a short explanatory commentary to round off each group.

The author soon discovered that teaching young children to write poetry was like permitting them to find what they already had. because they had a natural talent. Treating

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them seriously as poets, at first a diplomatic manoeuvre, turned out to be right because it was true, once he had broken through their belief that poetry was difficult and remote, an easy task for him with small children, progressively more difficult up the age scale.

But at the beginning, Mr Koch had to find ways to spark them off: Excitement is a key word throughout this book, and it had to be generated, first by the teacher, and then by the children with each other in the classroom, before they could write. To his surprise, the children wrote best when the classroom was noisy, and everyone was talking and jumping around, excited but 'held' by the teacher. To give them writing inspiration, the author devised a number of themes which his pupils could use, provided they were age-appropriate.

Thus, themes of wish-fantasies and the possession of magical powers were eagerly taken up by the six- to eight-year-olds, but rejected by older children in favour of a theme to do with the silent, secret, inner self which is apart from the self seen by the outside world.

'People think I'm so-and-so But I am not so-and-so People think I'm this

But I am that.'

The earliest poems attempted were class collaborations. Children with reading and writing difficulties were also able to respond to poetry ideas, and spoken collaborations led to their wanting to compose and write poems of their own. To help them, the author immediately praised anything that was imaginative or funny in what they said, letting the mistakes fall where they would. Once the children sensed a playful, encouraging and aesthetic (rather than corrective) attitude in the teacher, they became less shy and more willing to take risks.

The author's ebullience and enthusiasm for his subject and for his students are conveyed in his book. and awakened in his school a lively spirit for poetry which did not fail when he left it. If he often seems to overpraise the quality of the poems, it may be because he was astonished at his own success in transmitting his ideas to the children.

For those children who could do it, writing poetry proved to be a form of free association which they could enjoy, provided it was done within relationships, primarily with the teacher, but also with each other.

ANNE BARUA

JOB KOVBL: White racism: a psychohistory. 1970, Allen Lane, The Penguin Press,

London, pp. 300. £3'15.

Man is an ambiguous creature: he is not solitary like the gorilla or the cat; he lives in large groups, yet he is not collective and collectivized like the ant. He lives somewhat like a herd animal. yet he also maintains a personal individuality, a personal uniqueness, and he exercises individual choice over more or less important areas of his behaviour.

It is thus natural that social scientists should search for concepts or models which might increase our understanding of the interrelationship between individual and collective phenomena.

Both Freud and Jung dealt almost exclusively with the individual in his essentially personal and private relationship to himself and to a few meaningful persons around him, yet they were both very interested in man's behaviour in groups. Both wrote papers in which they studied and discussed political. sociological and cultural phenomena and attempted to extend the insights gained in their work with individuals to the understanding of the character and behaviour of groups.

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Professor Kovel, a psychoanalyst and psychiatrist, in his study of 'White racism: a psychohistory' tries to further the development of bridging concepts, that is of concepts which will help make sense of man as both a personal and collective being. (He suggests that 'psychohistory' be recognized as a new discipline having this particular bridging and integrating function.) He himself does some of this bridging very adroitly when in the introduction he defines culture as 'a system of shared meanings, an organized structure of symbols'.

Later in the book he suggests that 'psychohistory' is in fact the study of the changing meanings of things and that all meanings are symbols. His discussion of symbols is in fact a very interesting development of the original psychoanalytic position. He believes that symbols have more than a single referent; that they arise in the course of psychic differentiation; that they can be endlessly analysed and that in fact anyone of them could spread out and touch the entire range of shared human experience.

Surveying 'the immense aggregation of potential symbols' (p. 101), he is then led to recognize two distinct classes of symbols; those that he describes as 'secondary' because they are closer to reality, and those that are 'primary', because they are closer to inner fantasy and 'rooted in a timeless biological striving' (p. 100). Indeed, his description of the primary symbols has great affinity with Jung's description of the archeytpes. This is further underlined in his last chapter, where he postulates the presence of certain universal and unconscious fantasies which have always been part of the human situation, so that 'the unconscious has been continually available to be put to historical use' (p. 249).

Professor Kovel's discussion of individual psychological processes is very stimulating.

However, 'white racism', the theme he has chosen to explore with the new tools of psychohistory, is a theme with which he is emotionally involved. He is understandably outraged at what the white man has done to the black man. But his concern to prove that the white man was driven into these outrages by the 'primary' symbolism of black = dirt = faeces = dark = bad invalidates his moral revulsions. More important than this, his readiness to ascribe the identification of , blackness' and 'badness' to primary symbolism -or what the analytical psychologist would call an archetype-when he has only drawn on 'white' sources and not at all on black ones-as he explains in the introductionseems to me decidedly premature and verging on ethnocentricism.

Even those without great anthropological training know that for 'brown' Hindus the white man was as untouchable as any other coloured stranger; and the black man's fantasy had been furnished with 'white' devils just as the white man's hell had contained black ones. Prominent unconscious phantasy systems which in the course of history had been elaborated into collective mythological themes, such as the black devils in Christian iconography, may indeed be drawn upon to exacerbate racial strife. But only a very comprehensive study, carried out in many different parts of the world, can either confirm or deny whether they really belong to the primary, that is the universal, class of symbols.

This book could serve to remind us that our methods in the social sciences are still too fragile to be deployed efficiently in areas in which the researcher is subject to strong emotional pressures and involvements. As I read on I was reminded of what, at least to me, had been one of the first and one of the most exciting attempts at 'psychohistory'the collaboration of the anthropologist Ralph Linton, producing raw data from societies he had studied, with Abram Kardiner, who then subjected these data to psychoanalytic analysis and interpretation. There at least the interpreter was at a safe emotional distance from his research data. (A. Kardiner: The individual and his society, 1939).

Yet there is much in this book worth reading and pondering. I found particularly sensitive his description of the developmental process in the individual from fusion with mother towards 'winning mastery at the cost of separation' (p. 261), and his conception of the aggressive drive as covering a range from 'a healthy sense of mastery to the most unbridled and seemingly gratuitous aim of destruction' (p. 257).

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Books and Journals

It would be interesting to watch Professor Kovel tackle a 'cooler' theme with the help of his basic thesis that 'personality and culture are parallel organisms each reflecting the other' (p. 250).

ROSEMARY GORDON

ISCA SALZBERGER-WITTENBERG: Psycho-analytic insight and relationships:

Kleinian approach. London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970. pp. xvii + 178. £1' 50.

This book is one of a series designed to meet the needs of students in training for social work. But, lest analytical psychologists be immediately put off reading it (or reading about it) they should perhaps concede that in the eyes of the public they are ultimately no more than specialized members of the same company as social workers. And those who become analysts by other than the social work approach-road to the profession could on occasions benefit by the clarity of exposition that such a students' book as this necessarily has. It has some of the characteristics of a handbook which could be consulted when, for example, in a dilemma as to whether to regard a patient's current productions more helpfully as manifestations of envy, or as defensive against persecutory anxiety.

Yet the book stems from the author's personal experience in social science, casework, child psychotherapy and Kleinian psychoanalysis, and a small group of caseworkers joined her in discussions of cases and problems, which helped her to work out her views on the relevance of psychoanalytic views to social work. Though sectionalized and even tabulated, in its actual fabric it is not, to a Jungian, rigidly over-clear and self-assertive, as were the pioneering papers of Klein herself.

The first part is on aspects of the caseworker-client relationship; the second outlines the nature and workings of the nuclear anxieties, of typical emotional crises and personality traits; these two sections incorporate many elements of basic theory dating from Freud and Abraham, together with Kleinian developments. They could undoubtedly be of use to analytical psychologists wishing to work out how much of this corpus of work they can successfully amalgamate, and use in the practice of psychotherapy. And I think that a most valuable training or refresher exercise could be for members of each main division of depth psychology to consider in detail how they would respond to particular people as described in some of the very well selected cases given in this book.

The third section is less satisfactory: it is on 'gaining insight and applying it in the casework relationship'. In casework, no less than in counselling, psychotherapy or analysis, books cannot replace integrated experience gained in personal life, whether that is 'ordinary' life or concentrated, analytic, life. There is bound to be a slight flavour of facility about a textbook dealing with therapeutic interaction however well the author knows this writing: 'The value of written communications like this book, to the student of human nature, is probably very limited. Conviction as to the truth and usefulness of the concepts can only be gained in the actual working with clients. When adults in deep distress or young children talk "like a textbook", then one becomes convinced that this is not ''just theory". but that these concepts have arisen out of working with and understanding of patients' (p. 130).

Few who know Jung's work would give unqualified assent to 'Klein has led the way to understanding psychotic anxieties' (p. 129). When the author writes: Klein 'stressed the role of phantasy in building up an inner world, the interaction of internal and external factors' (p. 129), many of us would like to take her on, and offer her evidence of the way in which the theory of archetypes and of archetypal imagery is time and again validated in clinical practice.

JUDITH HUBBACK

Books and Journals

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ROBERT C. CARSON: Interaction concepts of personality. London, George Allen &

Unwin, 1970. pp. 306. £3"00.

Professor Carson sets out from the conceptual standpoint of the late Harry Stack Sullivan, whom he greatly admires, to survey the contemporary scene of 'transaction' theories in personality development. From this well-documented piece of work he attempts to build an integrative theoretical framework within which, he infers, the behaviourists may safely lie down with the social psychiatrists, the client-centred therapists and even with some psychoanalysts.

It is a serious attempt and there is sense in it, if you are interested in that kind of enterprise, which I find I am. But analytical psychologists, recalling Jung's extroverted husband with his introverted wife on their elegantly described picnic together, may be forgiven a surge of irritation at being asked to master yet another extremely inelegant language with which to codify their notions of the way people behave towards one another.

Of course, Jung did not work it all out for us as Professor Carson has done on the now fashionable geometric grid. About this, he disarmingly says in his introduction: 'If you are beginning to sense that you are being ineluctably drawn into something akin to a multi-dimensional chess game, your intuition is correct'.

The trouble is that such games have a fascination for the obsessional analyst, and if one's defences are that way inclined, I wonder whether in the long run it might not tum out better for the patient if the analyst occupied himself during sessions with needlepoint, in the way that many women psychoanalysts are alleged to have done and may still do.

The closing chapters are devoted to the exploration of psychotherapeutic aims, and the use of the transactional grid is offered as a technique for achieving them. Although Professor Carson assumes that all psychotherapists should be aware of the dangers of falling in with their patient's ploys, he suggests that this danger can be counteracted by a conscious alteration of one's attitude towards the patient systematically across the grid (really like moving on a chessboard).

The positive use of countertransference is not considered, except to say that analysing it is not enough, and that (as Freud discovered through 'Dora') the acquisition of insight does not in itself induce people to change. You might say that the use of the grid is being advocated as an adjunct to 'working through'. In defming and redefining our standpoint as analysts, it may be important to know where the well-informed psychotherapist stands in relation to us, and Professor Carson is a well-informed and experienced clinician.

ALISON LYONS