Page:Totem and Taboo (1919).djvu/3

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AUTHOR’S PREFACE

The essays treated here appeared under the subtitle of this book in the first numbers of the periodical “Imago” edited by me. They represent my first efforts to apply view-points and results of psychoanalysis to unexplained problems of racial psychology. In method this book contrasts with that of W. Wundt and the works of the Zurich Psychoanalytic School. The former tries to accomplish the same object through assumptions and procedures from non-analytic psychology, while the latter follow the opposite course and strive to settle problems of individual psychology by referring to material of racial psychology.[1] I am pleased to say that the first stimulus for my own works came from these two sources.

I am fully aware of the shortcomings in these essays. I shall not touch upon those which are characteristic of first efforts at investigation. The others, however, demand a word of explana-

  1. Jung: Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (Transformations and Symbols of the Libido) translated by Dr. Beatrice Hinkle under the title “The Psychology of the Unconscious,” Moffat, Yard & Co., and “Principles of Psychoanalysis, Nervous and Mental Diseases,” Monograph Series.

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