Esiler Robert (1 results)

Hardcover. Condition: Very Good. Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good. 1st Edition. Hardcover 1st edtion. A very clean sturdy copy, dust jacket in protective mylar. Man Into Wolf began as a lecture delivered to the Psychiatric Section of the Royal Society of Medicine in 1948, chaired by the eminent psychiatrist Sir David Henderson, who wrote the introduction to the first published edition. It was first published in Britain by Routledge and Kegan Paul in 1951 and in the United States by the Philosophical Library in 1952, with a later reprint from Ross-Erikson in 1978 carrying a new introduction by Donald Lathrop. The book runs to approximately 270 pages including extensive notes and appendices that substantially exceed the original lecture text in length ? the lecture itself runs to around fifty pages ? a structural peculiarity that some readers have found frustrating. Robert Eisler (1882-1949) was an Austrian Jewish polymath of extraordinary range whose intellectual circle included Freud, Jung, Warburg, and Scholem. He survived internment at Dachau and Buchenwald before taking refuge in Britain, where he spent the remainder of his life. Gershom Scholem described him, with a mixture of admiration and exasperation, as an astonishing figure in the world of scholarship who had in readiness for every unsolved problem brilliantly false solutions of the most surprising kind. Eisler's central argument is a grand prehistoric hypothesis about the origins of human violence, drawing simultaneously on archaeology, anthropology, and Jungian psychology. He proposes that the earliest proto-humans were essentially peaceful and vegetarian until the Ice Age forced a catastrophic break: starvation compelled humans to become meat-eaters, and cold compelled them to wear the skins of animals they killed. Eisler argues that both necessities left permanent scars on the human psyche ? the trauma of killing encoded as archaic memory, and the wearing of animal hides experienced at some deep psychological level as a transformation into the beast itself. From this double trauma he derives the wolf-man: the lycanthrope as not merely a medieval superstition but a psychologically real atavistic regression to this originary moment of violent becoming. The book moves outward from this premise in several directions. Sadism and masochism are interpreted as distorted expressions of the same archaic predatory and prey impulses. The wild hunt mythology, the Dionysian Maenads, the Luperci of Roman religion, the Green Men of European folk tradition, and agricultural ceremonies involving ritual violence are all assembled as evidence of the same deep structural memory surfacing through different cultural forms. A dedicated appendix examines the case of John George Haigh ? the so-called Acid Bath Murderer ? as a modern instance of the werewolf psychology, applying the framework to a contemporary criminal case to give it forensic grounding. The range of classical, mythological, anthropological, and philological reference is genuinely impressive. Critical responses have consistently noted, however, that the book's ambitions outrun its evidence, that the Jungian framework is treated as explanatory rather than hypothetical, and that the retrospective diagnosis of prehistoric psychological states from mythological survivals invites more scepticism than Eisler brings to it. What remains beyond dispute is the book's peculiar vitality: it is the work of a prodigiously learned mind operating at the edge of its evidence, asking large and uncomfortable questions about the roots of human cruelty at a moment ? the immediate aftermath of the Second World War ? when those questions carried uncommon urgency.