T HERE is in the foreword of Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa a challenging statement written by Professor Franz Boas: When speak about the difficulties of childhood and adolescent life, he writes, we are thinking of them as unavoidable periods of adjustment through which everyone has to pass. The whole psycho-analytic approach is largely based on this supposition. Not only do these words aim the attention of the reader as he starts the book) they also have for the student of modern youth a special pertinence, for they bring into the open some social questions of major importance. In spite of the qualifying adverb largely, these words suggest two implications: First, that the psycho-analytic writers have created the idea of human nature inherently faulty, a sort of modern personification of sin, which causes, because of the impulses it originates, problems of maladjustment, second, that the freedom of Samoan youth social tension reveals by contrast the point where our young people, the products of a highly developed civilization, experience their strain. In her first chapter Miss Mead shows us that this difference between the two cultures centers about sex, and the reader is given the theme of the book in the expression of the author's hope that from this contrast may be able to form a newly and vividly self-conscious, selfcritical judgment and perhaps fashion differently the education of our children. In the effort to check up the teaching of pychoanalysis naturally turn first to Freud, the father of the movement. In his writings, especially in his earlier ones, there is much that seems to justify the statement of Professor Boas. This appears especially in his Three Contributions to the Sexual Theory (Nervoas and Mental Disease Monograph Series No. 7) Perhaps the following quotation defines as clearly as any his disposition to load upon organic sex the responsibility for the beginning of conflict between impulse and social inhibition: