[Black Ship to Hell] is a vast, overloaded rag-bag of a book, in the tradition of Burtons's Anatomy, and Miss Brophy, like Burton, is prolific with quotations, recondite allusions and scraps of curious information. The book began, she tells us, as an attempt to psycho-analyse the Greek myth of the Underworld, but grew into a full-scale analysis of violence, aggression and the death-wish. Her attitude is anything but detached: she is a militant atheist, in a refreshingly old-fashioned way, and a militant Freudian as well. She delivers a virulent attack upon Jung, but too often herself falls into Jung's maddening habit of making dogmatic statements unsupported by the least shred of evidence. Apart from Freud, she draws much upon Frazer, and also upon Shaw, whose ideas she considers, rather oddly, to have been as influential as those of Freud himself.

In so far as she comes to any final conclusion, this would seem to be that our aggressive and self-destructive impulses can be overcome only by the release of sexual inhibitions: a theory which, one would have thought, a glance at any newspaper would be enough to disprove. War she considers to be almost entirely the result of repressed homosexuality—a view which, if shared by the Government, would presumably lead to the immediate implementing of the Wolfenden report. Or would it?

This is an interesting, sometimes amusing and often exasperating book; it might have been a better one if Miss Brophy had not tried to cover quite so much ground.