It is exceedingly important for parents and teachers to recognize the requirements of nature, which, beginning with puberty, imperiously demand of the young individual a separation of himself from the parent stem and the development of an independent existence. In our complex modern civilization this demand of nature is difficult enough of achievement for the child who has the heartiest and most intelligent co-operation of his parents and environment—but for the one who has not only to contend with his own inner struggle for his freedom but has in addition the resistance of his parents who would hold him in his childhood at any cost, because they cannot endure the thought of his separation from them, the task becomes one of the greatest magnitude. It is during this period when the struggle between the childish inertia and nature’s urge becomes so keen, that there occur the striking manifestations of jealousy, criticism, irritability all usually directed against the parents, of defiance of parental authority, of runaways and various other psychic and nervous disorders known to all. This struggle, which is the first great task of mankind and the one which requires the greatest effort, is that which is expressed by Jung as the self-sacrifice motive—the sacrifice of the childish feelings and demands, and of the irresponsibility of this period, and the assumption of the duties and tasks of an individual existence. It is this great theme which Jung sees as the real motive lying hidden in the myths and religions of man from the beginning, as well as in the literature and artistic creations of both ancient and modern time, and which he works out with the greatest wealth of detail and painstaking effort in the book herewith presented. This necessitates a recognition and revaluation of the enormous importance and influence of the ego and the sexual instinct upon the thought and reaction of man, and also predicates a displacement of the psychological point of gravity from the will and intellect to the realm of the emotions and feelings. The desired end is a synthesis of these two paths or the use of the intellect constructively in the service of the emotions in order to gain for the best interest of the individual some sort of co-operative reaction between the two.