With his mother Eleanor he occasionally assisted Nina Layard in her searches for palaeoliths in the Ipswich area, and through her was introduced to Professor A. C. Haddon of Cambridge.
She also had direct contacts with Professors William Ridgeway and McKenny Hughes, and with Wynfrid Laurence Henry Duckworth.
John attended King's College, Cambridge, and gained a degree in modern languages, but through his contacts became interested in anthropology.
The indigenous inhabitants gave them a rather cold reception at first, and Rivers decided to continue travelling while Layard stayed for a year immersing himself in the culture, learning and documenting the vernacular language, and recording myths, legends and oral history.
This was a society in which monoliths and standing stones formed part of the cultural material, and Layard's interest clearly had some roots in his aunt's investigations.
Layard in Atchin and his contemporary Bronisław Malinowski in the Trobriand Islands of New Guinea were the first modern anthropologists to use what is today called participant observation methods in ethnographic research.
Subsequent work (which served also as a training for Layard in his own exploration of his psyche, and his attempts to make sense of his experiences) took place in England, in Vienna (in 1926), and then in Berlin, where he joined the circle of David Ayerst and his English literary friends.
Instead the book is the only monographic treatment of Layard's New Hebridean materials, although he continued to analyse and write about them in numerous publications in psychoanalytic journals.
The second half of the book explores the images derived from the dream-work in explicitly Jungian terms, discussing "archetypes", and dealing in particular with the theme of hare and rabbit sacrifice, and its significance in various cultures and mythologies.
[2] Whilst in Oxford Layard met Doris, then the wife of the anthropologist and psychic investigator Eric Dingwall (c. 1891–1986).