Myth and guilt
IT IS difficult to describe what impression Freud's Totem and Taboo made upon us, his Vienna circle. I still vividly remember the meeting of our Analytic Association in 1913 in which Freud presented to us the last and most important part of the work about the return of totemism in childhood. We were enthusiastic and we immediately under- stood that there was an intellectual challenge for generations of psychologists and historians of civilization. Privileged to speak with the author of the great book, we discussed with him the overflow of ideas it had stimulated in most of us. In the following month Otto Rank, Hanns Sachs, and I — they called us the psychoanalytic trio in Berlin — often talked until early morning about plans for future research work each of us hoped to do. We were friends and helped each other wherever we could. There was no petty jealousy, no quarrel about the priority of ideas, no fear of plagiarism that sometimes disgraced the discussions of psychoanalysts later on.
Contents
PART one: The Most Important Problem in the
Evolution of Culture 1
I The Little Science Knows of Conscience 3
II Origin and Nature of Guilt Feeling 18
III There Is a World Sense of Guilt 34
IV Myths and Memories 46
V Never Remembered, Yet Not Forgotten 59
V Never Remembered, Yet Not Forgotten 59
VI It Is Still a Mystery to Me 80
PART two: The Crime 87
VII The Interpretations 89
VIII Text and Context 103
IX Criminal Investigation 117
X The Leading Clue 130
XI The Fagade and the Inside Story 143
XII Prehistoric Reality in the Myth 148
XIII The Man Without a Past 156
XIV, You Are Whom You Eat 168
XV The Answers of Science and Religion 181
XV The Answers of Science and Religion 181
XVI The Breakthrough of Memories 190
XVII The Emergence of Guilt-Feeling 207
XVIII The Tension Before Christ 218
PART three: The Punishment
XIX Toward Repeat Performance 233
XX The Christ-Myth and the Historic Christ 243
XXI To Let the Punishment Fit the Crime 259
XXII We Let Something Slip 269
XXIII The Cross and the Tree 280
XXIV Unconscious Meaning of Crucifixion 290
XXV The First and the Second Adam 305
XXV The First and the Second Adam 305
XXVI The Sexual Re-interpretation 318
PART four: Man, the Moral Climber 337
XXVII The Apostle of the Gentiles 339
XXVIII Dying Another Man's Death 350
XXIX The Invisible God 362
XXX The Splendid Isolation of the Jews 378
XXXI How Odd of the Jews 391
XXXII Hubris 399
XXXIII Man, the Moral Climber 416
Publication date: 1957
Author: Theodor Reik was a psychoanalyst who trained as one of Freud's first students in Vienna, Austria, and pioneered lay analysis in the United States.
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