Myth and guilt - by Theodor Reik - PDF ebook

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 

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 

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 

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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