The work which laid the foundations of psycho-analytic folk-psychology is beyond question Freud's 'Totem and Taboo', in which the phylogenetic parallels of the ontogenetic (or individual) Oedipus complex are brought to light. The results achieved in it were confirmed by Reik's work, to which we owe the most important advances of the period dealt with in this Review.

Reik (48) takes as his starting-point the observation that a common fundamental feature in rites of initiation is to be found