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This paper is divided into three sections. The first deals with the reactions of school children to the sudden death of one of their comrades, as studied by their behaviour and some written essays. The second deals ethnologically with food taboos and fasting in connection with mourning practices, while the third deals from the same point of view with funeral ceremonies themselves. As is to be expected, all three methods of approach reveal the existence of strongly ambivalent tendencies in the mind of the mourner. The children tended to identify their parents or themselves with the dead one, from motives of repressed hatred or from fear respectively. Fasting is a reaction formation to the primitive desire to eat the dead, a desire which expresses itself positively in the widespread custom of the funeral feast. Funeral rites, consciously undertaken with a view to the glory or benefit of the dead, reveal as an underlying motive the wish to prevent the dead from returning to do harm to the living. Everywhere, both in primitive societies and among children, there is found a powerful fear of the dead, based (as Freud has already shown) on a projection of the hostile feelings of the survivors.
The paper abounds in interesting points, of which we can only mention