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Dr. Reik's book is a collection of essays on the application of psychoanalysis to the problems of primitive customs and religious ritual. He investigates "The Couvade", the puberty rites of
savages, and under the title of "Kol Nidre" and "The Shofar", he studies several aspects of the religion of the ancient Hebrews. These essays represent one of the earliest attempts to follow up the principles that Freud posited in his "Totem und Tabu". Originally conceived as lectures in 1914-1919, they are here presented in a revised and enlarged form in an English translation.
Notwithstanding the variety of subjects investigated the book is held together by a uniform program and method. The basic observation from which the research proceeds is the one made by Freud, that there is a striking resemblance between the compulsion neurosis and religious ritual. It was this observation which led Freud to the formulation that the compulsion neurosis was a "private religion", or that religion is a communal compulsion neurosis. This phenomenological resemblance was subsequently proven to be based on a similarity of the underlying instinctual conflicts. The hypothesis of the "primal horde" and the communal blood guilt, which takes the place of the personal Oedipus complex, presents the background against which the dynamics of primitive religion are conceived.
Though we acknowledge the merits of the theory of the "primal horde", Reik makes rather indiscriminate use of it to explain every manifestation of an inhibited aggression. He does not define the limits of the analogy between an individual neurosis, as we know it now, and a communal neurosis of which the rituals are survivals. Nor does he attempt to trace the steps by which restrictions came to be placed on the instinctive impulses of man in order to make any form of social existence possible. In other words, one cannot quarrel with the evidence that ritual is the result of repression; one cannot deny that it is carried out