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Some Similarities in the Mental Life of Primitive and Neurotic People. III. Animism, Magic and the Omnipotence of Thought. Sigm. Freud.
The Titan Motive in General Mythology. Presentation and Analysis. Emil Franz Lorenz.
Carl Spitteler. Hans Sachs.
The True Nature of the Child Psyche. Edited by H. v. Hug-Hellmuth. I. Earliest Infantile Memories. H. v. Hug-Hellmuth. II. “From the Soul of the Child.” Theodor Reik. III. Leo N. Tolstoi, Childhood. Autobiographic Novel. Emil Franz Lorenz.
1. Animism, Magic and the Omnipotence of Thought.—Freud employs the psychoanalytic insight for the understanding of that branch of mental science, the vast territory known as animism. He uses the term to denote the remarkable conception of nature and the world held by primitive peoples, by which they fill the world with countless spirits, good or evil, and animate the inanimate things of nature. This conception still belongs with us, though narrowed to a limited belief in spirits and in the explanation of processes of nature through impersonal forces. Primitive man believed in individual human souls, which are the agents of individual spiritual activity and are to a certain degree independent of the body. Originally they resembled the individual and only reached a partial degree of spiritualization. This idea of the soul and of spirits was influenced doubtless in large measure by sleep with its dreams, by shadows and mirrored forms, but most of all by man's denial of death and demand for immortal life.
This conception is primitive man's reaction to the consideration of the outer world. He builds up an idea of the soul and then transfers it to the outer world. Wundt considers it, in view of its universality, as “a necessary psychological product of the myth building consciousness and