Frazer's Folk-Lore In The Old Testament.1: [A Brief Study of the Material and Methods of Thought of the Individual Unconscious in the Light of Comparative Studies of the Folk-Lore of the Peoples and Races of the Earth.]

Psychoanalysis has freely acknowledged its debt to the works of Sir James George Frazer. It has long accepted them as a part of the necessary equipment for its own task. For psychoanalysis is grounded upon the principle of the preservation of the past. Its field of work is first and foremost with the material of the past which is stored in the unconscious of the individual. Yet for this very reason it is compelled to investigate continually the past of the race of which the individual forms a component part.

We know already how this past is manifested in relics of earlier beliefs, in ceremonies and customs to be found all over the face of the earth as well as in the products of mythology or of the literary or other creative activity of our own as of any age. These all arise out of the undying unconscious of the race. The individual's past is preserved in large part in definite unconscious memories. The experiences of the race reappear in the individual at least in the tendencies that run through his personality. It may be believed that they are perhaps present as vague but actual presentations of a remote experience or that they appear more specifically but with meaning obscured in an occasional particular manifestation to consciousness. Racial tendencies still form wellsprings of action and they certainly influence modern thought. In any case a knowledge of the wider setting of the racial psychic life is necessary to the full understanding of any personality and the complete control of its forces. Frazer's works have taught us how these tendencies and experiences of the race which are found repeated in the individual may be studied in the mental products of