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Abstract of Dr Giza Roheim's paper, ‘After the Death of the Primal Father’ (read at the Berlin Congress of 1922 and published in the ninth volume of Imago).
It is difficult for two reasons to do justice to Dr Roheim's paper in a short abstract. Firstly, because the value of his investigation consists as much in its wealth of material and incidental suggestions as in its positive conclusions. And secondly, because the topics with which it deals are not always separated in a way which makes them easy to summarize. I shall, however, try to present his main conclusions, and some of his evidence for them, as clearly as I can; though I know that I shall run the risks both of missing some important parts of his argument and of misinterpreting others.
Dr Roheim's arguments are mainly of two types, arguments from the present to the past, or from a later to an earlier date, and arguments from the past to the present, or from an earlier to a later date. I will try to treat these separately and will label them respectively Reconstructions and Applications.
Thus I have divided my abstract into two parts, each of which is again subdivided, as follows:
Reconstructions (a) of the primal crime of parricide from the Egyptian story of Osiris, and (b) of the events which followed this primal crime from primitive funeral rites.
Applications of the reconstruction of primal parricide and the reactions to it to solve certain psychological and anthropological problems, such as: (a) the origin of melancholia and mania and of funeral rites; (b) the origin of obsessional neurosis and of the medicine man; (c) the origin of birth ceremonies; (d) the origin of anxiety hysteria and paranoia.