Theodor Reik

His theories about mythology and religion examined by Stefan Stenudd

Theodor Reik (1888-1969) was a psychology student at the University of Vienna when he in 1910 met Sigmund Freud, who was a professor of neurology there. Reik became his student and they remained on good terms until Freud's death. Reik got his PhD in psychology in 1912, with a dissertation on Gustave Flaubert's The Temptation of Saint Anthony, where he applied a psychoanalytical method.

Archetypes of Mythology

by Stefan Stenudd
This book examines Jungian theories on myth and religion, from Carl G. Jung to Jordan B. Peterson. Click the image to see the book at Amazon (paid link).

Psychoanalysis of Mythology

by Stefan Stenudd
This book examines Freudian theories on myth and religion, from Sigmund Freud to Erich Fromm. Click the image to see the book at Amazon (paid link).

In 1928 he moved to Berlin and set up a practice, but as Nazism rose, he moved to the Netherlands and in 1938 to New York, where he established a clinic and remained for the rest of his life.

His writing on mythology is limited. Discussed below is a book on ritual, Ritual: Psycho-Analytic Studies, which was the first in what was supposed to be a series of books on problems in the psychology of religion, but no additional volumes were released. The volume on ritual was originally published in 1919, with a preface by Freud, and a revised second edition came in 1928. The English translation from 1931 is based on the second edition.

Psychoanalytic Studies of Ritual

The book is a collection of four lectures held between 1914 and 1919 at the Berlin and Vienna branches of the International Psycho-Analytical Association. The four rituals discussed in the lectures are couvade, puberty rites, and the Jewish rites involving Kol Nidre and the Shofar. Since myths are only indirectly discussed, the treatment of his book will be limited to the first two rituals.

Still, they do present some psychoanalytical perspectives on religion and mythology. Reik is not modest about what the discipline can reveal simply by exposing "those unconscious impulses, to which analysis points as determining the genesis and essence of religion."^[1] That would not leave much undone.

Regarding myth, Reik states firmly that it is older than religion, and "one of the oldest wish-compensations of mankind in its eternal struggle with external and internal forces."^[2] Therefore, myth is "of the highest importance for our understanding of the first psychological conflicts of primitive people." Although it precedes religion, it allies itself with religious cults, sharing their history:

The same affects, wishes and tendencies are operative in myth and in religion and can be recognised as the unconscious roots of both those products of the mass-psyche.

Myth also has the advantage of being easier to decipher as an expression of the unconsciously preserved memories and their repression:

It must indeed be recognised that myth, in its original state, preserves in a far less disguised form the memory of those events which led to the institution of religion than do the other forms of phantasy formation in which the share of unconscious powers and forces of repression can be demonstrated.

It should be noted that he refers to the original state of myth, which is something he and his fellow Freudians reach by psychoanalytical theory about the true meaning of the content. Before psychoanalysis, "science had no means of recognising all the later distortions and alterations of the myth and of laying bare its hidden and original meaning." He states with a boldness so often shared by his fellow psychoanalysts: "Since psycho-analysis has succeeded in interpreting myths, their significance in folk-psychology has been more and more recognised."^[3]

The events leading to the formation of religion he speaks of are those suggested by Freud as the prehistoric causes of the Oedipus complex. As stated both by him and in Freud's preface, Reik applies his teacher's Totem and Taboo to the analysis of rituals, and quite slavishly at that.^[4] Reik's praise of the book is monumental. He describes it as "hitherto the most important work of the kind, and one that will always remain the standard illustration of what psycho-analysis can perform in the sphere of mental science."

Although stressing the importance and antiquity of myth, Reik finds ritual particularly suitable for psychoanalytical approach, since it is an active expression of religion:

The character of action which is such a marked feature of ritual may be more profitably investigated psycho-analytically than the ideas, commands, prohibition, dogmas and complicated sentiments, which have later become the chief content of religion.^[5]

The added bonus is that whereas dogmas change through time, "religious customs show a remarkable resistance to external influences."^[6] The rituals tend to stay the same in spite of social changes. Not all of them, certainly, as is evident regarding the rites he describes in the book, but many traditional behaviors rooted in ancient beliefs remain even when those beliefs have all but vanished.

The more difficult question is to what extent they were firm beliefs to begin with. Some rituals may have been consciously composed fantasy projects from the start, with or without a belief backing them up. For example, the modern way of celebrating Christmas would be misunderstood if future researchers regarded it as proof of our belief in Santa Claus.

Couvade

Couvade is the term for the tradition in some cultures of the father restricting his behavior during and after the mother gives birth to their child. Although the term existed beforehand, E. B. Tylor introduced it to anthropology in 1865.^[7] He translates it as "hatching." While the mother is in labor or approaching it or right after it, the father stays passive in bed as if the labor was his. In some cases, he also has dietary restrictions and is forbidden certain forceful activities, such as hunting big animals.

A modern use of the term is couvade syndrome, which is the sympathetic pregnancy experienced by some fathers. But in his lecture on the subject from 1914, Couvade and the Psychogenesis of the Fear of Retaliation, Reik refers to the old ritual.

Tylor and others explained the custom as an example of sympathetic magic, aimed at protecting the baby and easing the ordeal of the mother. Reik, in his psychoanalytical explanation, actually reverses it.

He sees the father's behavior as based on the hidden unconscious wish to increase the mother's pain and even to kill the baby.^[8] The father struggles unconsciously with these wishes, resulting in him masochistically striking himself with them, punishing himself with the pains. Thereby, his tender impulses have won over the hostile ones:

Having assumed that malevolent wishes of a sadistic nature are awakened in the husband, it follows that the suppression of these wishes will bring about a relatively increased intensity of the masochistic instinctual components. In the play of forces between sadistic and masochistic tendencies, and in the struggle between hostile and tender impulses, the latter, which alone could become conscious, have obtained the victory.^[9]

The father's hostility is caused by his sexual frustration from not having access to the mother in the late stage of pregnancy, at the same time as her increased helplessness through her condition is a constant temptation to him.^[10] The consequence is his rising aversion towards her:

His inhibited libido joins itself to those inborn sadistic instinctual components which the woman's condition brings to the fore and is turned into latent hate against her.^[11]

Therefore, the couvade is not really about easing the woman's labor pains, though that is assumed even by those following the custom. Its real social purpose is to protect the woman against the latent hostility and sexual aggression of the man.^[12]

It is the dietary couvade that reveals repressed hostile impulses towards the child.^[13] Again Reik uses a reversal. The restrictions on food and activity were supposed to be sympathetic magic for the protection of the child, and ignoring them might harm it, but: "The feared consequence of doing the forbidden things — the child would become sick and die — was once the desired consequence of the breaking out of hostile impulses."^[14] Behind it all is the father's death wish towards the child. Reik makes a quick and frightful sketch of the mentality of the primitive human able to host such thoughts:

One cannot conceive him having much fatherly tenderness. A strange being has come into his home and he feels no pleasure in supporting the little creature. On the contrary, he feels impelled to kill and devour the child.

Leaving aside the questionable prejudice about primitive man fostering such feelings against his child whereas presumably civilized man would not, Reik goes on with an even more alarming statement, "to-day the killing and eating of children is not unknown among certain peoples."^[15] He gives no source to the claim.

If that has any truth at all, it is certainly not "peoples" but individuals all on their own. Even in mythology it is depicted as a disgusting deed by deities soon suffering the punishment. Cronus (Saturn) is a famous example. And Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal from 1729 is, of course, nothing but a satire.

Reik has an explanation to the father's vile hostility towards the child, which is at least equally far-fetched, though quite familiar to Freudian psychoanalysis. It is the Oedipus complex again. The primeval revolt against the father, relived in the minds of every following generation, ends up with the son becoming a father: "The son, who in childhood had wished the death of the father in order to take his place with the mother, has now himself become a man and father."^[16]

That means he would fear his son repeating the deed with him, but Reik insists on another complication: "In the belief of the savage people the child represents not the rebirth of its father, but the rebirth of its father's father."^[17] No doubt, that increases the fear of retaliation. His son is none other than his own father, whom he revolted against.

We see also more precisely why he kills the child; he carries out once more the impulse of hate towards the deceased father; he kills once more his own father in the child.^[18]

But as civilization proceeded the child was replaced by a sacrificial animal. By time, even that was not allowed:

The taboo was made stricter, and finally extended so far that the killing of the animals at the period when the man became a father was also included in it. Here we perceive the origin of the rules of the dietetic couvade.^[19]

The fasting prohibition "originally only referred to the devouring of the child."^[20]

Fathers killing their children are not unheard of in human history and in the present, but that does not mean it has ever been a strong urge in men. If so, it would have put a quick end to the procreation of our species. Even more absurd is the claim that rituals were needed to hinder fathers from eating their offspring.

Reik is led astray by what he wants to find, whatever detours it makes him take. That is a streak he shares with his psychoanalytical colleagues. Already in choosing his subject he has obviously been attracted by the components of the Oedipus complex — the father, the mother, and the son. His commitment to Freud's doctrine and Totem and Taboo did the rest.

Reik's prejudiced account of the ritual and how it was played out in different cultures makes it difficult to get enough of a clear picture of it to suggest other explanations. But Tylor and others have already suggested sympathetic magic, and that would lend itself to a less complicated explanation.

Then the father lying in bed would really be an act of trying to ease the pain of the mother by accepting it to transfer into him during her labor, and maybe an act of transferring his power to her when he remained in bed after she had left it. Dietary restrictions would be due to the belief that father and child were connected and some food was regarded as harmful to the newborn, so the father avoided it to spare the child. This was also implied in some of the sources Reik used, though he brushed it aside.

An interesting aspect is the need for passivity of the father, disallowing him to handle weapons or chasing big game, and so on. That would be taken care of by him remaining in bed, so it must belong to other versions of the couvade. Invoking personal powers as well as challenging fierce beasts would, if father and child were connected, intimidate and frighten the latter.

There is also a possibility of the simple consideration that the father should not hurry to take risks when he had a newborn to protect.

Infanticide versus the Oedipus Complex

There is no denying that fathers, like any male adults, have been more of a threat to infants than the mothers. History has proven it often enough, among both humans and many other animals. It would worry both a mother and an infant if the father started swinging a sword right after delivery.

Still, it is doubtful that a brutal father would settle for a ritual doing the opposite of his intention. He might instead feel better raging after big prey.

If other primates are comparable to humans in this context, infanticide is known among 35 of those species. They are not exclusively done by males or targeted at male infants, nor are they necessarily done in order to diminish competition for reproduction, but such cases do exist.^[21] What is particularly rare among primates, though, is paternal and maternal infanticide.

Humans may be the primates most inclined to infanticide of their own offspring, but it is definitely not a common occurrence. Not enough, really, for a complicated ritual to be formed and continued for multiple generations. What would make more sense, for humans as well as other primates, is a ritual to protect the newborn from other adults — male and female — than the parents. But that would be out of the scope of Freudian doctrine, which is based on the Oedipus complex.

There are some intriguing similarities between male infanticide among mammals and the Oedipus complex. They involve a mortal drama between male, female, and child, with sexuality at the root. Males do it mostly to get access to impregnate the female. This is strongly supported by the fact that the behavior is not found among mammals with seasonal reproduction.^[22]

Only in species where the female can give birth the year around would the strategy make any sense, since it would speed up the possibility of impregnating her. It should be noted, though, that the males avoid killing their own offspring.

Although it is not a behavior involving father and son, it is one where males compete ferociously about access to the females for sexual purposes. This makes Reik's insistence on the Oedipus complex even more far-fetched. It has nothing to do with patricide or the father's father, but with removing another male's child to gain access to the mother — in order for the aggressor to produce his own children with her. That is among many primates the real threat, maybe also in a distant past among humans.

Psychoanalysts have focused on the son's envy of his father and the wish to take his place, already from infancy. What seems more plausible is the fear of the father. Paternal infanticide may be very rare, but the father's dominance and superior strength are not. The child's fate is helplessly in the hands of the father, not only in distant history. Children have good reason to regard their fathers as threats.

Gender roles were quite clear in the society of Freud and his pupils. The father was the master, also the punisher, especially when the punishment was to be physical. A stern father would certainly by time cause vindictive longings in his son, but that would grow out of the torment of living in fear of him. The mother had little to do with it, except in cases of the son's frustration over her inability to protect him from the father.

Nevertheless, there is reason to contemplate the tense relation between adult and infant males in both past and present societies, and the sexual implications of them. There is just no overwhelming support for describing it all with the theory of the Oedipus complex. Other explanations are nearer at hand.

Oedipal Puberty Rites

In 1915, at the Vienna Psycho-Analytical Society, Theodor Reik gave a lecture on a similar theme to the above: The Puberty Rites of Savages: Some Parallels between the Mental Life of Savages and of Neurotics. Again, he used Freud's Totem and Taboo to find the Oedipus complex at work in rituals, this time the rites of passage at puberty.

With the term savages, he refers to hunter-gatherer societies, using an abundance of ethnological material from James G. Frazer and others. He does not deny that those societies have evolved through time, but he regards them as primitive in comparison to the ones of the industrialized parts of the world.

As for the comparison to neurotics, he does it scarcely and superfluously. The bulk of his arguments are based on ethnographic material about the so-called primitives.

There are two puberty rites his text focuses on — the circumcision and the ostensible death and resurrection of boys. He explains them, of course, as expressions of the Oedipus complex. They are to discourage the adolescents from killing their fathers and lusting after their mothers.

The circumcision is a symbol of castration, intended to lessen the sexual drive of the boys, so that they will be able to resist their desires for their mothers, since "circumcision represents a castration equivalent and supports in the most effective way the prohibition against incest."^[23]

The ordeal of the ritualized death, which involves an imaginary monster Reik claims to represent the grandfather,^[24] is the way of the fathers to scare the boys from trying to harm them:

The rite of being devoured by the monster is a threat of death and a psychic reaction to the youth's unconscious intention to murder his father.^[25]

According to Reik, the animosity between the generations of males goes as far as to the appetite for cannibalism, which thankfully diminishes by age:

The temptation to kill and devour the father which originates unconsciously from the Oedipus complex is natural to the young and passionate man; the older he becomes, the stronger is his tendency to identify himself with his own father, and the weaker becomes the temptation.^[26]

Reik shows no hesitation about his explanations. Instead, he even scorns ethnologists and anthropologists for not realizing the same.^[27]

He also takes a shot at Carl G. Jung for having presented an alternative to the Oedipus complex in his 1912 book Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (published in English in 1916 as Psychology of the Unconscious), where the childish urge is instead described as an unconscious wish to return to the safety of the mother's womb and then to be reborn from it. To Reik, this is pure nonsense:

Every psychological investigation that is not merely superficial is able to prove that such an idea represents neither the essential nor the effective thing.^[28]

Reik's critique of Jung can be described with the psychological term projection. The proof he presents for his own theory is questionable, too, to say the least. He is certainly no friend of Ockham's razor. Simpler explanations to these rites he either omits or discards.

He accepts neither the opinions of the anthropologists whose material he is using, nor the answers given by the people whose rituals are described.

He dismisses the reason for circumcision given by anthropologists and "primitives" alike, "that it is an operation for facilitating sexual intercourse and increasing its pleasures."^[29] The real functions of the rites are unconscious and therefore hidden from the conscious minds of their practitioners:

Unconsciously circumcision and the various cruelties practised on the youths signify the suppression of their sexual and aggressive impulses; consciously primitive peoples regard these procedures as institutions for the actual promotion of those impulses.^[30]

A Rite of Passage

In his Freudian conviction, Reik refused to even consider other likely explanations, although they were accessible in the material he had at his disposal. He would have done well to start by putting this rite in relation to the other rites of passage^[31] that are prominent and comparable in any society — past and present.

There are four major passages or transformations humans go through in a lifetime: birth, puberty, procreation, and death. Each has a significant rite connected to it. In the Christian society they are the baptism, the confirmation, the wedding, and the funeral. There is little chance of understanding the emergence and components of one of these rites without seeing its relation to the other three.

Obviously, the key is in the word "passage" used in anthropology for these rites. They are performed when life changes significantly from one situation to another, intended to prepare for as well as celebrate these changes.

Newborns are baptized to be introduced into the community and receive their protection, and at the other end the dead are celebrated for their contribution and prepared for whatever is believed to come next. The wedding is an invitation for the couple to procreate, and to discourage others from pursuing them for the same purpose. The confirmation is a call to leave childhood and enter the world of the adults.

Puberty is certainly a drastic change, physically as well as psychologically, in no need of the Oedipus complex to deserve a rite. Also, the components of the rite as described by Reik are easy to connect to the passage in question.

The coming-of-age passage rite has the function of letting both the boy and his community know that now he has become a man. His childhood is over. That is a death and a rebirth — the child dies and the man is born. It also means that he detaches from his mother to make close bonds with the other men, which Reik instead explains as a measure to the prevention of incest.^[32]

This sheds light on the occurrence in the ritual of the boy behaving as if completely forgetful of his past when returning from the ordeal, which Reik described as peculiar: "The youths behave as though they had forgotten their previous life."^[33] It is part of the transformation. The life of the child is to be forgotten, because there is a new life to live.

Reik's explanation to this momentary amnesia is as elaborate as it is predictable:

The youths are to forget, or better, 'repress' what constituted hitherto their chief desire, namely, to put the father out of the way and take his place with the mother.^[34]

What may seem even more peculiar is the circumcision. It is hardly to be seen as a castration. What would be the point of celebrating sexual maturity by ending it, symbolically or otherwise? The focus on this part of the male anatomy is understandable, since it is very much what the passage is all about. In addition, the explanation of the natives, mentioned above, should be given some credit. Health and hygiene intentions are also probable.

Its role as an ingredient in a rite of passage is indicated also by the Jewish practice of performing circumcision soon after birth, which is of course another most significant passage. Although a Jew himself, Reik does not discuss that timing of the procedure in his text. It would put his oedipal explanation into question, since newborns are no threats to their fathers, nor are they likely to remember the lesson until puberty.

There is something more with the circumcision, worthy of considering. It is the bleeding and its correspondence to the bleeding that signals the sexual maturity of girls. So, both sexes are introduced to their adult lives by the same bodily fluid, which is a vital and highly symbolic one, also in this case coming from their respective reproductive organs.

Reik makes no mention of female puberty rites and he might not even have asked himself if they exist at all among natives. That would complicate matters for his understanding of the male rite and even of the Oedipus complex as a whole. Freud denied that it had a female counterpart, suggested by Jung as the Electra complex. The loyal Reik would not question Freud's view. On the other hand, he was hardly ignorant of the fact that in Western society, all four rites of passage mentioned are done for both genders.

He had an excuse in the case of rites within hunter-gatherer societies, since the ethnographic material at the time was very scarce indeed with reports on female rites — simply because the field research was done by men. They would not have access to female rites, nor were they probably aware of their existence.

Reik could have surmised the hidden existence of a female counterpart to the male rites, since he was aware of women being strictly excluded from the latter.^[35] He also gives other examples of the male world that women were forbidden to enter. The guess that the same would be true for the opposite is not far off.

Instead, Reik mentions the male secret societies spread among the "primitive" peoples of the world, as reported by the 19^th century German ethnologist Heinrich Schurtz:

He shows very clearly that the men's societies are 'the real bearers of almost all higher development'.^[36]

That is another claim which must be questioned. For both Reik and Schurtz, their own gender dimmed their eyes. It was not uncommon at that time.

Of course, there are and have been many examples of female puberty rites around the world, often excluding men completely from participating. The first menstruation, menarche, is a passage of great significance in any culture, as it is to any girl.

Notes

Theodor Reik, Ritual: Psycho-Analytic Studies (Das Ritual: Psychoanalytische Studien, 1928, revised edition of Probleme der Religionspsychologie, 1919), transl. Douglas Bryan, London 1931, p. 14. ↑
Ibid., p. 18. ↑
Ibid., pp. 18f. ↑
Ibid., pp. 15 and 10. ↑
Ibid., p. 16. ↑
Ibid., p. 17. ↑
Edward Burnet Tylor, Researches Into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization, London 1865, p. 288. ↑
Reik, Ritual, p. 50. ↑
Ibid., p. 53. ↑
Ibid., p. 54. ↑
Ibid., p. 55. ↑
Ibid., p. 56. ↑
Ibid., p. 59. ↑
Ibid., p. 60. ↑
Ibid., p. 61. ↑
Ibid., p. 75. ↑
Ibid., p. 79. ↑
Ibid., p. 78. ↑
Ibid., p. 81. ↑
Ibid., p. 83. ↑
Sara Alvarez et al., "Male-directed infanticide in spider monkeys," Primates, volume 56:2, 2015, p. 173 (springer.com). ↑
Will Dunham, "Infanticide common among adult males in many mammal species," Reuters, November 13, 2014 (reuters.com). ↑
Reik, Ritual, p. 105. ↑
Ibid., p. 99. ↑
Ibid., p. 106. ↑
Ibid., p. 116. ↑
Ibid., pp. 117, footnote, and 123. ↑
Ibid., p. 148. ↑
Ibid., pp. 124f. ↑
Ibid., p. 117. ↑
The concept was introduced by the ethnographer Arnold van Gennep in Les rites de passage, 1909. ↑
Reik, Ritual, p. 145. ↑
Ibid., p. 126. ↑
Ibid., p. 137. ↑
Ibid., p. 96. ↑
Ibid., p. 150. ↑

Freudians on Myth and Religion

This text is an excerpt from my book Psychoanalysis of Mythology: Freudian Theories on Myth and Religion Examined from 2022. The excerpt was published on this website in February, 2026.

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