women on whose account they had killed their father. They were then driven to finding strange women, and this was the origin of the exogamy which is so closely bound up with totemism. The totem-feast was the commemoration of the fearful deed, from which sprang man’s sense of guilt (or “original sin”) and which was the beginning at once of social organization, of religion, and of ethical restrictions. Now, whether we suppose that such a possibility was a historical event or not, it brings the formation of religion within the circle of the father-complex and bases it upon the ambivalence which dominates that complex. After the totem animal had ceased to serve as a substitute for him, the primal father, at once feared and hated, honoured and envied, became the prototype of God himself. The son’s rebelliousness and his affection for his father struggled against each other through a constant succession of compromises, which sought, on the one hand, to atone for the act of parricide, and, on the other, to consolidate the advantages it had brought. This view of religion throws a particularly clear light upon the psychological basis of Christianity, in which, it may be added, the ceremony of the totem-feast still survives, with but little distortion, in the form of Communion. I should like explicitly to mention that this last observation was not made by me, but is to be found in the works of Robertson Smith and Frazer. Theodor Reik and G. Róheim, the ethnologist, have taken up the line of thought which I developed in _Totem and Taboo_, and, in a series of important works, have extended it, amplified it or corrected it. I myself have since returned to it more than once in the course of my investigations into the “unconscious sense of guilt” (which also plays such an important part among the motives of neurotic suffering) and in my attempts at forming a closer connection between social psychology and the psychology of the individual.[27] I have, moreover, made use of the idea of an archaic inheritance from the “primal horde” epoch of mankind’s development in explaining susceptibility to hypnosis.