We face a decision here which is really not easy. But let us begin by acknowledging that the difference which may seem fundamental to others does not, in our judgment, touch the most important part of the subject. If wishes and impulses have the full value of fact for primitive man, it is for us to follow such a conception intelligently instead of correcting it according to our standard. But in that case we must scrutinize more closely the prototype of the neurosis itself which is responsible for having raised this doubt. It is not true that compulsion neurotics, who to-day are under the pressure of over-morality, defend themselves only against the psychic reality of temptations and punish themselves for impulses which they have only felt. A piece of historic reality is also involved; in their childhood these persons had nothing but evil impulses and as far as their childish impotence permitted they put them into action. Each of these over-good persons had a period of badness in his childhood, and a perverse phase as a fore-runner and a premise of the latter over morality. The analogy between primitive men and neurotics is therefore much more fundamentally established if we assume that with the former, too, the psychic reality, concerning whose structure there is no doubt, originally coincided with the actual reality, and that primitive men really did what according to all testimony they intended to do. But we must not let our judgment about primitive men be influenced too far by the analogy with neurotics. Differences must also be taken into account. Of course the sharp division between thinking and doing as we draw it does not exist either with savages or with neurotics. But the neurotic is above all inhibited in his actions; with him the thought is a complete substitute for the deed. Primitive man is not inhibited, the thought is directly converted into the deed, the deed is for him so to speak rather a substitute for the thought, and for that reason I think we may well assume in the case we are discussing, though without vouching for the absolute certainty of the decision, that “In the beginning was the deed”. THE END _Printed in Great Britain by_ Butler & Tanner, _Frome and London_ FOOTNOTES: [1] Jung: _Wandlungen and Symbole der Libido_ (Transformations and Symbols of the Libido) translated by Dr. Beatrice Hinkle under the title _The Psychology of the Unconscious_, and _Principles of Psychoanalysis, Nervous and Mental Diseases_. [2] _The History of the Psychoanalytic Movement_, translated by A. A. Brill. [3] _Selected Papers on Hysteria and other Psychoneuroses_, translated by A. A. Brill. [4] _The Psychopathology of Everyday Life_, translated by A. A. Brill. [5] Translated by A. A. Brill. [6] _Wit and Its Relations to the Unconscious_, translated by A. A. Brill. [7] Freud: _Leonardo Da Vinci_, translated by A. A. Brill. [8] Cf. the works of Abraham, Spielrein, Jung, and Rank.