The so-called rites of passage, which occupy such a prominent place in the life of a primitive society (ceremonials of birth, naming, puberty, marriage, burial, etc.), are distinguished by formal, and usually very severe, exercises of severance, whereby the mind is radically cut away from the attitudes, attachments, and life patterns of the stage being left behind. When we turn now, with this image in mind, to consider the numerous strange rituals that have been reported from the primitive tribes and great civilizations of the past, it becomes apparent that the purpose and actual effect of these was to conduct people across those difficult thresholds of transformation that demand change in the patterns not only of conscious but also of unconscious life. Thus the first object of the child's hostility is identical with the first object of its love, and its first ideal (which thereafter is retained as the unconscious basis of all images of bliss, truth, beauty, and perfection) is that of the dual unity of the Madonna and Bambino." Throughout the inhabited world, in all times and under every circumstance, myths of man have flourished and they have been the living inspiration of whatever else may have appeared out of the activities of the human body and mind.Īny prolonged absence of the parent causes tension in the infant and consequent impulses of aggression also, when the mother is obliged to hamper the child, aggressive responses are aroused.
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