Note 163 — Chapter XIII · FAMILY INFLUENCES IN RELIGION

A fear which, as modern psychological knowledge seems to show, is largely the result of the guilty conscience of the living; the feelings of hostility (including of course death wishes) which the living had experienced towards the dead during their lifetime being projected on to the dead (in accordance with the now familiar mechanism, which can be studied most clearly in psychopathological disorders such as Paranoia; cp. above pp. 116, 130); as a result of which the dead are conceived as being on the whole evilly disposed towards the living and consequently to be feared. Hence the very general fear of ghosts. Cp. Freud, "Totem and Taboo," 88 ff.