ABSTRACT
Jacob A. Arlow provides clinical evidence of the fusion of the induction of the young man into the Jewish community with his transition to sexual maturity. In one of his footnotes, the author comments that his clinical material provided evidence also that the Bar Mitzvah ceremony encouraged the boy's separation from his mother, and from women and sexuality in general. Arlow emphasizes the role of the Bar Mitzvah tutor as a new ideal and model. In certain religious ceremonies one can observe how society tends to institutionalize the major universal affect-arousing situations and, by linking them to suitable occasions, utilizes them for purposes of real social values. Among the affect-arousing situations, few are more dramatic than the transition to biological and sexual maturity. The initiation rites of primitive peoples which usually involve circumcision, serve to discharge the fear and hostility which the older generation harbors toward the developing younger generation.
