ABSTRACT
Any society is a reservoir of old longings and ancient hatreds. The primitive returns whenever a society has to dig deeply into its own storehouse of memory and aspiration or when it needs to respond to a new set of opportunities and threats in its environment. If warlike dispositions prevail, a society may self-destruct from patricidal or fratricidal conflict. If Nazism was fundamentally anti-Christian as well as anti-Jewish, it was because the primitive aspects of Christianity had been finally replaced by Reformed Christianity and needed a new way to return. For Sigmund Freud the primitive consists of the earliest experiences of the child, at a time when sexual desire and aggressiveness are poorly separated, and when early impressions often wound the child's own sense of being lovable and important. For the primitive to return in the form of a grandiose sense of entitlement to satisfactions that the individual is as yet ill-prepared to command or enjoy.
