ABSTRACT
Human beings are creatures of magic and ritual. Sigmund Freud of the modern era saw an interesting correspondence between the behavior of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and the less pathological rituals and traditions of indigenous culture. Later psychologists have explored the idea of ritual as psychological action in greater detail and even use it in therapy, but in truth, the idea that ritual scholarship can inform the practice of psychotherapy is one that has not received the full attention it deserves. Psychology and anthropology are both about human behavior, but their approaches have traditionally been very different. The methods of the two fields of depth psychology and symbolic anthropology therefore share similar approaches, regardless of what school of thought one uses. However, depth psychology and interpretive/symbolic anthropology naturally both utilize different data sets and different settings. Not only have psychoanalysts made overly simplifying assumptions about cultures, anthropologists, too, have often made simplifying assumptions about human mental activity.
