From _Psychoanalysis and Religion_ by Erich Fromm... "No wonder that those psychoanalysts who turned their attention to religious rituals were struck by the similarity of the private compulsive rituals they observed in their patients to the socially patterned ceremonies they found in religion. They expected to find that the religious rituals follow the same mechanism as the neurotic compulsions. They looked for the unconscious drives, as, for instance, destructive hate of the father figure represented by God, which they felt must be either directly expressed or warded off in the ritual. Undoubtedly, psychoanalysts, in pursuing this course, have made an important discovery about the nature of many religious rituals even though they may not have always been right in their specific explanations. But being preoccupied with pathological phenomena they often failed to see that rituals are not necessarily of the irrational nature found in neurotic compulsion. They did not differentiate between these irrational rituals based upon repression of irrational impulses and the _rational rituals_ which are of an entirely different nature. "We not only have the need for a frame of orientation which makes some sense of our existence and which we can share with our fellow men; we also have the need to express our devotion to dominant values by _action_ shared with others. A ritual, broadly speaking, is _shared action expressive of common strivings rooted in common values._ "The rational differs from the irrational ritual primarily in its function; it does not _ward off_ repressed impulses but _expresses_ strivings which are recognized as valuable by the individual. Consequently it does not have the obsessional-compulsive quality so characteristic of the irrational ritual; if the latter even once is not performed, the repressed threatens to break in, and therefore any lapse is accompanied by considerable anxiety. No such consequences are attached to any lapse in the performance of the ration ritual; non-performance may be regretted, but it is not feared. In fact, one can always recognize the irrational ritual by the degree of fear produced in its violation in any manner."