How psychology fills the gap from the disenchantment of the world.

Mythological schemes – including psychology – provide stories about the origins of mortality, sexuality, society, rules and work. They offer a motivation for why things are the way they are. Our shared world is maintained by the practice of rites, of rituals. As the French philosopher Georges Bataille wrote, rites represent rules of conduct in the presence of the sacred, thus protecting and insulating it from the profane. In myths and the rituals that sustain them, we search for a lost sense of intimacy with transcendent sources. By providing explanatory tenets, psychology is thus a means of enabling humans to sustain their practices of personhood and materialism such that we can face the world with greater confidence and increased energy.

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