Animism Magic and the Omnipotence of Thought

Freud drew the concept of animism from anthropologists such as Herbert Spencer James George Frazer Andrew Lang Edward Burnett Tyler and Wilhelm Wundt who used it to refer to the tendency thought to belong to people in primitive cultures and children of attributing a soul to things and thus ascribing an intentionality to phenomena that would otherwise be understood in mechanistic causal terms. In psychoanalysis the concept of animism is inextricably connected with projective mechanisms.