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Rituals, Routines, and Resilience 187

In what follows, I will elaborate on the ambivalent relationship between
psychiatry and rituals and try to begin to sketch a picture of a less-con-
flicted future.

Background
Ritual has been defined as a ceremonial act or as an act or series of acts
regularly repeated in a set and precise manner (Merriam-Webster OnLine).
A more detailed definition from within the field of psychiatry is as follows:
“Rituals are group methods that serve to maintain a culture’s social struc-
ture and its norms, strengthen the bonds of individuals to their communi-
ties, assist adaptation (to change or crises), manage fear and anxiety, and
ward off threats” (Danieli & Nader, 2006).
Psychiatry has historically viewed rituals as problematic, if not as out-
right pathology. Sigmund Freud, who has influenced the field of psychiatry
as much as anyone in the last century, famously wrote about the pathologic
proneness to repetition seen in many of his patients (Strachey, 1914). The
repetition compulsion represents a tendency for people to unknowingly
repeat problematic experiences from their past, especially the formative
years of their childhood, in present-day experiences. They are unaware of
how they repeatedly experience current relationships in terms of key past
relationships and, thereby, distort them in such a way as to be unable to
participate in them in a maximally healthy and fulfilling manner. Patients
repeat instead of remembering, and it is the psychotherapist’s role to get
them to understand how their forgotten past compels them to fruitless
repetition. It is not hard to see how Freud’s discussion of the ignorance
and dysfunction that are the bookends to repetition could have contrib-
uted to a long tradition of psychiatrist’s seeing repetitions, like rituals, as
indicators of something being wrong with someone. At the least, we can
see the roots of why the field may not embrace routine and ritual.
Freud even wrote about the parallels between obsessive patients’ prone-
ness to routines and rituals and the psychological processes underlying
religious ritual (Strachey, 1907). He suggested that the rigid routines and
ceremonies of neurotic patients (e.g., how fastidiously they wash or where
they invariably sit in their home) differed from religious ceremony because
the latter at least was full of symbolism and meaning, whereas neurotic
obsessions are more of a “half comic and half tragic” form of “private reli-
gion.” Even with this distinction drawn, however, it is hard not to come
away from Freud’s comparison of obsessive and religious rituals with a