Title: Totem and Taboo - Resemblances Between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics
Author: Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1939
Language: English
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TOTEM AND TABOO

BY DR. S. FREUD


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TOTEM AND TABOO

RESEMBLANCES BETWEEN THE PSYCHIC
LIVES OF SAVAGES AND NEUROTICS

BY

PROFESSOR SIGMUND FREUD, Ll.D.

Authorized English Translation,
with Introduction by

A. A. BRILL, Ph.B., M.D.

Asst. Prof. of Psychiatry, N.Y. Post-Graduate Medical
School; Lecturer in Psychoanalysis and Abnormal
Psychology, New York University;
former Chief of Clinic of Psychiatry,
Columbia University

[Illustration: colophon]

LONDON

GEORGE ROUTLEDGE & SONS, LIMITED

1919

_Printed in Great Britain
by_ Butler & Tanner.

_Frome and London_



AUTHOR’S PREFACE


The essays treated here appeared under the subtitle of this book in the
first numbers of the periodical _Imago_ edited by me. They represent my
first efforts to apply view-points and results of psychoanalysis to
unexplained problems of racial psychology. In method this book contrasts
with that of W. Wundt and the works of the Zurich Psychoanalytic School.
The former tries to accomplish the same object through assumptions and
procedures from non-analytic psychology, while the latter follow the
opposite course and strive to settle problems of individual psychology
by referring to material of racial psychology[1]. I am pleased to say
that the first stimulus for my own works came from these two sources.

I am fully aware of the shortcomings in these essays. I shall not touch
upon those which are characteristic of first efforts at investigation.
The others, however, demand a word of explanation. The four essays
which are here collected will be of interest to a wide circle of
educated people, but they can only be thoroughly understood and judged
by those who are really acquainted with psychoanalysis as such. It is
hoped that they may serve as a bond between students of ethnology,
philology, folklore and of the allied sciences, and psychoanalysts; they
cannot, however, supply both groups the entire requisites for such
co-operation. They will not furnish the former with sufficient insight
into the new psychological technique, nor will the psychoanalysts
acquire through them an adequate command over the material to be
elaborated. Both groups will have to content themselves with whatever
attention they can stimulate here and there and with the hope that
frequent meetings between them will not remain unproductive for science.

The two principal themes, totem and taboo, which give the name to this
small book are not treated alike here. The problem of taboo is presented
more exhaustively, and the effort to solve it is approached with perfect
confidence. The investigation of totemism may be modestly expressed as:
“This is all that psychoanalytic study can contribute at present to the
elucidation of the problem of totemism.” This difference in the
treatment of the two subjects is due to the fact that taboo still exists
in our midst. To be sure, it is negatively conceived and directed to
different contents, but according to its psychological nature, it is
still nothing else than Kant’s ‘Categorical Imperative’, which tends to
act compulsively and rejects all conscious motivations. On the other
hand, totemism is a religio-social institution which is alien to our
present feelings; it has long been abandoned and replaced by new forms.
In the religions, morals, and customs of the civilized races of to-day
it has left only slight traces, and even among those races where it is
still retained, it has had to undergo great changes. The social and
material progress of the history of mankind could obviously change taboo
much less than totemism.

In this book the attempt is ventured to find the original meaning of
totemism through its infantile traces, that is, through the indications
in which it reappears in the development of our own children. The close
connection between totem and taboo indicates the further paths to the
hypothesis maintained here. And although this hypothesis leads to
somewhat improbable conclusions, there is no reason for rejecting the
possibility that it comes more or less near to the reality which is so
hard to reconstruct.



CONTENTS


CHAP.      PAGE

I THE SAVAGE’S DREAD OF INCEST      1

II TABOO AND THE AMBIVALENCE OF EMOTIONS      30

III ANIMISM, MAGIC AND THE OMNIPOTENCE OF
THOUGHT      125

IV THE INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM      166



TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION


When one reviews the history of psychoanalysis[2] one finds that it had
its inception in the study of morbid mental states. Beginning with the
observation of hysteria and the other neuroses[3] Professor Freud
gradually extended his investigations to normal psychology and evolved
new concepts and new methods of study. The neurotic symptoms were no
longer imaginary troubles the nature of which one could not grasp, but
were conceived as mental and emotional maladjustments to one’s
environment. The stamp of degeneracy impressed upon neurotics by other
schools of medicine was altogether eradicated. Deeper investigation
showed conclusively that a person might become neurotic if subjected to
certain environments, and that there was no definite dividing line
between normal and abnormal. The hysterical symptoms, obsessions,
doubts, phobias, as well as hallucinations of the insane, show the same
mechanisms as those similar psychic structures which one constantly
encounters in normal persons in the form of mistakes in talking,
reading, writing, forgetting[4], dreams and wit. The dream, always
highly valued by the populace, and as much despised by the educated
classes, has a definite structure and meaning when subjected to
analysis. Professor Freud’s monumental work, _The Interpretation of
Dreams_[5], marked a new epoch in the history of mental science. One
might use the same words in reference to his profound analysis of
wit[6].

Faulty psychic actions, dreams and wit are products of the unconscious
mental activity, and like neurotic or psychotic manifestations represent
efforts at adjustment to one’s environment. The slip of the tongue shows
that on account of unconscious inhibitions the individual concerned is
unable to express his true thoughts; the dream is a distorted or plain
expression of those wishes which are prohibited in the waking states,
and the witticism, owing to its veiled or indirect way of expression,
enables the individual to obtain pleasure from forbidden sources. But
whereas dreams, witticisms, and faulty actions give evidences of inner
conflicts which the individual overcomes, the neurotic or psychotic
symptom is the result of a failure and represents a morbid adjustment.

The aforementioned psychic formations are therefore nothing but
manifestations of the struggle with reality, the constant effort to
adjust one’s primitive feelings to the demands of civilization. In spite
of all later development the individual retains all his infantile
psychic structures. Nothing is lost; the infantile wishes and primitive
impulses can always be demonstrated in the grown-up and on occasion can
be brought back to the surface. In his dreams the normal person is
constantly reviving his childhood, and the neurotic or psychotic
individual merges back into a sort of psychic infantilism through his
morbid productions. The unconscious mental activity which is made up of
repressed infantile material for ever tries to express itself. Whenever
the individual finds it impossible to dominate the difficulties of the
world of reality there is a regression to the infantile, and psychic
disturbances ensue which are conceived as peculiar thoughts and acts.
Thus the civilized adult is the result of his childhood or the sum total
of his early impressions; psychoanalysis thus confirms the old saying:
The child is father to the man.

It is at this point in the development of psychoanalysis that the paths
gradually broadened until they finally culminated in this work. There
were many indications that the childhood of the individual showed a
marked resemblance to the primitive history or the childhood of races.
The knowledge gained from dream analysis and phantasies[7], when applied
to the productions of racial phantasies, like myths and fairy tales,
seemed to indicate that the first impulse to form myths was due to the
same emotional strivings which produced dreams, fancies and symptoms[8].
Further study in this direction has thrown much light on our great
cultural institutions, such as religion, morality, law and philosophy,
all of which Professor Freud has modestly formulated in this volume and
thus initiated a new epoch in the study of racial psychology.

I take great pleasure in acknowledging my indebtedness to Mr Alfred B.
Kuttner for the invaluable assistance he rendered in the translation of
this work.

A. A. BRILL.



TOTEM AND TABOO



CHAPTER I

THE SAVAGE’S DREAD OF INCEST


Primitive man is known to us by the stages of development through which
he has passed: that is, through the inanimate monuments and implements
which he has left behind for us, through our knowledge of his art, his
religion and his attitude towards life, which we have received either
directly or through the medium of legends, myths and fairy tales; and
through the remnants of his ways of thinking that survive in our own
manners and customs. Moreover, in a certain sense he is still our
contemporary: there are people whom we still consider more closely
related to primitive man than to ourselves, in whom we therefore
recognize the direct descendants and representatives of earlier man. We
can thus judge the so-called savage and semi-savage races; their psychic
life assumes a peculiar interest for us, for we can recognize in their
psychic life a well-preserved, early stage of our own development.

If this assumption is correct, a comparison of the ‘Psychology of
Primitive Races’ as taught by folklore, with the psychology of the
neurotic as it has become known through psychoanalysis will reveal
numerous points of correspondence and throw new light on subjects that
are more or less familiar to us.

For outer as well as for inner reasons, I am choosing for this
comparison those tribes which have been described by ethnographists as
being most backward and wretched: the aborigines of the youngest
continent, namely Australia, whose fauna has also preserved for us so
much that is archaic and no longer to be found elsewhere.

The aborigines of Australia are looked upon as a peculiar race which
shows neither physical nor linguistic relationship with its nearest
neighbours, the Melanesian, Polynesian and Malayan races. They do not
build houses or permanent huts; they do not cultivate the soil or keep
any domestic animals except dogs; and they do not even know the art of
pottery. They live exclusively on the flesh of all sorts of animals
which they kill in the chase, and on the roots which they dig. Kings or
chieftains are unknown among them, and all communal affairs are decided
by the elders in assembly. It is quite doubtful whether they evince any
traces of religion in the form of worship of higher beings. The tribes
living in the interior who have to contend with the greatest
vicissitudes of life owing to a scarcity of water, seem in every way
more primitive than those who live near the coast.

We surely would not expect that these poor naked cannibals should be
moral in their sex life according to our ideas, or that they should have
imposed a high degree of restriction upon their sexual impulses. And yet
we learn that they have considered it their duty to exercise the most
searching care and the most painful rigour in guarding against
incestuous sexual relations. In fact their whole social organization
seems to serve this object or to have been brought into relation with
its attainment.

Among the Australians the system of _Totemism_ takes the place of all
religious and social institutions. Australian tribes are divided into
smaller _septs_ or clans, each taking the name of its _totem_. Now what
is a totem? As a rule it is an animal, either edible and harmless, or
dangerous and feared; more rarely the totem is a plant or a force of
nature (rain, water), which stands in a peculiar relation to the whole
clan. The totem is first of all the tribal ancestor of the clan, as well
as its tutelary spirit and protector; it sends oracles and, though
otherwise dangerous, the totem knows and spares its children. The
members of a totem are therefore under a sacred obligation not to kill
(destroy) their totem, to abstain from eating its meat or from any other
enjoyment of it. Any violation of these prohibitions is automatically
punished. The character of a totem is inherent not only in a single
animal or a single being but in all the members of the species. From
time to time festivals are held at which the members of a totem
represent or imitate, in ceremonial dances, the movements and
characteristics of their totems.

The totem is hereditary either through the maternal or the paternal
line; (maternal transmission probably always preceded and was only later
supplanted by the paternal). The attachment to a totem is the foundation
of all the social obligations of an Australian: it extends on the one
hand beyond the tribal relationship, and on the other hand it supersedes
consanguineous relationship[9].

The totem is not limited to district or to locality; the members of a
totem may live separated from one another and on friendly terms with
adherents of other totems[10].

And now, finally, we must consider that peculiarity of the totemic
system which attracts the interest of the psychoanalyst. Almost
everywhere the totem prevails there also exists the law that _the
members of the same totem are not allowed to enter into sexual relations
with each other; that is, that they cannot marry each other_. This
represents the _exogamy_ which is associated with the totem.

This sternly maintained prohibition is very remarkable. There is nothing
to account for it in anything that we have hitherto learned from the
conception of the totem or from any of its attributes; that is, we do
not understand how it happened to enter the system of totemism. We are
therefore not astonished if some investigators simply assume that at
first exogamy--both as to its origin and to its meaning--had nothing to
do with totemism, but that it was added to it at some time without any
deeper association, when marriage restrictions proved necessary. However
that may be, the association of totemism and exogamy exists, and proves
to be very strong.

Let us elucidate the meaning of this prohibition through further
discussion.

(_a_) The violation of the prohibition is not left to what is, so to
speak, an automatic punishment, as is the case with other violations of
the prohibitions of the totem (e.g., not to kill the totem animal), but
is most energetically avenged by the whole tribe as if it were a
question of warding off a danger that threatens the community as a whole
or a guilt that weighs upon all. A few sentences from Frazer’s book[11]
will show how seriously such trespasses are treated by these savages
who, according to our standard are otherwise very immoral.

“In Australia the regular penalty for sexual intercourse with a person
of a forbidden clan is death. It matters not whether the woman is of the
same local group or has been captured in war from another tribe; a man
of the wrong clan who uses her as his wife is hunted down and killed by
his clansmen, and so is the woman; though in some cases, if they succeed
in eluding capture for a certain time, the offence may be condoned. In
the Ta-Ta-thi tribe, New South Wales, in the rare cases which occur, the
man is killed, but the woman is only beaten or speared, or both, till
she is nearly dead; the reason given for not actually killing her being
that she was probably coerced. Even in casual amours the clan
prohibitions are strictly observed; any violations of these prohibitions
‘are regarded with the utmost abhorrence and are punished by death’
(Howitt).”

(_b_) As the same severe punishment is also meted out for temporary love
affairs which have not resulted in childbirth, the assumption of other
motives, perhaps of a practical nature, becomes improbable.

(_c_) As the totem is hereditary and is not changed by marriage, the
results of the prohibition, for instance in the case of maternal
heredity, are easily perceived. If, for example, the man belongs to a
clan with the totem of the Kangaroo and marries a woman of the Emu
totem, the children, both boys and girls, are all Emu. According to the
totem law incestuous relations with his mother and his sister, who are
Emu like himself, are therefore made impossible for a son of this
marriage[12].

(_d_) But we need only a reminder to realize that the exogamy connected
with the totem accomplishes more; that is, aims at more than the
prevention of incest with the mother or the sisters. It also makes it
impossible for the man to have sexual union with all the women of his
own group, with a number of females, therefore, who are not
consanguineously related to him, by treating all these women like blood
relations. The psychological justification for this extraordinary
restriction, which far exceeds anything comparable to it among civilized
races, is not, at first, evident. All we seem to understand is that the
rôle of the totem (the animal) as ancestor is taken very seriously.
Everybody descended from the same totem is consanguineous; that is, of
one family; and in this family the most distant grades of relationship
are recognized as an absolute obstacle to sexual union.

Thus these savages reveal to us an unusually high grade of incest dread
or incest sensitiveness, combined with the peculiarity, which we do not
very well understand, of substituting the totem relationship for the
real blood relationship. But we must not exaggerate this contradiction
too much, and let us bear in mind that the totem prohibitions include
real incest as a special case.

In what manner the substitution of the totem group for the actual family
has come about remains a riddle, the solution of which is perhaps bound
up with the explanation of the totem itself. Of course it must be
remembered that with a certain freedom of sexual intercourse, extending
beyond the limitations of matrimony, the blood relationship, and with it
also the prevention of incest, becomes so uncertain that we cannot
dispense with some other basis for the prohibition. It is therefore not
superfluous to note that the customs of Australians recognize social
conditions and festive occasions at which the exclusive conjugal right
of a man to a woman is violated.

The linguistic customs of these tribes, as well as of most totem races,
reveals a peculiarity which undoubtedly is pertinent in this connection.
For the designations of relationship of which they make use do not take
into consideration the relationship between two individuals, but between
an individual and his group; they belong, according to the expression of
L. H. Morgan, to the ‘classifying’ system. That means that a man calls
not only his begetter ‘father’ but also every other man who, according
to the tribal regulations, might have married his mother and thus become
his father; he calls ‘mother’ not only the woman who bore him but also
every other woman who might have become his mother without violation of
the tribal laws; he calls ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’ not only the children
of his real parents, but also the children of all the persons named who
stand in the parental group relation with him, and so on. The kinship
names which two Australians give each other do not, therefore,
necessarily point to a blood relationship between them, as they would
have to according to the custom of our language; they signify much more
the social than the physical relations. An approach to this classifying
system is perhaps to be found in our nursery, when the child is induced
to greet every male and female friend of the parents as ‘uncle’ and
‘aunt’, or it may be found in a transferred sense when we speak of
‘Brothers in Apollo’, or ‘Sisters in Christ’.

The explanation of this linguistic custom, which seems so strange to us,
is simple if looked upon as a remnant and indication of those marriage
institutions which the Rev. L. Fison has called ‘group marriage’,
characterized by a number of men exercising conjugal rights over a
number of women. The children of this group marriage would then rightly
look upon each other as brothers and sisters although not born of the
same mother, and would take all the men of the group for their fathers.

Although a number of authors, as, for instance, B. Westermarck in his
_History of Human Marriage_[13], oppose the conclusions which others
have drawn from the existence of group-relationship names, the best
authorities on the Australian savages are agreed that the classificatory
relationship names must be considered as survivals from the period of
group marriages. And, according to Spencer and Gillen[14], a certain
form of group marriage can be established as still existing to-day among
the tribes of the Urabunna and the Dieri. Group marriage therefore
preceded individual marriage among these races, and did not disappear
without leaving distinct traces in language and custom.

But if we replace individual marriage, we can then grasp the apparent
excess of cases of incest shunning which we have met among these same
races. The totem exogamy, or prohibition of sexual intercourse between
members of the same clan, seemed the most appropriate means for the
prevention of group incest; and this totem exogamy then became fixed and
long survived its original motivation.

Although we believe we understand the motives of the marriage
restrictions among the Australian savages, we have still to learn that
the actual conditions reveal a still more bewildering complication. For
there are only few tribes in Australia which show no other prohibition
besides the totem barrier. Most of them are so organized that they fall
into two divisions which have been called marriage classes, or
phratries. Each of these marriage groups is exogamous and includes a
majority of totem groups. Usually each marriage group is again divided
into two subclasses (subphratries), and the whole tribe is therefore
divided into four classes; the subclasses thus standing between the
phratries and the totem groups.

The typical and very often intricate scheme of organization of an
Australian tribe therefore looks as follows:

[Illustration]

The twelve totem groups are brought under four subclasses and two main
classes. All the divisions are exogamous[15]. The subclass c forms an
exogamous unit with e, and the subclass d with f. The success or the
tendency of these arrangements is quite obvious; they serve as a further
restriction on the marriage choice and on sexual freedom. If there were
only these twelve totem groups--assuming the same number of people in
each group--every member of a group would have 11/12 of all the women of
the tribe to choose from. The existence of the two phratries reduces
this number to 6/12 or 1/2; a man of the totem [Greek: α alpha] can only
marry a woman from the groups 1 to 6. With the introduction of the two
subclassess the selection sinks to 3/12 or 1/4; a man of the totem
[Greek: α alpha] must limit his marriage choice to a woman of the totems
4, 5, 6.

The historical relations of the marriage classes--of which there are
found as many as eight in some tribes--are quite unexplained. We only
see that these arrangements seek to attain the same object as the totem
exogamy, and even strive for more. But whereas the totem exogamy makes
the impression of a sacred statute which sprang into existence, no one
knows how, and is therefore a custom, the complicated institutions of
the marriage classes, with their sub-divisions and the conditions
attached to them, seem to spring from legislation with a definite aim in
view. They have perhaps taken up afresh the task of incest prohibition
because the influence of the totem was on the wane. And while the totem
system is, as we know, the basis of all other social obligations and
moral restrictions of the tribe, the importance of the phratries
generally ceases when the regulation of the marriage choice at which
they aimed has been accomplished.

In the further development of the classification of the marriage system
there seems to be a tendency to go beyond the prevention of natural and
group incest, and to prohibit marriage between more distant group
relations, in a manner similar to the Catholic church, which extended
the marriage prohibitions always in force for brother and sisters, to
cousins, and invented for them the grades of spiritual kinship[16].

It would hardly serve our purpose to go into the extraordinarily
intricate and unsettled discussion concerning the origin and
significance of the marriage classes, or to go more deeply into their
relation to totemism. It is sufficient for our purposes to point out the
great care expended by the Australians as well as by other savage people
to prevent incest[17]. We must say that these savages are even more
sensitive to incest than we, perhaps because they are more subject to
temptations than we are, and hence require more extensive protection
against it.

But the incest dread of these races does not content itself with the
creation of the institutions described, which, in the main, seem to be
directed against group incest. We must add a series of ‘customs’ which
watch over the individual behaviour to near relatives in our sense,
which are maintained with almost religious severity and of whose object
there can hardly be any doubt. These customs or custom prohibitions may
be called ‘avoidances’. They spread far beyond the Australian totem
races. But here again I must ask the reader to be content with a
fragmentary excerpt from the abundant material.

Such restrictive prohibitions are directed in Melanesia against the
relations of boys with their mothers and sisters. Thus, for instance, on
Lepers Island, one of the New Hebrides, the boy leaves his maternal home
at a fixed age and moves to the ‘clubhouse’, where he there regularly
sleeps and takes his meals. He may still visit his home to ask for food;
but if his sister is at home he must go away before he has eaten; if no
sister is about he may sit down to eat near the door. If brother and
sister meet by chance in the open, she must run away or turn aside and
conceal herself. If the boy recognizes certain footprints in the sand as
his sister’s he is not to follow them, nor is she to follow his. He
will not even mention her name and will guard against using any current
word if it forms part of her name. This avoidance, which begins with the
ceremony of puberty, is strictly observed for life. The reserve between
mother and son increases with age and generally is more obligatory on
the mother’s side. If she brings him something to eat she does not give
it to him herself but puts it down before him, nor does she address him
in the familiar manner of mother and son, but uses the formal address.
Similar customs obtain in New Caledonia. If brother and sister meet, she
flees into the bush and he passes by without turning his head toward
her[18].

On the Gazella Peninsula in New Britain a sister, beginning with her
marriage, may no longer speak with her brother, nor does she utter his
name but designates him by means of a circumlocution[19].

In New Mecklenburg some cousins are subject to such restrictions, which
also apply to brothers and sisters. They may neither approach each
other, shake hands, nor give each other presents, though they may talk
to each other at a distance of several paces. The penalty for incest
with a sister is death through hanging[20].

These rules of avoidance are especially severe in the Fiji Islands where
they concern not only consanguineous sisters but group sisters as well.

To hear that these savages hold sacred orgies in which persons of just
these forbidden degrees of kinship seek sexual union would seem still
more peculiar to us, if we did not prefer to make use of this
contradiction to explain the prohibition instead of being astonished at
it[21].

Among the Battas of Sumatra these laws of avoidance affect all near
relationships. For instance, it would be most offensive for a Battan to
accompany his own sister to an evening party. A brother will feel most
uncomfortable in the company of his sister even when other persons are
also present. If either comes into the house, the other prefers to
leave. Nor will a father remain alone in the house with his daughter any
more than the mother with her son. The Dutch missionary who reported
these customs added that unfortunately he had to consider them well
founded. It is assumed without question by these races that a man and a
woman left alone together will indulge in the most extreme intimacy,
and as they expect all kinds of punishments and evil consequences from
consanguineous intercourse they do quite right to avoid all temptations
by means of such prohibitions[22].

Among the Barongos in Delagoa Bay, in Africa, the most rigorous
precautions are directed, curiously enough, against the sister-in-law,
the wife of the brother of one’s own wife. If a man meets this person
who is so dangerous to him, he carefully avoids her. He does not dare to
eat out of the same dish with her; he speaks only timidly to her, does
not dare to enter her hut, and greets her only with a trembling
voice[23].

Among the Akamba (or Wakamba) in British East Africa, a law of avoidance
is in force which one would have expected to encounter more frequently.
A girl must carefully avoid her own father between the time of her
puberty and her marriage. She hides herself if she meets him on the
street and never attempts to sit down next to him, behaving in this way
right up to her engagement. But after her marriage no further obstacle
is put in the way of her social intercourse with her father[24].

The most widespread and strictest avoidance, which is perhaps the most
interesting one for civilized races is that which restricts the social
relations between a man and his mother-in-law. It is quite general in
Australia, but it is also in force among the Melanesian, Polynesian and
Negro races of Africa as far as the traces of totemism and group
relationship reach, and probably further still. Among some of these
races similar prohibitions exist against the harmless social intercourse
of a wife with her father-in-law, but these are by far not so constant
or so serious. In a few cases both parents-in-law become objects of
avoidance.

As we are less interested in the ethnographic dissemination than in the
substance and the purpose of the mother-in-law avoidance, I will here
also limit myself to a few examples.

On the Banks Island these prohibitions are very severe and painfully
exact. A man will avoid the proximity of his mother-in-law as she avoids
his. If they meet by chance on a path, the woman steps aside and turns
her back until he is passed, or he does the same.

In Vanna Lava (Port Patterson) a man will not even walk behind his
mother-in-law along the beach until the rising tide has washed away the
trace of her footsteps. But they may talk to each other at a certain
distance. It is quite out of the question that he should ever pronounce
the name of his mother-in-law, or she his[25].

On the Solomon Islands, beginning with his marriage, a man must neither
see nor speak with his mother-in-law. If he meets her he acts as if he
did not know her and runs away as fast as he can in order to hide
himself[26].

Among the Zulu Kaffirs custom demands that a man should be ashamed of
his mother-in-law and that he should do everything to avoid her company.
He does not enter a hut in which she is, and when they meet he or she
goes aside, she perhaps hiding behind a bush while he holds his shield
before his face. If they cannot avoid each other and the woman has
nothing with which to cover herself, she at least binds a bunch of grass
around her head in order to satisfy the ceremonial requirements.
Communication between them must either be made through a third person or
else they may shout at each other at a considerable distance if they
have some barrier between them as, for instance, the enclosure of a
kraal. Neither may utter the other’s name[27].

Among the Basogas, a negro tribe living in the region of the Nile
sources, a man may talk to his mother-in-law only if she is in another
room of the house and is not visible to him. Moreover, this race
abominates incest to such an extent as not to let it go unpunished even
among domestic animals[28].

Whereas all observers have interpreted the purpose and meaning of the
avoidances between near relatives as protective measures against incest,
different interpretations have been given for those prohibitions which
concern the relationship with the mother-in-law. It was quite
incomprehensible why all these races should manifest such great fear of
temptation on the part of the man for an elderly woman, old enough to be
his mother[29].

The same objection was also raised against the conception of Fison who
called attention to the fact that certain marriage class systems show a
gap in that they make marriage between a man and his mother-in-law
theoretically not impossible and that a special guarantee was therefore
necessary to guard against this possibility.

Sir J. Lubbock, in his book _The Origin of Civilization_, traces back
the behaviour of the mother-in-law toward the son-in-law to the former
‘marriage by capture’. “As long as the capture of women actually took
place, the indignation of the parents was probably serious enough. When
nothing but symbols of this form of marriage survived, the indignation
of the parents was also symbolized and this custom continued after its
origin had been forgotten.” Crawley has found it easy to show how little
this tentative explanation agrees with the details of actual
observation.

E. B. Tylor thinks that the treatment of the son-in-law on the part of
the mother-in-law is nothing more than a form of ‘cutting’ on the part
of the woman’s family. The man counts as a stranger, and this continues
until the first child is born. But even if no account is taken of cases
in which this last condition does not remove the prohibition, this
explanation is subject to the objection that it does not throw any light
on the custom dealing with the relation between mother-in-law and
son-in-law, thus overlooking the sexual factor, and that it does not
take into account the almost sacred loathing which finds expression in
the laws of avoidance[30].

A Zulu woman who was asked about the basis for this prohibition showed
great delicacy of feeling in her answer: “It is not right that he
should see the breasts which nursed his wife.”[31]

It is known that also among civilized races the relation of son-in-law
and mother-in-law belongs to one of the most difficult sides of family
organization. Although laws of avoidance no longer exist in the society
of the white races of Europe and America, much quarrelling and
displeasure would often be avoided if they did exist and did not have to
be re-established by individuals. Many a European will see an act of
high wisdom in the laws of avoidance which savage races have established
to preclude any understanding between two persons who have become so
closely related. There is hardly any doubt that there is something in
the psychological situation of mother-in-law and son-in-law which
furthers hostilities between them and renders living together difficult.
The fact that the witticisms of civilized races show such a preference
for this very mother-in-law theme seems to me to point to the fact that
the emotional relations between mother-in-law and son-in-law are
controlled by components which stand in sharp contrast to each other. I
mean that the relation is really ‘ambivalent’, that is, it is composed
of conflicting feelings of tenderness and hostility.

A certain part of these feelings is evident. The mother-in-law is
unwilling to give up the possession of her daughter; she distrusts the
stranger to whom her daughter has been delivered, and shows a tendency
to maintain the dominating position, to which she became accustomed at
home. On the part of the man, there is the determination not to subject
himself any longer to any foreign will, his jealousy of all persons who
preceded him in the possession of his wife’s tenderness, and, last but
not least, his aversion to being disturbed in his illusion of sexual
over-valuation. As a rule such a disturbance emanates for the most part
from his mother-in-law who reminds him of her daughter through so many
common traits but who lacks all the charm of youth, such as beauty and
that psychic spontaneity which makes his wife precious to him.

The knowledge of hidden psychic feelings which psychoanalytic
investigation of individuals has given us, makes it possible to add
other motives to the above. Where the psycho-sexual needs of the woman
are to be satisfied in marriage and family life, there is always the
danger of dissatisfaction through the premature termination of the
conjugal relation, and the monotony in the wife’s emotional life. The
ageing mother protects herself against this by living through the lives
of her children, by identifying herself with them and making their
emotional experiences her own. Parents are said to remain young with
their children, and this is, in fact, one of the most valuable psychic
benefits which parents derive from their children. Childlessness thus
eliminates one of the best means to endure the necessary resignation
imposed upon the individual through marriage. This emotional
indentification with the daughter may easily go so far with the mother
that she also falls in love with the man her daughter loves, which
leads, in extreme cases, to severe forms of neurotic ailments on account
of the violent psychic resistance against this emotional predisposition.
At all events the tendency to such infatuation is very frequent with the
mother-in-law, and either this infatuation itself or the tendency
opposed to it joins the conflict of contending forces in the psyche of
the mother-in-law. Very often it is just this harsh and sadistic
component of the love emotion which is turned against the son-in-law in
order better to suppress the forbidden tender feelings.

The relation of the husband to his mother-in-law is complicated through
similar feelings which, however, spring from other sources. The path of
object selection has normally led him to his love object through the
image of his mother and perhaps of his sister; in consequence of the
incest barriers his preference for these two beloved persons of his
childhood has been deflected and he is then able to find their image in
strange objects. He now sees the mother-in-law taking the place of his
own mother and of his sister’s mother, and there develops a tendency to
return to the primitive selection, against which everything in him
resists. His incest dread demands that he should not be reminded of the
genealogy of his love selection; the actuality of his mother-in-law,
whom he had not known all his life like his mother so that her picture
can be preserved unchanged in his unconscious, facilitates this
rejection. An added mixture of irritability and animosity in his
feelings leads us to suspect that the mother-in-law actually represents
an incest temptation for the son-in-law, just as it not infrequently
happens that a man falls in love with his subsequent mother-in-law
before his inclination is transferred to her daughter.

I see no objection to the assumption that it is just this incestuous
factor of the relationship which motivates the avoidance between son-and
mother-in-law among savages. Among the explanations for the ‘avoidances’
which these primitive races observe so strictly, we would therefore give
preference to the opinion originally expressed by Fison, who sees
nothing in these regulations but a protection against possible incest.
This would also hold good for all the other avoidances between those
related by blood or by marriage. There is only one difference, namely,
in the first case the incest is direct, so that the purpose of the
prevention might be conscious; in the other case, which includes the
mother-in-law relation, the incest would be a phantasy temptation
brought about by unconscious intermediary links.

We have had little opportunity in this exposition to show that the facts
of folk-psychology can be seen in a new light through the application of
the psychoanalytic point of view, for the incest dread of savages has
long been known as such, and is in need of no further interpretation.
What we can add to the further appreciation of incest dread is the
statement that it is a subtle infantile trait and is in striking
agreement with the psychic life of the neurotic. Psychoanalysis has
taught us that the first object selection of the boy is of an incestuous
nature and that it is directed to the forbidden objects, the mother and
the sister; pyschoanalysis has taught us also the methods through which
the maturing individual frees himself from these incestuous attractions.
The neurotic, however, regularly presents to us a piece of psychic
infantilism; he has either not been able to free himself from the
childlike conditions of psychosexuality, or else he has returned to them
(inhibited development and regression). Hence the incestuous fixations
of the libido still play or again are playing the main rôle in his
unconscious psychic life. We have gone so far as to declare that the
relation to the parents instigated by incestuous longings is the central
complex of the neurosis. This discovery of the significance of incest
for the neurosis naturally meets with the most general incredulity on
the part of the grown-up, normal man; a similar rejection will also meet
the researches of Otto Rank, which show in even larger scope to what
extent the incest theme stands in the centre of poetical interest and
how it forms the material of poetry in countless variations and
distortions. We are forced to believe that such a rejection is above all
the product of man’s deep aversion to his former incest wishes which
have since succumbed to repression. It is therefore of importance to us
to be able to show that man’s incest wishes, which later are destined to
become unconscious, are still felt to be dangerous by savage races who
consider them worthy of the most severe defensive measures.



CHAPTER II

TABOO AND THE AMBIVALENCE OF EMOTIONS


1

Taboo is a Polynesian word, the translation of which provides
difficulties for us because we no longer possess the idea which it
connotes. It was still current with the ancient Romans: their word
‘sacer’ was the same as the taboo of the Polynesians. The [Greek: ἁγος hagos]
of the Greeks and the Kodaush of the Hebrews must also have signified
the same thing which the Polynesians express through their word taboo
and what many races in America, Africa (Madagascar), North and Central
Asia express through analogous designations.

For us the meaning of taboo branches off into two opposite directions.
On the one hand it means to us sacred, consecrated: but on the other
hand it means, uncanny, dangerous, forbidden, and unclean. The opposite
for taboo is designated in Polynesian by the word _noa_ and signifies
something ordinary and generally accessible. Thus something like the
concept of reserve inheres in taboo; taboo expresses itself essentially
in prohibitions and restrictions. Our combination of ‘holy dread’ would
often express the meaning of taboo.

The taboo restrictions are different from religious or moral
prohibitions. They are not traced to a commandment of a god but really
they themselves impose their own prohibitions; they are differentiated
from moral prohibitions by failing to be included in a system which
declares abstinences in general to be necessary and gives reasons for
this necessity. The taboo prohibitions lack all justification and are of
unknown origin. Though incomprehensible to us they are taken as a matter
of course by those who are under their dominance.

Wundt[32] calls taboo the oldest unwritten code of law of humanity. It
is generally assumed that taboo is older than the gods and goes back to
the pre-religious age.

As we are in need of an impartial presentation of the subject of taboo
before subjecting it to psychoanalytic consideration I shall now cite an
excerpt from the article _Taboo_ in the _Encyclopedia Britannica_
written by the anthropologist Northcote W. Thomas[33]:

“Properly speaking taboo includes only (a) the sacred (or unclean)
character of persons or things, (b) the kind of prohibition which
results from this character, and (c) the sanctity (or uncleanliness)
which results from a violation of the prohibition. The converse of taboo
in Polynesia is ‘noa’ and allied forms which mean ‘general’ or ‘common’
...

“Various classes of taboo in the wider sense may be distinguished: 1.
natural or direct, the result of ‘mana’ mysterious (power) inherent in a
person or thing; 2. communicated or indirect, equally the result of
‘mana’ but (_a_) acquired or (_b_) imposed by a priest, chief or other
person; 3. intermediate, where both factors are present, as in the
appropriation of a wife to her husband. The term taboo is also applied
to ritual prohibitions of a different nature; but its use in these
senses is better avoided. It might be argued that the term should be
extended to embrace cases in which the sanction of the prohibition is
the creation of a god or spirit, i.e., to religious interdictions as
distinguished from magical, but there is neither automatic action nor
contagion in such a case, and a better term for it is religious
interdiction.

“The objects of the taboo are many: 1. direct taboos aim at (_a_)
protection of important persons--chiefs, priests, etc.--and things
against harm; (_b_) safeguarding of the weak--women children and common
people generally--from the powerful mana (magical influence) of chiefs
and priests; (_c_) providing against the dangers incurred by handling or
coming in contact with corpses, by eating certain food, etc.; (_d_)
guarding the chief acts of life--births, initiation, marriage and sexual
functions--against interference; (_e_) securing human beings against the
wrath or power of gods and spirits[34]; (_f_) securing unborn infants
and young children who stand in a specially sympathetic relation with
their parents, from the consequence of certain actions, and more
especially from the communication of qualities supposed to be derived
from certain foods. 2. Taboos are imposed in order to secure against
thieves the property of an individual, his fields, tools, etc.”

Other parts of the article may be summarized as follows. Originally the
punishment for the violation of a taboo was probably left to an inner,
automatic arrangement. The violated taboo avenged itself. Wherever the
taboo was related to ideas of gods and demons an automatic punishment
was expected from the power of the godhead. In other cases, probably as
a result of a further development of the idea, society took over the
punishment of the offender, whose action has endangered his companions.
Thus man’s first systems of punishment are also connected with taboo.

“The violation of a taboo makes the offender himself taboo.” The author
goes on to say that certain dangers resulting from the violation of a
taboo may be exercised through acts of penance and ceremonies of
purification.

A peculiar power inherent in persons and ghosts, which can be
transmitted from them to inanimate objects is regarded as the source of
the taboo. This part of the article reads as follows: “Persons or things
which are regarded as taboo may be compared to objects charged with
electricity; they are the seat of tremendous power which is
transmissible by contact, and may be liberated with destructive effect
if the organisms which provoke its discharge are too weak to resist it;
the result of a violation of a taboo depends partly on the strength of
the magical influence inherent in the taboo object or person, partly on
the strength of the opposing mana of the violator of the taboo. Thus,
kings and chiefs are possessed of great power, and it is death for their
subjects to address them directly; but a minister or other person of
greater _mana_ than common, can approach them unharmed, and can in turn
be approached by their inferiors without risk.... So, too, indirect
taboos depend for their strength on the mana of him who opposes them; if
it is a chief or a priest, they are more powerful than those imposed by
a common person.”

The fact that a taboo is transmissible has surely given rise to the
effort of removing it through expiatory ceremonies.

The author states that there are permanent and temporary taboos. The
former comprise priests and chiefs as well as the dead and everything
that has belonged to them. Temporary taboos attach themselves to certain
conditions such as menstruation and child-bed, the status of the warrior
before and after the expedition, the activities of fishing and of the
chase, and similar activities. A general taboo may also be imposed upon
a large district like an ecclesiastical interdict, and may then last for
years.

If I judge my readers’ impressions correctly, I dare say that after
hearing all that was said about taboo they are far from knowing what to
understand by it and where to store it in their minds. This is surely
due to the insufficient information I have given and to the omission of
all discussions concerning the relation of taboo to superstition, to
belief in the soul, and to religion. On the other hand I fear that a
more detailed description of what is known about taboo would be still
more confusing; I can therefore assure the reader that the state of
affairs is really far from clear. We may say, however, that we deal with
a series of restrictions which these primitive races impose upon
themselves; this and that is forbidden without any apparent reason; nor
does it occur to them to question this matter, for they subject
themselves to these restrictions as a matter of course and are convinced
that any transgression will be punished automatically in the most severe
manner. There are reliable reports that innocent transgressions of such
prohibitions have actually been punished automatically. For instance,
the innocent offender who had eaten from a forbidden animal became
deeply depressed, expected his death and then actually died. The
prohibitions mostly concern matters which are capable of enjoyment such
as freedom of movement and unrestrained intercourse; in some cases they
appear very ingenious, evidently representing abstinences and
renunciations; in other cases their content is quite incomprehensible,
they seem to concern themselves with trifles and give the impression of
ceremonials. Something like a theory seems to underlie all these
prohibitions, it seems as if these prohibitions are necessary because
some persons and objects possess a dangerous power which is transmitted
by contact with the object so charged, almost like a contagion. The
quantity of this dangerous property is also taken into consideration.
Some persons or things have more of it than others and the danger is
precisely in accordance with the charge. The most peculiar part of it is
that any one who has violated such a prohibition assumes the nature of
the forbidden object as if he had absorbed the whole dangerous charge.
This power is inherent in all persons who are more or less prominent,
such as kings, priests and the newly born, in all exceptional physical
states such as menstruation, puberty and birth, in everything sinister
like illness and death and in everything connected with these conditions
by virtue of contagion or dissemination.

However, the term ‘taboo’ includes all persons, localities, objects and
temporary conditions which are carriers or sources of this mysterious
attribute. The prohibition derived from this attribute is also
designated as taboo, and lastly taboo, in the literal sense, includes
everything that is sacred, above the ordinary, and at the same time
dangerous, unclean and mysterious.

Both this word and the system corresponding to it express a fragment of
psychic life which really is not comprehensible to us. And indeed it
would seem that no understanding of it could be possible without
entering into the study of the belief in spirits and demons which is so
characteristic of these low grades of culture.

Now why should we take any interest at all in the riddle of taboo? Not
only, I think, because every psychological problem is well worth the
effort of investigation for its own sake, but for other reasons as well.
It may be surmised that the taboo of Polynesian savages is after all not
so remote from us as we were at first inclined to believe; the moral and
customary prohibitions which we ourselves obey may have some essential
relation to this primitive taboo the explanation of which may in the end
throw light upon the dark origin of our own ‘categorical imperative.’

We are therefore inclined to listen with keen expectations when an
investigator like W. Wundt gives his interpretation of taboo, especially
as he promises to “go back to the very roots of the taboo concepts”[35].

Wundt states that the idea of taboo “includes all customs which express
dread of particular objects connected with cultic ideas or of actions
having reference to them”[36].

On another occasion he says: “In accordance with the general sense of
the word we understand by taboo every prohibition laid down in customs
or manners or in expressly formulated laws, not to touch an object or to
take it for one’s own use, or to make use of certain proscribed
words....” Accordingly there would not be a single race or stage of
culture which had escaped the injurious effects of taboo.

Wundt then shows why he finds it more practical to study the nature of
taboo in the primitive states of Australian savages rather than in the
higher culture of the Polynesian races. In the case of the Australians
he divides taboo prohibitions into three classes according as they
concern animals, persons or other objects. The animal taboo, which
consists essentially of the taboo against killing and eating, forms the
nucleus of Totemism[37]. The taboo of the second class, which has human
beings for its object, is of an essentially different nature. To begin
with it is restricted to conditions which bring about an unusual
situation in life for the person tabooed. Thus young men at the feast of
initiation, women during menstruation and immediately after delivery,
newly born children, the deceased and especially the dead, are all
taboo. The constantly used property of any person, such as his clothes,
tools and weapons, is permanently taboo for everybody else. In
Australia the new name which a youth receives at his initiation into
manhood becomes part of his most personal property, it is taboo and must
be kept secret. The taboos of the third class, which apply to trees,
plants, houses and localities, are more variable and seem only to follow
the rule that anything which for any reason arouses dread or is
mysterious, becomes subject to taboo.

Wundt himself has to acknowledge that the changes which taboo undergoes
in the richer culture of the Polynesians and in the Malayan Archipelago
are not very profound. The greater social differentiation of these races
manifests itself in the fact that chiefs, kings and priests exercise an
especially effective taboo and are themselves exposed to the strongest
taboo compulsion.

But the real sources of taboo lie deeper than in the interests of the
privileged classes: “They begin where the most primitive and at the same
time the most enduring human impulses have their origin, namely, _in the
fear of the effect of demonic powers_”[38]. “The taboo, which originally
was nothing more than the objectified fear of the demonic power thought
to be concealed in the tabooed object, forbids the irritation of this
power and demands the placation of the demon whenever the taboo has been
knowingly or unknowingly violated.”

The taboo then gradually became an autonomous power which has detached
itself from demonism. It becomes the compulsion of custom and tradition
and finally of the law. “But the commandment concealed behind taboo
prohibitions which differ materially according to place and time, had
originally the meaning: Beware of the wrath of the demons.”

Wundt therefore teaches that taboo is the expression and evolution of
the belief of primitive races in demonic powers, and that later taboo
has dissociated itself from this origin and has remained a power simply
because it was one by virtue of a kind of a psychic persistence and in
this manner it became the root of our customs and laws. As little as one
can object to the first part of this statement I feel, however, that I
am only voicing the impression of many of my readers if I call Wundt’s
explanation disappointing. Wundt’s explanation is far from going back to
the sources of taboo concepts or to their deepest roots. For neither
fear nor demons can be accepted in psychology as finalities defying any
further deduction. It would be different if demons really existed; but
we know that, like gods, they are only the product of the psychic
powers of man; they have been created from and out of something.

Wundt also expresses a number of important though not altogether clear
opinions about the double meaning of taboo. According to him the
division between _sacred_ and _unclean_ does not yet exist in the first
primitive stages of taboo. For this reason these conceptions entirely
lack the significance which they could only acquire later on when they
came to be contrasted. The animal, person or place on which there is a
taboo is demonic, that is, not sacred, and therefore not yet, in the
later sense, unclean. The expression taboo is particularly suitable for
this undifferentiated and intermediate meaning of the demonic, in the
sense of something which may not be touched, since it emphasizes a
characteristic which finally adheres both to what is sacred and to the
unclean, namely, the dread of contact. But the fact that this important
characteristic is permanently held in common points to the existence of
an original agreement here between these two spheres which gave way to a
differentiation only as the result of further conditions through which
both finally developed into opposites.

The belief associated with the original taboo, according to which a
demonic power concealed in the object avenges the touching of it or its
forbidden use by bewitching the offender was still an entirely
objectified fear. This had not yet separated into the two forms which it
assumed at a more developed stage, namely, awe and aversion.

How did this separation come about? According to Wundt, this was done
through the transference of taboo prohibitions from the sphere of demons
to that of theistic conceptions. The antithesis of sacred and unclean
coincides with the succession of two mythological stages the first of
which did not entirely disappear when the second was reached but
continued in a state of greatly lowered esteem which gradually turned
into contempt. It is a general law in mythology that a preceding stage,
just because it has been overcome and pushed back by a higher stage,
maintains itself next to it in a debased form so that the objects of its
veneration become objects of aversion[39].

Wundt’s further elucidations refer to the relation of taboo to
lustration and sacrifice.


2

He who approaches the problem of taboo from the field of psychoanalysis,
which is concerned with the study of the unconscious part of the
individual’s psychic life, needs but a moment’s reflection to realize
that these phenomena are by no means foreign to him. He knows people who
have individually created such taboo prohibitions for themselves, which
they follow as strictly as savages observe the taboos common to their
tribe or society. If he were not accustomed to call these individuals
‘compulsion neurotics’ he would find the term ‘taboo disease’ quite
appropriate for their malady. Psychoanalytic investigation has taught
him the clinical etiology and the essential part of the psychological
mechanism of this compulsion disease, so that he cannot resist applying
what he has learnt there to explain corresponding manifestations in folk
psychology.

There is one warning to which we shall have to give heed in making this
attempt. The similarity between taboo and compulsion disease may be
purely superficial, holding good only for the manifestations of both
without extending into their deeper characteristics. Nature loves to use
identical forms in the most widely different biological connections, as,
for instance, for coral stems and plants and even for certain crystals
or for the formation of certain chemical precipitates. It would
certainly be both premature and unprofitable to base conclusions
relating to inner relationships upon the correspondence of merely
mechanical conditions. We shall bear this warning in mind without,
however, giving up our intended comparison on account of the possibility
of such confusions.

The first and most striking correspondence between the compulsion
prohibitions of neurotics and taboo lies in the fact that the origin of
these prohibitions is just as unmotivated and enigmatic. They have
appeared at some time or other and must now be retained on account of an
unconquerable anxiety. An external threat of punishment is superfluous,
because an inner certainty (a conscience) exists that violation will be
followed by unbearable disaster. The very most that compulsion patients
can tell us is the vague premonition that some person of their
environment will suffer harm if they should violate the prohibition. Of
what the harm is to consist is not known, and this inadequate
information is more likely to be obtained during the later discussions
of the expiatory and defensive actions than when the prohibitions
themselves are being discussed.

As in the case of taboo the nucleus of the neurotic prohibition is the
act of touching, whence we derive the name ‘touching phobia’ or _délire
de toucher_. The prohibition extends not only to direct contact with the
body but also to the figurative use of the phrase as ‘to come into
contact’ or ‘be in touch with some one or something’. Anything that
leads the thoughts to what is prohibited and thus calls forth mental
contact is just as much prohibited as immediate bodily contact; this
same extension is also found in taboo.

Some prohibitions are easily understood from their purpose but others
strike us as incomprehensible, foolish and senseless. We designate such
commands as ‘ceremonials’ and we find that taboo customs show the same
variations.

Obsessive prohibitions possess an extraordinary capacity for
displacement; they make use of almost any form of connection to extend
from one object to another and then in turn make this new object
‘impossible’, as one of my patients aptly puts it. This impossibility
finally lays an embargo upon the whole world. The compulsion neurotics
act as if the ‘impossible’ persons and things were the carriers of a
dangerous contagion which is ready to displace itself through contact to
all neighbouring things. We have already emphasized the same
characteristics of contagion and transference in the description of
taboo prohibitions. We also know that any one who has violated a taboo
by touching something which is taboo becomes taboo himself, and no one
may come into contact with him.

I shall put side by side two examples of transference or, to use a
better term, displacement, one from the life of the Maori, and the
other from my observation of a woman suffering from a compulsion
neurosis:

“For a similar reason a Maori chief would not blow on a fire with his
mouth; for his sacred breath would communicate its sanctity to the fire,
which would pass it on to the meat in the pot, which would pass it on to
the man who ate the meat which was in the pot, which stood on the fire,
which was breathed on by the chief; so that the eater, infected by the
chiefs breath conveyed through these intermediaries, would surely
die”[40].

My patient demanded that a utensil which her husband had purchased and
brought home should be removed lest it make the place where she lives
impossible. For she has heard that this object was bought in a store
which is situated, let us say, in Stag Street. But as the word ‘stag’ is
the name of a friend now in a distant city, whom she has known in her
youth under her maiden name and whom she now finds ‘impossible’, that is
taboo, the object bought in Vienna is just as taboo as this friend with
whom she does not want to come into contact.

Compulsion prohibitions, like taboo prohibitions, entail the most
extraordinary renunciations and restrictions of life, but a part of
these can be removed by carrying out certain acts which now also must be
done because they have acquired a compulsive character (obsessive acts);
there is no doubt that these acts are in the nature of penances,
expiations, defence reactions, and purifications. The most common of
these obsessive acts is washing with water (washing obsession). A part
of the taboo prohibitions can also be replaced in this way, that is to
say, their violation can be made good through such a ‘ceremonial’, and
here too lustration through water is the preferred way.

Let us now summarize the points in which the correspondence between
taboo customs and the symptoms of compulsion neurosis are most clearly
manifested: 1. In the lack of motivation of the commandments, 2. in
their enforcement through an inner need, 3. in their capacity of
displacement and in the danger of contagion from what is prohibited, 4.
and in the causation of ceremonial actions and commandments which
emanate from the forbidden.

However, psychoanalysis has made us familiar with the clinical history
as well as the psychic mechanism of compulsion neurosis. Thus the
history of a typical case of touching phobia reads as follows: In the
very beginning, during the early period of childhood, the person
manifested a strong pleasure in touching himself, the object of which
was much more specialized than one would be inclined to suspect.
Presently the carrying out of this very pleasurable act of touching was
opposed by a prohibition from without[41]. The prohibition was accepted
because it was supported by strong inner forces[42]; it proved to be
stronger than the impulse which wanted to manifest itself through this
act of touching. But due to the primitive psychic constitution of the
child this prohibition did not succeed in abolishing the impulse. Its
only success lay in repressing the impulse (the pleasure of touching)
and banishing it into the unconscious. Both the prohibition and the
impulse remained; the impulse because it had only been repressed and not
abolished, the prohibition, because if it had ceased the impulse would
have broken through into consciousness and would have been carried out.
An unsolved situation, a psychic fixation, had thus been created and now
everything else emanated from the continued conflict between prohibition
and impulse.

The main characteristic of the psychic constellation which has thus gone
under fixation lies in what one might call the ambivalent behaviour[43]
of the individual to the object, or rather to an action regarding it.
The individual constantly wants to carry out this action (the act of
touching), he sees in it the highest pleasure, but he may not carry it
out, and he even abominates it. The opposition between these two streams
cannot be easily adjusted because--there is no other way to express
it--they are so localized in the psychic life that they cannot meet. The
prohibition becomes fully conscious, while the surviving pleasure of
touching remains unconscious, the person knowing nothing about it. If
this psychological factor did not exist the ambivalence could neither
maintain itself so long nor lead to such subsequent manifestations.

In the clinical history of the case we have emphasized the appearance of
the prohibition in early childhood as the determining factor; but for
the further elaboration of the neurosis this rôle is played by the
repression which appears at this age. On account of the repression which
has taken place, which is connected with forgetting (amnesia), the
motivation of the prohibition that has become conscious remains unknown,
and all attempts to unravel it intellectually must fail, as the point of
attack cannot be found. The prohibition owes its strength--its
compulsive character--to its association with its unknown counterpart,
the hidden and unabated pleasure, that is to say, to an inner need into
which conscious insight is lacking. The transferability and reproductive
power of the prohibition reflect a process which harmonizes with the
unconscious pleasure and is very much facilitated through the
psychological determinants of the unconscious. The pleasure of the
impulse constantly undergoes displacement in order to escape the
blocking which it encounters and seeks to acquire surrogates for the
forbidden in the form of substitutive objects and actions. For the same
reason the prohibition also wanders and spreads to the new aims of the
proscribed impulse. Every new advance of the repressed libido is
answered by the prohibition with a new severity. The mutual inhibition
of these two contending forces creates a need for discharge and for
lessening the existing tension, in which we may recognize the motivation
for the compulsive acts. In the neurosis there are distinctly acts of
compromise which on the one hand may be regarded as proofs of remorse
and efforts to expiate and similar actions; but on the other hand they
are at the same time substitutive actions which recompense the impulse
for what has been forbidden. It is a law of neurotic diseases that these
obsessive acts serve the impulse more and more and come nearer and
nearer to the original and forbidden act.

We may now make the attempt to study taboo as if it were of the same
nature as the compulsive prohibitions of our patients. It must naturally
be clearly understood that many of the taboo prohibitions which we shall
study are already secondary, displaced and distorted, so that we shall
have to be satisfied if we can shed some light upon the earliest and
most important taboo prohibitions. We must also remember that the
differences in the situation of the savage and of the neurotic may be
important enough to exclude complete correspondence and prevent a point
by point transfer from one to the other such as would be possible if we
were dealing with exact copies.

First of all it must be said that it is useless to question savages as
to the real motivation of their prohibitions or as to the genesis of
taboo. According to our assumption they must be incapable of telling us
anything about it since this motivation is ‘unconscious’ to them. But
following the model of the compulsive prohibition we shall construct the
history of taboo as follows: Taboos are very ancient prohibitions which
at one time were forced upon a generation of primitive people from
without, that is, they probably were forcibly impressed upon them by an
earlier generation. These prohibitions concerned actions for which there
existed a strong desire. The prohibitions maintained themselves from
generation to generation, perhaps only as the result of a tradition set
up by paternal and social authority. But in later generations they have
perhaps already become ‘organized’ as a piece of inherited psychic
property. Whether there are such ‘innate ideas’ or whether these have
brought about the fixation of the taboo by themselves or by co-operating
with education no one could decide in the particular case in question.
The persistence of taboo teaches, however, one thing, namely, that the
original pleasure to do the forbidden still continues among taboo races.
They therefore assume an _ambivalent attitude_ toward their taboo
prohibitions; in their unconscious they would like nothing better than
to transgress them but they are also afraid to do it; they are afraid
just because they would like to transgress, and the fear is stronger
than the pleasure. But in every individual of the race the desire for it
is unconscious, just as in the neurotic.

The oldest and most important taboo prohibitions are the two basic laws
of _totemism_: namely not to kill the totem animal, and to avoid sexual
intercourse with totem companions of the other sex.

It would therefore seem that these must have been the oldest and
strongest desires of mankind. We cannot understand this and therefore we
cannot use these examples to test our assumptions as long as the meaning
and the origin of the totemic system is so wholly unknown to us. But the
very wording of these taboos and the fact that they occur together will
remind any one who knows the results of the psychoanalytic investigation
of individuals, of something quite definite which psychoanalysts call
the central point of the infantile wish life and the nucleus of the
later neurosis[44].

All other varieties of taboo phenomena which have led to the attempted
classifications noted above become unified if we sum them up in the
following sentence. The basis of taboo is a forbidden action for which
there exists a strong inclination in the unconscious.

We know, without understanding it, that whoever does what is prohibited
and violates the taboo, becomes himself taboo. But how can we connect
this fact with the other, namely that the taboo adheres not only to
persons who have done what is prohibited but also to persons who are in
exceptional circumstances, to these circumstances themselves, and to
impersonal things? What can this dangerous attribute be which always
remains the same under all these different conditions? Only one thing,
namely, the propensity to arouse the ambivalence of man and to tempt him
to violate the prohibition.

An individual who has violated a taboo becomes himself taboo because he
has the dangerous property of tempting others to follow his example. He
arouses envy; why should he be allowed to do what is prohibited to
others? He is therefore really _contagious_, in so far as every example
incites to imitation and therefore he himself must be avoided.

But a person may become permanently or temporarily taboo without having
violated any taboos, for the simple reason that he is in a condition
which has the property of inciting the forbidden desires of others and
of awakening the ambivalent conflict in them. Most of the exceptional
positions and conditions have this character and possess this dangerous
power. The king or chieftain rouses envy of his prerogatives; everybody
would perhaps like to be king. The dead, the newly born, and women when
they are incapacitated all act as incitements on account of their
peculiar helplessness, while the individual who has just reached sexual
maturity tempts through the promise of a new pleasure. Therefore all
these persons and all these conditions are taboo, for one must not yield
to the temptations which they offer.

Now, too, we understand why the forces inherent in the ‘mana’ of various
persons can neutralize one another so that the mana of one individual
can partly cancel that of the other. The taboo of a king is too strong
for his subject because the social difference between them is too great.
But a minister, for example, can become the harmless mediator between
them. Translated from the language of taboo into the language of normal
psychology this means: the subject who shrinks from the tremendous
temptation which contact with the king creates for him can brook the
intercourse of an official, whom he does not have to envy so much and
whose position perhaps seems attainable to him. The minister, on his
part, can moderate his envy of the king by taking into consideration the
power that has been granted to him. Thus smaller differences in the
magic power that lead to temptation are less to be feared than
exceptionally big differences.

It is equally clear how the violation of certain taboo prohibitions
becomes a social danger which must be punished or expiated by all the
members of society lest it harm them all. This danger really exists if
we substitute the known impulses for the unconscious desires. It
consists in the possibility of imitation, as a result of which society
would soon be dissolved. If the others did not punish the violation they
would perforce become aware that they want to imitate the evil doer.

Though the secret meaning of a taboo prohibition cannot possibly be of
so special a nature as in the case of a neurosis, we must not be
astonished to find that touching plays a similar rôle in taboo
prohibition as in the _délire de toucher_. To touch is the beginning of
every act of possession, of every attempt to make use of a person or
thing.

We have interpreted the power of contagion which inheres in the taboo as
the property of leading into temptation, and of inciting to imitation.
This does not seem to be in accord with the fact that the contagiousness
of the taboo is above all manifested in the transference to objects
which thus themselves become carriers of the taboo.

This transferability of the taboo reflects what is found in the
neurosis, namely, the constant tendency of the unconscious impulse to
become displaced through associative channels upon new objects. Our
attention is thus drawn to the fact that the dangerous magic power of
the ‘mana’ corresponds to two real faculties, the capacity of reminding
man of his forbidden wishes, and the apparently more important one of
tempting him to violate the prohibition in the service of these wishes.
Both functions reunite into one, however, if we assume it to be in
accord with a primitive psychic life that with the awakening of a memory
of a forbidden action there should also be combined the awakening of the
tendency to carry out the action. Memory and temptation then again
coincide. We must also admit that if the example of a person who has
violated a prohibition leads another to the same action, the
disobedience of the prohibition has been transmitted like a contagion,
just as the taboo is transferred from a person to an object, and from
this to another.

If the violation of a taboo can be condoned through expiation or
penance, which means, of course, a _renunciation_ of a possession or a
liberty, we have the proof that the observance of a taboo regulation was
itself a renunciation of something really wished for. The omission of
one renunciation is cancelled through a renunciation at some other
point. This would lead us to conclude that, as far as taboo ceremonials
are concerned, penance is more primitive than purification.

Let us now summarize what understanding we have gained of taboo through
its comparison with the compulsive prohibition of the neurotic. Taboo
is a very primitive prohibition imposed from without (by an authority)
and directed against the strongest desires of man. The desire to violate
it continues in the unconscious; persons who obey the taboo have an
ambivalent feeling toward what is affected by the taboo. The magic power
attributed to taboo goes back to its ability to lead man into
temptation; it behaves like a contagion, because the example is
contagious, and because the prohibited desire becomes displacing in the
unconscious upon something else. The expiation for the violation of a
taboo through a renunciation proves that a renunciation is at the basis
of the observance of the taboo.


3

We may ask what we have gained from the comparison of taboo with
compulsion neurosis and what value can be claimed for the interpretation
we have given on the basis of this comparison? Our intrepretation is
evidently of no value unless it affords an advantage not to be had in
any other way and unless it affords a better understanding of taboo than
was otherwise possible. We might claim that we have already given proof
of its usefulness in what has been said above; but we shall have to try
to strengthen our proof by continuing the explanation of taboo
prohibitions and customs in detail.

But we can avail ourselves of another method. We can shape our
investigation so as to ascertain whether a part of the assumptions which
we have transferred from the neurosis to the taboo, or the conclusions
at which we have thereby arrived can be demonstrated directly in the
phenomena of taboo. We must decide, however, what we want to look for.
The assertion concerning the genesis of taboo, namely, that it was
derived from a primitive prohibition which was once imposed from
without, cannot, of course, be proved. We shall therefore seek to
confirm those psychological conditions for taboo with which we have
become acquainted in the case of compulsion neurosis. How did we gain
our knowledge of these psychological factors in the case of neurosis?
Through the analytical study of the symptoms, especially the compulsive
actions, the defence reactions and the obsessive commands. These
mechanisms gave every indication of having been derived from
_ambivalent_ impulses or tendencies, they either represented
simultaneously the wish and counter-wish or they served preponderantly
one of the two contrary tendencies. If we should now succeed in showing
that ambivalence, i.e., the sway of contrary tendencies, exists also in
the case of taboo regulations or if we should find among taboo
mechanisms some which like neurotic obsessions give simultaneous
expression to both currents, we would have established what is
practically the most important point in the psychological correspondence
between taboo and compulsion neurosis.

We have already mentioned that the two fundamental taboo prohibitions
are inaccessible to our analysis because they belong to totemism;
another part of the taboo rules is of secondary origin and cannot be
used for our purpose. For among these races taboo has become the general
form of law giving and has helped to promote social tendencies which are
certainly younger; than taboo itself, as for instance, the taboos
imposed by chiefs and priests to insure their property and privileges.
But there still remains a large group of laws which we may undertake to
investigate. Among these I lay stress on those taboos which are attached
(_a_) to enemies, (_b_) to chiefs, and (_c_) to the dead; the material
for our investigation is taken from the excellent collection of J. G.
Frazer in his great work, _The Golden Bough_[45].


(_A_) THE TREATMENT OF ENEMIES

Inclined as we may have been to ascribe to savage and semi-savage races
uninhibited and remorseless cruelty towards their enemies, it is of
great interest to us to learn that with them, too, the killing of a
person compels the observation of a series of rules which are associated
with taboo customs. These rules are easily brought under four groups;
they demand 1. reconciliation with the slain enemy, 2. restrictions, 3.
acts of expiation, and purifications of the manslayer, and 4. certain
ceremonial rites. The incomplete reports do not allow us to decide with
certainty how general or how isolated such taboo customs may be among
these races, but this is a matter of indifference as far as our interest
in these occurrences is concerned. Still, it may be assumed that we are
dealing with widespread customs and not with isolated peculiarities.

The reconciliation customs practised on the island of Timor, after a
victorious band of warriors has returned with the severed heads of the
vanquished enemy, are especially significant because the leader of the
expedition is subject to heavy additional restrictions. “At the solemn
entry of the victors, sacrifices are made to conciliate the souls of the
enemy; otherwise one would have to expect harm to come to the victors.
A dance is given and a song is sung in which the slain enemy is mourned
and his forgiveness is implored: ‘Be not angry’, they say ‘because your
head is here with us; had we been less lucky, our heads might have been
exposed in your village. We have offered the sacrifice to appease you.
Your spirit may now rest and leave us at peace. Why were you our enemy?
Would it not have been better that we should remain friends? Then your
blood would not have been spilt and your head would not have been cut
off’”[46].

Similar customs are found among the Palu in Celebes; the Gallas
sacrifice to the spirits of their dead enemies before they return to
their home villages[47].

Other races have found methods of making friends, guardians and
protectors out of their former enemies after they are dead. This
consists in the tender treatment of the severed heads, of which many
wild tribes of Borneo boast. When the See-Dayaks of Sarawak bring home a
head from a war expedition, they treat it for months with the greatest
kindness and courtesy and address it with the most endearing names in
their language. The best morsels from their meals are put into its
mouth, together with titbits and cigars. The dead enemy is repeatedly
entreated to hate his former friends and to bestow his love upon his new
hosts because he has now become one of them. It would be a great mistake
to think that any derision is attached to this treatment, horrible
though it may seem to us[48].

Observers have been struck by the mourning for the enemy after he is
slain and scalped, among several of the wild tribe of North America.
When a Choctaw had killed an enemy he began a month’s mourning during
which he submitted himself to serious restrictions. The Dakota Indians
mourned in the same way. One authority mentions that the Osaga Indians
after mourning for their own dead mourned for their foes as if they had
been friends[49].

Before proceeding to the other classes of taboo customs for the
treatment of enemies, we must define our position in regard to a
pertinent objection. Both Frazer as well as other authorities may well
be quoted against us to show that the motive for these rules of
reconciliation is quite simple and has nothing to do with ‘ambivalence.’
These races are dominated by a superstitious fear of the spirits of the
slain, a fear which was also familiar to classical antiquity, and which
the great British dramatist brought upon the stage in the hallucinations
of Macbeth and Richard the Third. From this superstition all the
reconciliation rules as well as the restrictions and expiations which we
shall discuss later can be logically deduced; moreover, the ceremonies
included in the fourth group also argue for this interpretation, since
the only explanation of which they admit is the effort to drive away the
spirits of the slain which pursue the manslayers[50]. Besides, the
savages themselves directly admit their fear for the spirits of their
slain foes and trace back the taboo customs under discussion to this
fear.

This objection is certainly pertinent and if it were adequate as well we
would gladly spare ourselves the trouble of our attempt to find a
further explanation. We postpone the consideration of this objection
until later and for the present merely contrast it to the interpretation
derived from our previous discussion of taboo. All these rules of taboo
lead us to conclude that other impulses besides those that are merely
hostile find expression in the behaviour towards enemies. We see in them
manifestations of repentance, of regard for the enemy, and of a bad
conscience for having slain him. It seems that the commandment, Thou
shalt not slay, which could not be violated without punishment, existed
also among these savages, long before any legislation was received from
the hands of a god.

We now return to the remaining classes of taboo rules. The
_restrictions_ laid upon the victorious manslayer are unusually frequent
and are mostly of a serious nature. In Timor (compare the reconciliation
customs mentioned above) the leader of the expedition cannot return to
his house under any circumstances. A special hut is erected for him in
which he spends two months engaged in the observance of various rules of
purification. During this period he may not see his wife or nourish
himself; another person must put his food in his mouth.[51] Among some
Dayak tribes warriors returning from a successful expedition must remain
sequestered for several days and abstain from certain foods; they may
not touch iron and must remain away from their wives. In Logea, an
island near New Guinea, men who have killed an enemy or have taken part
in the killing, lock themselves up in their houses for a week. They
avoid every intercourse with their wives and friends, they do not touch
their victuals with their hands and live on nothing but vegetable foods
which are cooked for them in special dishes. As a reason for this last
restriction it is alleged that they must smell the blood of the slain,
otherwise they would sicken and die. Among the Toaripi-or
Motumotu-tribes in New Guinea a manslayer must not approach his wife and
must not touch his food with his fingers. A second person must feed him
with special food. This continues until the next new moon.

I avoid the complete enumeration of all the cases of restrictions of the
victorious slayer mentioned by Frazer, and emphasize only such cases in
which the character of taboo is especially noticeable or where the
restriction appears in connection with expiation, purification and
ceremonial.

Among the Monumbos in German New Guinea a man who has killed an enemy in
combat becomes ‘unclean’, the same word being employed which is applied
to women during menstruation or confinement. For a considerable period
he is not allowed to leave the men’s club-house, while the inhabitants
of his village gather about him and celebrate his victory with songs and
dances. He must not touch any one, not even his wife and children; if he
did so they would be afflicted with boils. He finally becomes clean
through washing and other ceremonies.

Among the Natchez in North America young warriors who had procured their
first scalp were bound for six months to the observance of certain
renunciations. They were not allowed to sleep with their wives or to eat
meat, and received only fish and maize pudding as nourishment. When a
Choctaw had killed and scalped an enemy he began a period of mourning
for one month, during which he was not allowed to comb his hair. When
his head itched he was not allowed to scratch it with his hand but used
a small stick for this purpose.

After a Pima Indian had killed an Apache he had to submit himself to
severe ceremonies of purification and expiation. During a fasting period
of sixteen days he was not allowed to touch meat or salt, to look at a
fire or to speak to any one. He lived alone in the woods, where he was
waited upon by an old woman who brought him a small allowance of food;
he often bathed in the nearest river, and carried a lump of clay on his
head as a sign of mourning. On the seventeenth day there took place a
public ceremony through which he and his weapons were solemnly purified.
As the Pima Indians took the manslayer taboo much more seriously than
their enemies and, unlike them, did not postpone expiation and
purification until the end of the expedition, their prowess in war
suffered very much through their moral severity or what might be called
their piety. In spite of their extraordinary bravery they proved to be
unsatisfactory allies to the Americans in their wars against the
Apaches.

The detail and variations of these expiatory and purifying ceremonies
after the killing of an enemy would be most interesting for purposes of
a more searching study, but I need not enumerate any more of them here
because they cannot furnish us with any new points of view. I might
mention that the temporary or permanent isolation of the professional
executioner, which was maintained up to our time, is a case in point.
The position of the ‘free-holder’ in mediæval society really conveys a
good idea of the ‘taboo’ of savages[52].

The current explanation of all these rules of reconciliation,
restriction, expiation and purification, combines two principles,
namely, the extension of the taboo of the dead to everything that has
come into contact with him, and the fear of the spirit of the slain. In
what combination these two elements are to explain the ceremonial,
whether they are to be considered as of equal value or whether one of
them is primary and the other secondary, and which one, is nowhere
stated, nor would this be an easy matter to decide. In contradistinction
to all this we emphasize the unity which our interpretation gains by
deducing all these rules from the ambivalence of the emotion of savages
towards their enemies.


(_B_) THE TABOO OF RULERS

The behaviour of primitive races towards their chiefs, kings, and
priests, is controlled by two principles which seem rather to supplement
than to contradict each other. They must both be guarded and be guarded
against[53].

Both objects are accomplished through innumerable rules of taboo. Why
one must guard against rulers is already known to us; because they are
the bearers of that mysterious and dangerous magic power which
communicates itself by contact, like an electric charge, bringing death
and destruction to any one not protected by a similar charge. All direct
or indirect contact with this dangerous sacredness is therefore avoided,
and where it cannot be avoided a ceremonial has been found to ward off
the dreaded consequences. The Nubas in East Africa, for instance,
believe that they must die if they enter the house of their
priest-king, but that they escape this danger if, on entering, they bare
the left shoulder and induce the king to touch it with his hand. Thus we
have the remarkable case of the king’s touch becoming the healing and
protective measure against the very dangers that arise from contact with
the king; but it is probably a question of the healing power of the
intentional touching on the king’s part in contradistinction to the
danger of touching him, in other words, of the opposition between
passivity and activity towards the king.

Where the healing power of the royal touch is concerned we do not have
to look for examples among savages. In comparatively recent times the
kings of England exercised this power upon scrofula, whence it was
called ‘The King’s Evil’. Neither Queen Elizabeth nor any of her
successors renounced this part of the royal prerogative. Charles I is
said to have healed a hundred sufferers at one time, in the year 1633.
Under his dissolute son Charles II, after the great English revolution
had passed, royal healings of scrofula attained their greatest vogue.

This king is said to have touched close to a hundred thousand victims of
scrofula in the course of his reign. The crush of those seeking to be
cured used to be so great that on one occasion six or seven patients
suffered death by suffocation instead of being healed. The sceptical
king of Orange, William III, who became king of England after the
banishment of the Stuarts, refused to exercise the spell; on the one
occasion when he consented to practise the touch, he did so with words:
“May God give you better health and more sense”[54].

The following account will bear witness to the terrible effect of
touching by virtue of which a person, even though unintentionally,
becomes active against his king or against what belongs to him. A chief
of high rank and great holiness in New Zealand happened to leave the
remains of his meal by the roadside. A young slave came along, a strong
healthy fellow, who saw what was left over and started to eat it. Hardly
had he finished when a horrified spectator informed him of his offence
in eating the meal of the chief. The man had been a strong, brave
warrior, but as soon as he heard this he collapsed and was afflicted by
terrible convulsions, from which he died towards sunset of the following
day[55]. A Maori woman ate a certain fruit and then learned that it came
from a place on which there was a taboo. She cried out that the spirit
of the chief whom she had thus offended would surely kill her. This
incident occurred in the afternoon, and on the next day at twelve
o’clock she was dead[56]. The tinder box of a Maori chief once cost
several persons their lives. The chief had lost it, and those who found
it used it to light their pipes. When they learned whose property the
tinder box was they all died of fright[57].

It is hardly astonishing that the need was felt to isolate dangerous
persons like chiefs and priests, by building a wall around them which
made them inaccessible to others. We surmise that this wall, which
originally was constructed out of taboo rules, still exists to-day in
the form of court ceremony.

But probably the greater part of this taboo of the rulers cannot be
traced back to the need of guarding against them. The other point of
view in the treatment of privileged persons, the need of guarding them
from dangers with which they are threatened, has had a distinct share in
the creation of taboo and therefore of the origin of court etiquette.

The necessity of guarding the king from every conceivable danger arises
from his great importance for the weal and woe of his subjects. Strictly
speaking, he is a person who regulates the course of the world; his
people have to thank him not only for rain and sunshine, which allow the
fruits of the earth to grow, but also for the wind which brings the
ships to their shores and for the solid ground on which they set their
feet[58].

These savage kings are endowed with a wealth of power and an ability to
bestow happiness which only gods possess; certainly in later stages of
civilization none but the most servile courtiers would play the
hypocrite to the extent of crediting their sovereigns with the
possession of attributes similar to these.

It seems like an obvious contradiction that persons of such perfection
of power should themselves require the greatest care to guard them
against threatening dangers, but this is not the only contradiction
revealed in the treatment of royal persons on the part of savages. These
races consider it necessary to watch over their kings to see that they
use their powers in the right way; they are by no means sure of their
good intentions or of their conscientiousness. A strain of mistrust is
mingled with the motivation of the taboo rules for the king. “The idea
that early kingdoms are despotisms”, says Frazer[59], “in which the
people exist only for the sovereign, is wholly inapplicable to the
monarchies we are considering. On the contrary, the sovereign in them
exists only for his subjects: his life is only valuable so long as he
discharges the duties of his position by ordering the course of nature
for his people’s benefit. So soon as he fails to do so, the care, the
devotion, the religious homage which they had hitherto lavished on him
cease and are changed into hatred and contempt; he is ignominiously
dismissed and may be thankful if he escapes with his life. Worshipped as
a god one day, he is killed as a criminal the next. But in this changed
behaviour of the people there is nothing capricious or inconsistent. On
the contrary, their conduct is quite consistent. If their king is their
god he is or should be, also their preserver; and if he will not
preserve them he must make room for another who will. So long, however,
as he answers their expectations, there is no limit to the care which
they take of him, and which they compel him to take of himself. A king
of this sort lives hedged in by ceremonious etiquette, a network of
prohibitions and observances, of which the intention is not to
contribute to his dignity, much less to his comfort, but to restrain him
from conduct which, by disturbing the harmony of nature, might involve
himself, his people, and the universe in one common catastrophe. Far
from adding to his comfort, these observances, by trammelling his every
act, annihilate his freedom and often render the very life, which it is
their object to preserve, a burden and sorrow to him.”

One of the most glaring examples of thus fettering and paralysing a holy
ruler through taboo ceremonial seems to have been reached in the life
routine of the Mikado of Japan, as it existed in earlier centuries. A
description which is now over two hundred years old[60] relates: “He
thinks that it would be very prejudicial to his dignity and holiness to
touch the ground with his feet; for this reason when he intends to go
anywhere, he must be carried thither on men’s shoulders. Much less will
they suffer that he should expose his sacred person to the open air, and
the sun is not thought worthy to shine on his head. There is such a
holiness ascribed to all the parts of his body that he dares to cut off
neither his hair, nor his beard, nor his nails. However, lest he should
grow too dirty, they may clean him in the night when he is asleep;
because they say that what is taken from his body at that time, hath
been stolen from him, and that such a theft does not prejudice his
holiness or dignity. In ancient times, he was obliged to sit on the
throne for some hours every morning, with the imperial crown on his
head; but to sit altogether like a statue without stirring either hands
or feet, head or eyes, nor indeed any part of his body, because by this
means it was thought that he could preserve peace and tranquillity in
his empire; for if unfortunately, he turned himself on one side or
other, or if he looked a good while towards any part of his dominion, it
was apprehended that war, famine, fire or some other great misfortune
was near at hand to desolate the country.”

Some of the taboos to which barbarian kings are subject vividly recall
the restrictions placed on murderers. On Shark Point at Cape Padron in
Lower Guinea (West Africa), a priest-king called Kukulu lives alone in a
woods. He is not allowed to touch a woman or to leave his house and
cannot even rise out of his chair, in which he must sleep in a sitting
position. If he should lie down the wind would cease and shipping would
be disturbed. It is his function to keep storms in check, and in
general, to see to an even, healthy condition of the atmosphere[61]. The
more powerful a king of Loango is, says Bastian, the more taboos he must
observe. The heir to the throne is also bound to them from childhood on;
they accumulate about him while he is growing up, and by the time of
his accession he is suffocated by them.

Our interest in the matter does not require us to take up more space to
describe more fully the taboos that cling to royal and priestly dignity.
We merely add that restrictions as to freedom of movement and diet play
the main rôle among them. But two examples of taboo ceremonial taken
from civilized nations, and therefore from much higher stages of
culture, will indicate to what an extent association with these
privileged persons tends to preserve ancient customs.

The Flamen _Dialis_, the high-priest of Jupiter in Rome, had to observe
an extraordinarily large number of taboo rules. He was not allowed to
ride, to see a horse or an armed man, to wear a ring that was not
broken, to have a knot in his garments, to touch wheat flour or leaven,
or even to mention by name a goat, a dog, raw meat, beans and ivy; his
hair could only be cut by a free man and with a bronze knife, his hair
combings and nail parings had to be buried under a lucky tree; he could
not touch the dead, go into the open with bare head, and similar
prohibitions. His wife, the Flaminica, also had her own prohibitions:
she was not allowed to ascend more than three steps on a certain kind of
stairs and on certain holidays she could not comb her hair; the leather
for her shoes could not be taken from any animal that had died a
natural death but only from one that had been slaughtered or sacrificed;
when she heard thunder she was unclean until she had made an expiatory
sacrifice[62].

The old kings of Ireland were subject to a series of very curious
restrictions, the observance of which was expected to bring every
blessing to the country while their violation entailed every form of
evil. The complete description of these taboos is given in the _Book of
Rights_, of which the oldest manuscript copies bear the dates 1890 and
1418. The prohibitions are very detailed and concern certain activities
at specified places and times; in some cities, for instance, the king
cannot stay on a certain day of the week, while at some specified hour
this or that river may not be crossed, or again there is a plane on
which he cannot camp a full nine days, etc.[63]

Among many savage races the severity of the taboo restrictions for the
priest-kings has had results of historic importance which are especially
interesting from our point of view. The honour of being a priest-king
ceased to be desirable; the person in line for the succession often used
every means to escape it. Thus in Combodscha, where there is a fire and
water king, it is often necessary to use force to compel the successor
to accept the honour. On Niue or Savage Island, a coral island in the
Pacific Ocean, monarchy actually came to an end because nobody was
willing to undertake the responsible and dangerous office. In some parts
of West Africa a general council is held after the death of the king to
determine upon the successor. The man on whom the choice falls is
seized, tied and kept in custody in the fetish house until he has
declared himself willing to accept the crown. Sometimes the presumptive
successor to the throne finds ways and means to avoid the intended
honour; thus it is related of a certain chief that he used to go armed
day and night and resist by force every attempt to place him on the
throne[64]. Among the negroes of Sierra Leone the resistance against
accepting the kingly honour was so great that most of the tribes were
compelled to make strangers their kings.

Frazer makes these conditions responsible for the fact that in the
development of history a separation of the original priest-kingship into
a spiritual and a secular power finally took place. Kings, crushed by
the burden of their holiness, became incapable of exercising their power
over real things and had to leave this to inferior but executive persons
who were willing to renounce the honours of royal dignity. From these
there grew up the secular rulers, while the spiritual over-lordship,
which was now of no practical importance, was left to the former taboo
kings. It is well known to what extent this hypothesis finds
confirmation in the history of old Japan.

A survey of the picture of the relations of primitive peoples to their
rulers gives rise to the expectation that our advance from description
to psychoanalytic understanding will not be difficult. These relations
are of an involved nature and are not free from contradictions. Rulers
are granted great privileges which are practically cancelled by taboo
prohibitions in regard to other privileges. They are privileged persons,
they can do or enjoy what is withheld from the rest through taboo. But
in contrast to this freedom they are restricted by other taboos which do
not affect the ordinary individual. Here, therefore, is the first
contrast, which amounts almost to a contradiction, between an excess of
freedom and an excess of restriction as applied to the same persons.
They are credited with extraordinary magic powers, and contact with
their person or their property is therefore feared, while on the other
hand the most beneficial effect is expected from these contacts. This
seems to be a second and an especially glaring contradiction; but we
have already learned that it is only apparent. The king’s touch,
exercised by him with benevolent intention, heals and protects; it is
only when a common man touches the king or his royal effects that the
contact becomes dangerous, and this is probably because the act may
recall aggressive tendencies. Another contradiction which is not so
easily solved is expressed in the fact that great power over the
processes of nature is ascribed to the ruler and yet the obligation is
felt to guard him with especial care against threatening dangers, as if
his own power, which can do so much, were incapable of accomplishing
this. A further difficulty in the relation arises because there is no
confidence that the ruler will use his tremendous power to the advantage
of his subjects as well as for his own protection; he is therefore
distrusted and surveillance over him is considered to be justified. The
taboo etiquette, to which the life of the king is subject,
simultaneously serves all these objects of exercising a tutelage over
the king, of guarding him against dangers and of guarding his subjects
against danger which he brings to them.

We are inclined to give the following explanation of the complicated and
contradictory relation of the primitive peoples to their rulers. Through
superstition as well as through other motives, various tendencies find
expression in the treatment of kings, each of which is developed to the
extreme without regard to the other. As a result of this, contradictions
arise at which the intellect of savages takes no more offence than a
highly civilized person would as long as it is only a question of
religious matters or of ‘loyalty’.

That would be so far so good; but the psychoanalytic technique may
enable us to penetrate more deeply into the matter and to add something
about the nature of these various tendencies. If we subject the facts as
stated to analysis, just as if they formed the symptoms of a neurosis,
our first attention would be directed to the excess of anxious worry
which is said to be the cause of the taboo ceremonial. The occurrence of
such excessive tenderness is very common in the neurosis and especially
in the compulsion neurosis upon which we are drawing primarily for our
comparison. We now thoroughly understand the origin of this tenderness.
It occurs wherever, besides the predominant tenderness, there exists a
contrary but unconscious stream of hostility, that is to say, wherever
the typical case of an ambivalent affective attitude is realized. The
hostility is then cried down by an excessive increase of tenderness
which is expressed as anxiety and becomes compulsive because otherwise
it would not suffice for its task of keeping the unconscious opposition
in a state of repression. Every psychoanalyst knows how infallibly this
anxious excess of tenderness can be resolved even under the most
improbable circumstances, as for instance, when it appears between
mother and child, or in the case of affectionate married people. Applied
to the treatment of privileged persons this theory of an ambivalent
feeling would reveal that their veneration, their very deification, is
opposed in the unconscious by an intense hostile tendency, so that, as
we had expected, the situation of an ambivalent feeling is here
realized. The distrust which certainly seems to contribute to the
motivation of the royal taboo, would be another direct manifestation of
the same unconscious hostility. Indeed the ultimate issues of this
conflict show such a diversity among different races that we would not
be at a loss for examples in which the proof of such hostility would be
much easier. We learn from Frazer[65] that the savage Timmes of Sierra
Leone reserve the right to administer a beating to their elected king on
the evening before his coronation, and that they make use of this
constitutional right with such thoroughness that the unhappy ruler
sometimes does not long survive his accession to the throne; for this
reason the leaders of the race have made it a rule to elect some man
against whom they have a particular grudge. Nevertheless, even in such
glaring cases the hostility is not acknowledged as such, but is
expressed as if it were a ceremonial.

Another trait in the attitude of primitive races towards their rulers
recalls a mechanism which is universally present in mental disturbances,
and is openly revealed in the so-called delusions of persecution. Here
the importance of a particular person is extraordinarily heightened and
his omnipotence is raised to the improbable in order to make it easier
to attribute to him the responsibility for everything painful which
happens to the patient. Savages really do not act differently towards
their rulers when they ascribe to them power over rain and shine, wind
and weather, and then dethrone or kill them because nature has
disappointed their expectation of a good hunt or a ripe harvest. The
prototype which the paranoiac reconstructs in his persecution mania, is
found in the relation of the child to its father. Such omnipotence is
regularly attributed to the father in the imagination of the son, and
distrust of the father has been shown to be intimately connected with
the highest esteem for him. When a paranoiac names a person of his
acquaintance as his ‘persecutor’, he thereby elevates him to the
paternal succession and brings him under conditions which enable him to
make him responsible for all the misfortune which he experiences. Thus
this second analogy between the savage and the neurotic may allow us to
surmise how much in the relation of the savage to his ruler arises from
the infantile attitude of the child to its father.

But the strongest support for our point of view, which seeks to compare
taboo prohibitions with neurotic symptoms, is to be found in the taboo
ceremonial itself, the significance of which for the status of kinship
has already been the subject of our previous discussion. This ceremonial
unmistakably reveals its double meaning and its origin from ambivalent
tendencies if only we are willing to assume that the effects it produces
are those which it intended from the very beginning. It not only
distinguishes kings and elevates them above all ordinary mortals, but it
also makes their life a torture and an unbearable burden and forces them
into a thraldom which is far worse than that of their subjects. It would
thus be the correct counterpart to the compulsive action of the
neurosis, in which the suppressed impulse and the impulse which
suppresses it meet in mutual and simultaneous satisfaction. The
compulsive action is nominally a protection against the forbidden
action; but we would say that actually it is a repetition of what is
forbidden. The word ‘nominally’ is here applied to the conscious whereas
the word ‘actually’ applies to the unconscious instance of the psychic
life. Thus also the taboo ceremonial of kings is nominally an expression
of the highest veneration and a means of guarding them; actually it is
the punishment for their elevation, the revenge which their subjects
take upon them. The experiences which Cervantes makes Sancho Panza
undergo as governor on his island have evidently made him recognize this
interpretation of courtly ceremonial as the only correct one. It is very
possible that this point would be corroborated if we could induce kings
and rulers of to-day to express themselves on this point.

Why the emotional attitude towards rulers should contain such a strong
unconscious share of hostility is a very interesting problem which,
however, exceeds the scope of this book. We have already referred to the
infantile father-complex; we may add that an investigation of the early
history of kingship would bring the decisive explanations. Frazer has an
impressive discussion of the theory that the first kings were strangers
who, after a short reign, were destined to be sacrificed at solemn
festivals as representatives of the deity; but Frazer himself does not
consider his facts altogether convincing[66]. Christian myths are said
to have been still influenced by the after-effects of this evolution of
kings.


(_C_) THE TABOO OF THE DEAD

We know that the dead are mighty rulers: we may be surprised to learn
that they are regarded as enemies.

Among most primitive people the taboo of the dead displays, if we may
keep to our infection analogy, a peculiar virulence. It manifests itself
in the first place, in the consequences which result from contact with
the dead, and in the treatment of the mourners for the dead. Among the
Maori any one who had touched a corpse or who had taken part in its
interment, became extremely unclean and was almost cut off from
intercourse with his fellow beings; he was, as we say, boycotted. He
could not enter a house, or approach persons or objects without
infecting them with the same properties. He could not even touch his
food with his own hands, which were now unclean and therefore quite
useless to him. His food was put on the ground and he had no alternative
except to seize it as best he could, with his lips and teeth, while he
held his hands behind on his back. Occasionally he could be fed by
another person who helped him to his food with outstretched arms so as
not to touch the unfortunate one himself, but this assistant was then in
turn subjected to almost equally oppressive restrictions. Almost every
village contained some altogether disreputable individual, ostracized by
society, whose wretched existence depended upon people’s charity. This
creature alone was allowed within arm’s length of a person who had
fulfilled the last duty towards the deceased. But as soon as the period
of segregation was over and the person rendered unclean through the
corpse could again mingle with his fellow-beings, all the dishes which
he had used during the dangerous period were broken and all his clothing
was thrown away.

The taboo customs after bodily contact with the dead are the same all
over Polynesia, in Melanesia, and in a part of Africa; their most
constant feature is the prohibition against handling one’s food and the
consequent necessity of being fed by somebody else. It is noteworthy
that in Polynesia, or perhaps only in Hawaii[67], priest-kings were
subject to the same restrictions during the exercise of holy functons.
In the taboo of the dead on the Island of Tonga the abatement and
gradual abolition of the prohibitions through the individual’s own
taboo power are clearly shown. A person who touched the corpse of a dead
chieftain was unclean for ten months; but if he was himself a chief, he
was unclean for only three, four, or five months, according to the rank
of the deceased; if it was the corpse of the idolized head-chief even
the greatest chiefs became taboo for ten months. These savages are so
certain that any one who violates these taboo rules must become
seriously ill and die, that according to the opinion of an observer,
they have never yet dared to convince themselves of the contrary[68].

The taboo restrictions imposed upon persons whose contact with the dead
is to be understood in the transferred sense, namely the mourning
relatives such as widows and widowers, are essentially the same as those
mentioned above, but they are of greater interest for the point we are
trying to make. In the rules hitherto mentioned we see only the typical
expression of the virulence and power of diffusion of the taboo; in
those about to be cited we catch a gleam of the motives, including both
the ostensible ones and those which may be regarded as the underlying
and genuine motives.

Among the Shuswap in British-Columbia widows and widowers have to
remain segregated during their period of mourning; they must not use
their hands to touch the body or the head and all utensils used by them
must not be used by any one else. No hunter will want to approach the
hut in which such mourners live, for that would bring misfortune; if the
shadow of one of the mourners should fall on him he would become ill.
The mourners sleep on thorn bushes, with which they also surround their
beds. This last precaution is meant to keep off the spirit of the
deceased; plainer still is the reported custom of other North American
tribes where the widow, after the death of her husband, has to wear a
kind of trousers of dried grass in order to make herself inaccessible to
the approach of the spirit. Thus it is quite obvious that touching ‘in
the transferred sense’ is after all understood only as bodily contact,
since the spirit of the deceased does not leave his kin and does not
desist from ‘hovering about them’, during the period of mourning.

Among the Agutainos, who live on Palawan, one of the Philippine Islands,
a widow may not leave her hut for the first seven or eight days after
her husband’s death, except at night, when she need not expect
encounters. Whoever sees her is in danger of immediate death and
therefore she herself warns others of her approach by hitting the trees
with a wooden stick with every step she takes; these trees all wither.
Another observation explains the nature of the danger inherent in a
widow. In the district of Mekeo, British New Guinea, a widower forfeits
all civil rights and lives like an outlaw. He may not tend a garden, or
show himself in public, or enter the village or go on the street. He
slinks about like an animal, in the high grass or in the bushes, and
must hide in a thicket if he sees anybody, especially a woman,
approaching. This last hint makes it easy for us to trace back the
danger of the widower or widow to the danger of temptation. The husband
who has lost his wife must evade the desire for a substitute; the widow
has to contend with the same wish, and beside this, she may arouse the
desire of other men because she is without a master. Every such
satisfaction through a substitute runs contrary to the intention of
mourning and would cause the anger of the spirit to flare up[69].

One of the most surprising, but at the same time one of the most
instructive taboo customs of mourning among primitive races is the
prohibition against pronouncing the _name_ of the deceased. This is
very widespread, and has been subjected to many modifications with
important consequences.

Aside from the Australians and the Polynesians, who usually show us
taboo customs in their best state of preservation, we also find this
prohibition among races so far apart and unrelated to each other as the
Samojedes in Siberia and the Todas in South India, the Mongolians of
Tartary and the Tuaregs of the Sahara, the Aino of Japan and the Akamba
and Nandi in Central Africa, the Tinguanes in the Philippines and the
inhabitants of the Nikobari Islands and of Madagascar and Borneo[70].
Among some of these races the prohibition and its consequences hold good
only for the period of mourning while in others it remains permanent;
but in all cases it seems to diminish with the lapse of time after the
death.

The avoidance of the name of the deceased is as a rule kept up with
extraordinary severity. Thus, among many South American tribes, it is
considered the gravest insult to the survivors to pronounce the name of
the deceased in their presence, and the penalty set for it is no less
than that for the slaying itself[71]. At first it is not easy to guess
why the mention of the name should be so abominated, but the dangers
associated with it have called into being a whole series of interesting
and important expedients to avoid this. Thus the Masai in Africa have
hit upon the evasion of changing the name of the deceased immediately
upon his death; he may now be mentioned without dread by this new name,
while all the prohibitions remain attached to the old name. It seems to
be assumed that the ghost does not know his new name and will not find
it out. The Australian tribes on Adelaide and Encounter Bay are so
consistently cautious that when a death occurs almost every person who
has the same name as the deceased or a very similar one, exchanges it
for another. Sometimes by a further extension of the same idea as seen
among several tribes in Victoria and in North America all the relatives
of the deceased change their names regardless of whether their names
resemble the name of the deceased in sound. Among the Guaycuru in
Paraguay the chief used to give new names to all the members of the
tribe, on such sad occasions, which they then remembered as if they had
always had them[72].

Furthermore, if the deceased had the same name as an animal or object,
etc., some of the races just enumerated thought it necessary to give
these animals and objects new names, in order not to be reminded of the
deceased when they mentioned them. Through this there must have resulted
a never ceasing change of vocabulary, which caused a good deal of
difficulty for the missionaries, especially where the interdiction upon
a name was permanent. In the seven years which the missionary
Dobrizhofer spent among the Abipons in Paraguay, the name for jaguar was
changed three times and the words for crocodile, thorns and animal
slaughter underwent a similar fate[73]. But the dread of pronouncing a
name which has belonged to a deceased person extends also to the mention
of everything in which the deceased had any part, and a further
important result of this process of suppression is that these races have
no tradition or any historical reminiscences, so that we encounter the
greatest difficulties in investigating their past history. Among a
number of these primitive races compensating customs have also been
established in order to re-awaken the names of the deceased after a long
period of mourning; they are bestowed upon children who were regarded as
reincarnations of the dead.

The strangeness of this taboo on names diminishes if we bear in mind
that the savage looks upon his name as an essential part and an
important possession of his personality, and that he ascribes the full
significance of things to words. Our children do the same, as I have
shown elsewhere, and therefore they are never satisfied with accepting a
meaningless verbal similarity, but consistently conclude that when two
things have identical names a deeper correspondence between them must
exist. Numerous peculiarities of normal behaviour may lead civilized man
to conclude that he too is not yet as far removed as he thinks from
attributing the importance of things to mere names and feeling that his
name has become peculiarly identified with his person. This is
corroborated by psychoanalytic experiences, where there is much occasion
to point out the importance of names in unconscious thought
activity[74]. As was to be expected, the compulsion neurotics behave
just like savages in regard to names. They show the full ‘complex
sensitiveness’ towards the utterance and hearing of special words (as do
also other neurotics) and derive a good many, often serious, inhibitions
from their treatment of their own name. One of these taboo patients whom
I knew, had adopted the avoidance of writing down her name for fear that
it might get into somebody’s hands who thus would come into possession
of a piece of her personality. In her frenzied faithfulness, which she
needed to protect herself against the temptations of her phantasy, she
had created for herself the commandment, ‘not to give away anything of
her personality’. To this belonged first of all her name, then by
further application her hand-writing, so that she finally gave up
writing.

Thus it no longer seems strange to us that savages should consider a
dead person’s name as a part of his personality and that it should be
subjected to the same taboo as the deceased. Calling a dead person by
name can also be traced back to contact with him, so that we can turn
our attention to the more inclusive problem of why this contact is
visited with such a severe taboo.

The nearest explanation would point to the natural horror which a corpse
inspires, especially in view of the changes so soon noticeable after
death. Mourning for a dead person must also be considered as a
sufficient motive for everything which has reference to him. But horror
of the corpse evidently does not cover all the details of taboo rules,
and mourning can never explain to us why the mention of the dead is a
severe insult to his survivors. On the contrary, mourning loves to
preoccupy itself with the deceased, to elaborate his memory, and
preserve it for the longest possible time. Something besides mourning
must be made responsible for the peculiarities of taboo customs,
something which evidently serves a different purpose. It is this very
taboo on names which reveals this still unknown motive, and if the
customs did not tell us about it we would find it out from the
statements of the mourning savages themselves.

For they do not conceal the fact that they fear the presence and the
return of the spirit of a dead person; they practise a host of
ceremonies to keep him off and banish him[75]. They look upon the
mention of his name as a conjuration which must result in his immediate
presence[76]. They therefore consistently do everything to avoid
conjuring and awakening a dead person. They disguise themselves in order
that the spirit may not recognize them[77], they distort either his name
or their own, and become infuriated when a ruthless stranger incites the
spirit against his survivors by mentioning his name. We can hardly avoid
the conclusion that they suffer, according to Wundt’s expression, from
the fear of “his soul now turned into a demon,”[78].

With this understanding we approach Wundt’s conception who, as we have
heard, sees the nature of taboo in the fear of demons.

The assumption which this theory makes, namely, that immediately after
death the beloved member of a family becomes a demon, from whom the
survivors have nothing but hostility to expect, so that they must
protect themselves by every means from his evil desires, is so peculiar
that our first impulse is not to believe it. Yet almost all competent
authors agree as to this interpretation of primitive races.
Westermarck[79], who, in my opinion, gives altogether too little
consideration to taboo, makes this statement: “On the whole facts lead
me to conclude that the dead are more frequently regarded as enemies
than as friends and that Jevons and Grant Allen are wrong in their
assertion that it was formerly believed that the malevolence of the dead
was as a rule directed only against strangers, while they were
paternally concerned about the life and welfare of their descendants
and the members of their clan.”

R. Kleinpaul has written an impressive book in which he makes use of the
remnants of the old belief in souls among civilized races to show the
relation between the living and the dead[80]. According to him too, this
relation culminates in the conviction that the dead, thirsting for
blood, draw the living after them. The living did not feel themselves
safe from the persecutions of the dead until a body of water had been
put between them. That is why it was preferred to bury the dead on
islands or to bring them to the other side of a river: the expressions
‘here’ and ‘beyond’ originated in this way. Later moderation has
restricted the malevolence of the dead to those categories where a
peculiar right to feel rancour had to be admitted, such as the murdered
who pursue their murderer as evil spirits, and those who, like brides,
had died with their longings unsatisfied. Kleinpaul believes that
originally, however, the dead were all vampires, who bore ill-will to
the living, and strove to harm them and deprive them of life. It was the
corpse that first furnished the conception of an evil spirit.

The hypothesis that those whom we love best turn into demons after
death obviously allows us to put a further question. What prompted
primitive races to ascribe such a change of sentiment to the beloved
dead? Why did they make demons out of them? According to Westermarck
this question is easily answered[81]. “As death is usually considered
the worst calamity that can overtake man, it is believed that the
deceased are very dissatisfied with their lot. Primitive races believe
that death comes only through being slain, whether by violence or by
magic, and this is considered already sufficient reason for the soul to
be vindictive and irritable. The soul presumably envies the living and
longs for the company of its former kin; we can therefore understand
that the soul should seek to kill with them diseases in order to be
re-united with them....

“ ...A further explanation of the malevolence ascribed to souls lies in
the instinctive fear of them, which is itself the result of the fear of
death.”

Our study of psychoneurotic disturbances points to a more comprehensive
explanation, which includes that of Westermarck.

When a wife loses her husband, or a daughter her mother, it not
infrequently happens that the survivor is afflicted with tormenting
scruples, called ‘obsessive reproaches’ which raises the question
whether she herself has not been guilty through carelessness or neglect,
of the death of the beloved person. No recalling of the care with which
she nursed the invalid, or direct refutation of the asserted guilt can
put an end to the torture, which is the pathological expression of
mourning and which in time slowly subsides. Psychoanalytic investigation
of such cases has made us acquainted with the secret mainsprings of this
affliction. We have ascertained that these obsessive reproaches are in a
certain sense justified and therefore are immune to refutation or
objections. Not that the mourner has really been guilty of the death or
that she has really been careless, as the obsessive reproach asserts;
but still there was something in her, a wish of which she herself was
unaware, which was not displeased with the fact that death came, and
which would have brought it about sooner had it been strong enough. The
reproach now reacts against this unconscious wish after the death of the
beloved person. Such hostility, hidden in the unconscious behind tender
love, exists in almost all cases of intensive emotional allegiance to a
particular person, indeed it represents the classic case, the prototype
of the ambivalence of human emotions. There is always more or less of
this ambivalence in everybody’s disposition; normally it is not strong
enough to give rise to the obsessive reproaches we have described. But
where there is abundant predisposition for it, it manifests itself in
the relation to those we love most, precisely where you would least
expect it. The disposition to compulsion neurosis which we have so often
taken for comparison with taboo problems, is distinguished by a
particularly high degree of this original ambivalence of emotions.

We now know how to explain the supposed demonism of recently departed
souls and the necessity of being protected against their hostility
through taboo rules. By assuming a similar high degree of ambivalence in
the emotional life of primitive races such as psychoanalysis ascribes to
persons suffering from compulsion neurosis, it becomes comprehensible
that the same kind of reaction against the hostility latent in the
unconscious behind the obsessive reproaches of the neurotic should also
be necessary here after the painful loss has occurred. But this
hostility which is painfully felt in the unconscious in the form of
satisfaction with the demise, experiences a different fate in the case
of primitive man: the defence against it is accomplished by displacement
upon the object of hostility, namely the dead. We call this defence
process, frequent both in normal and diseased psychic life, a
_projection_. The survivor will deny that he has ever entertained
hostile impulses toward the beloved dead; but now the soul of the
deceased entertains them and will try to give vent to them during the
entire period of mourning. In spite of the successful defence through
projection, the punitive and remorseful character of this emotional
reaction manifests itself in being afraid, in self-imposed renunciations
and in subjection to restrictions which are partly disguised as
protective measures against the hostile demon. Thus we find again that
taboo has grown out of the soil of an ambivalent emotional attitude. The
taboo of the dead also originates from the opposition between the
conscious grief and the unconscious satisfaction at death. If this is
the origin of the resentment of spirits it is self-evident that just the
nearest and formerly most beloved survivors have to fear it most.

As in neurotic symptoms, the taboo regulations also evince opposite
feelings. Their restrictive character expresses mourning, while they
also betray very clearly what they are trying to conceal, namely, the
hostility towards the dead, which is now motivated as self-defence. We
have learnt to understand part of the taboo regulations as temptation
fears. A dead person is defenceless, which must act as an incitement to
satisfy hostile desires entertained against him; this temptation has to
be opposed by the prohibition.

But Westermarck is right in not admitting any difference in the savage’s
conception between those who have died by violence and those who have
died a natural death. As will be shown later[82], in the unconscious
mode of thinking even a natural death is perceived as murder; the person
was killed by evil wishes. Any one interested in the origin and meaning
of dreams dealing with the death of dear relatives such as parents and
brothers and sisters will find that the same feeling of ambivalence is
responsible for the fact that the dreamer, the child, and the savage all
have the same attitude towards the dead[83].

A little while ago we challenged Wundt’s conception, who explains the
nature of taboo through the fear of demons, and yet we have just agreed
with the explanation which traces back the taboo of the dead to a fear
of the soul of the dead after it has turned into a demon. This seems
like a contradiction, but it will not be difficult for us to explain it.
It is true that we have accepted the idea of demons, but we know that
this assumption is not something final which psychology cannot resolve
into further elements. We have, as it were, exposed the demons by
recognizing them as mere projections of hostile feelings which the
survivor entertains towards the dead.

The double feeling--tenderness and hostility--against the deceased,
which we consider well founded, endeavours to assert itself at the time
of bereavement as mourning and satisfaction. A conflict must ensue
between these contrary feelings, and as one of them, namely the
hostility, is altogether or for the greater part unconscious, the
conflict cannot result in a conscious difference in the form of
hostility or tenderness as, for instance, when we forgive an injury
inflicted upon us by some one we love. The process usually adjusts
itself through a special psychic mechanism, which is designated in
psychoanalysis as _projection_. This unknown hostility, of which we are
ignorant and of which we do not wish to know, is projected from our
inner perception into the outer world and is thereby detached from our
own person and attributed to the other. Not we, the survivors, rejoice
because we are rid of the deceased, on the contrary, we mourn for him;
but now, curiously enough, he has become an evil demon who would rejoice
in our misfortune and who seeks our death. The survivors must now defend
themselves against this evil enemy; they are freed from inner
oppression, but they have only succeeded in exchanging it for an
affliction from without.

It is not to be denied that this process of projection, which turns the
dead into malevolent enemies, finds some support in the real hostilities
of the dead which the survivors remember and with which they really can
reproach the dead. These hostilities are harshness, the desire to
dominate, injustice, and whatever else forms the background of even the
most tender relations between men. But the process cannot be so simple
that this factor alone could explain the origin of demons by projection.
The offences of the dead certainly motivate in part the hostility of the
survivors, but they would have been ineffective if they had not given
rise to this hostility and the occasion of death would surely be the
least suitable occasion for awakening the memory of the reproaches which
justly could have been brought against the deceased. We cannot dispense
with the unconscious hostility as the constant and really impelling
motive. This hostile tendency towards those nearest and dearest could
remain latent during their lifetime, that is to say, it could avoid
betraying itself to consciousness either directly or indirectly through
any substitutive formation. However, when the person who was
simultaneously loved and hated died, this was no longer possible, and
the conflict became acute. The mourning originating from the enhanced
tenderness, became on the one hand more intolerant of the latent
hostility, while on the other hand it could not tolerate that the latter
should not give origin to a feeling of pure gratification. Thus there
came about the repression of the unconscious hostility through
projection, and the formation of the ceremonial in which fear of
punishment by demons finds expression. With the termination of the
period of mourning, the conflict also loses its acuteness so that the
taboo of the dead can be abated or sink into oblivion.


4

Having thus explained the basis on which the very instructive taboo of
the dead has grown up, we must not miss the opportunity of adding a few
observations which may become important for the understanding of taboo
in general.

The projection of unconscious hostility upon demons in the taboo of the
dead is only a single example from a whole series of processes to which
we must grant the greatest influence in the formation of primitive
psychic life. In the foregoing case the mechanism of projection is used
to settle an emotional conflict; it serves the same purpose in a large
number of psychic situations which lead to neuroses. But projection is
not specially created for the purpose of defence, it also comes into
being where there are no conflicts. The projection of inner perceptions
to the outside is a primitive mechanism which, for instance, also
influences our sense-perceptions, so that it normally has the greatest
share in shaping our outer world. Under conditions that have not yet
been sufficiently determined even inner perceptions of ideational and
emotional processes are projected outwardly, like sense perceptions, and
are used to shape the outer world, whereas they ought to remain in the
inner world. This is perhaps genetically connected with the fact that
the function of attention was originally directed not towards the inner
world, but to the stimuli streaming in from the outer world, and only
received reports of pleasure and pain from the endopsychic processes.
Only with the development of the language of abstract thought through
the association of sensory remnants of word representations with inner
processes, did the latter gradually become capable of perception. Before
this took place primitive man had developed a picture of the outer world
through the outward projection of inner perceptions, which we, with our
reinforced conscious perception, must now translate back into
psychology.

The projection of their own evil impulses upon demons is only a part of
what has become the world system (‘Weltanschauung’) of primitive man
which we shall discuss later as ‘animism’. We shall then have to
ascertain the psychological nature of such a system formation and the
points of support which we shall find in the analysis of these system
formations will again bring us face to face with the neurosis. For the
present we merely wish to suggest that the ‘secondary elaboration’ of
the dream content is the prototype of all these system formations[84].
And let us not forget that beginning at the stage of system formation
there are two origins for every act judged by consciousness, namely the
systematic, and the real but unconscious origin[85].

Wundt[86] remarks that “among the influences which myth everywhere
ascribes to demons the evil ones preponderate, so that according to the
religions of races evil demons are evidently older than good demons.”
Now it is quite possible that the whole conception of demons was derived
from the extremely important relation to the dead. In the further course
of human development the ambivalence inherent in this relation then
manifested itself by allowing two altogether contrary psychic formations
to issue from the same root, namely, the fear of demons and of
_ghosts_, and the reverence for ancestors[87]. Nothing testifies so much
to the influence of mourning on the origin of belief in demons as the
fact that demons were always taken to be the spirits of persons not long
dead. Mourning has a very distinct psychic task to perform, namely, to
detach the memories and expectations of the survivors from the dead.
When this work is accomplished the grief, and with it the remorse and
reproach, lessens, and therefore also the fear of the demon. But the
very spirits which at first were feared as demons now serve a friendlier
purpose; they are revered as ancestors and appealed to for help in times
of distress.

If we survey the relation of survivors to the dead through the course of
the ages, it is very evident that the ambivalent feeling has
extraordinarily abated. We now find it easy to suppress whatever
unconscious hostility towards the dead there may still exist without any
special psychic effort on our part. Where formerly satisfied hate and
painful tenderness struggled with each other, we now find piety, which
appears like a cicatrice and demands: _De mortuis nil nisi_ _bene_.
Only neurotics still blur the mourning for the loss of their dear ones
with attacks of compulsive reproaches which psychoanalysis reveals as
the old ambivalent emotional feeling. How this change was brought about,
and to what extent constitutional changes and real improvement of
familiar relations share in causing the abatement of the ambivalent
feeling, need not be discussed here. But this example would lead us to
assume _that the psychic impulses of primitive man possessed a higher
degree of ambivalence than is found at present among civilized human
beings. With the decline of this ambivalence the taboo, as the
compromise symptom of the ambivalent conflict, also slowly disappeared._
Neurotics who are compelled to reproduce this conflict, together with
the taboo resulting from it, may be said to have brought with them an
atavistic remnant in the form of an archaic constitution the
compensation of which in the interest of cultural demands entails the
most prodigious psychic efforts on their part.

At this point we may recall the confusing information which Wundt
offered us about the double meaning of the word taboo, namely, holy and
unclean (see above). It was supposed that originally the word taboo did
not yet mean holy and unclean but signified something demonic, something
which may not be touched, thus emphasizing a characteristic common to
both extremes of the later conception; this persistent common trait
proves, however, that an original correspondence existed between what
was holy and what was unclean, which only later became differentiated.

In contrast to this, our discussion readily shows that the double
meaning in question belonged to the word taboo from the very beginning
and that it serves to designate a definite ambivalence as well as
everything which has come into existence on the basis of this
ambivalence. Taboo is itself an ambivalent word and by way of supplement
we may add that the established meaning of this word might of itself
have allowed us to guess what we have found as the result of extensive
investigation, namely, that the taboo prohibition is to be explained as
the result of an emotional ambivalence. A study of the oldest languages
has taught us that at one time there were many such words which included
their own contrasts so that they were in a certain sense ambivalent,
though perhaps not exactly in the same sense as the word taboo[88].
Slight vocal modifications of this primitive word containing two
opposite meanings later served to create a separate linguistic
expression for the two opposites originally united in one word.

The word taboo has had a different fate; with the diminished importance
of the ambivalence which it connotes it has itself disappeared, or
rather, the words analogous to it have vanished from the vocabulary. In
a later connection I hope to be able to show that a tangible historic
change is probably concealed behind the fate of this conception; that
the word at first was associated with definite human relations which
were characterized by great emotional ambivalence from which it expanded
to other analogous relations.

Unless we are mistaken, the understanding of taboo also throws light
upon the nature and origin of _conscience_. Without stretching ideas we
can speak of a taboo conscience and a taboo sense of guilt after the
violation of a taboo. Taboo conscience is probably the oldest form in
which we meet the phenomenon of conscience.

For what is ‘conscience’? According to linguistic testimony it belongs
to what we know most surely; in some languages its meaning is hardly to
be distinguished from consciousness.

Conscience is the inner perception of objections to definite wish
impulses that exist in us; but the emphasis is put upon the fact that
this rejection does not have to depend on anything else, that it is
sure of itself. This becomes even plainer in the case of a guilty
conscience, where we become aware of the inner condemnation of such acts
which realized some of our definite wish impulses. Confirmation seems
superfluous here; whoever has a conscience must feel in himself the
justification of the condemnation, and the reproach for the accomplished
action. But this same character is evinced by the attitude of savages
towards taboo. Taboo is a command of conscience, the violation of which
causes a terrible sense of guilt which is as self-evident as its origin
is unknown[89].

It is therefore probable that conscience also originates on the basis of
an ambivalent feeling from quite definite human relations which contain
this ambivalence. It probably originates under conditions which are in
force both for taboo and the compulsion neurosis, that is, one component
of the two contrasting feelings is unconscious and is kept repressed by
the compulsive domination of the other component. This is confirmed by
many things which we have learned from our analysis of neurosis. In the
first place the character of compulsion neurotics shows a predominant
trait of painful conscientiousness which is a symptom of reaction
against the temptation which lurks in the unconscious, and which
develops into the highest degrees of guilty conscience as their illness
grows worse. Indeed, one may venture the assertion that if the origin of
guilty conscience could not be discovered through compulsion neurotic
patients, there would be no prospect of ever discovering it. This task
is successfully solved in the case of the individual neurotic, and we
are confident of finding a similar solution in the case of races.

In the second place we cannot help noticing that the sense of guilt
contains much of the nature of anxiety; without hesitation it may be
described as ‘conscience phobia’. But fear points to unconscious
sources. The psychology of the neuroses taught us that when wish
feelings undergo repression their libido becomes transformed into
anxiety. In addition we must bear in mind that the sense of guilt also
contains something unknown and unconscious, namely the motivation for
the rejection. The character of anxiety in the sense of guilt
corresponds to this unknown quantity.

If taboo expresses itself mainly in prohibitions it may well be
considered self-evident, without remote proof from the analogy with
neurosis that it is based on a positive, desireful impulse. For what
nobody desires to do does not have to be forbidden, and certainly
whatever is expressly forbidden must be an object of desire. If we
applied this plausible theory to primitive races we would have to
conclude that among their strongest temptations were desires to kill
their kings and priests, to commit incest, to abuse their dead and the
like. That is not very probable. And if we should apply the same theory
to those cases in which we ourselves seem to hear the voice of
conscience most clearly we would arouse the greatest contradiction. For
there we would assert with the utmost certainty that we did not feel the
slightest temptation to violate any of these commandments, as for
example, the commandment: Thou shalt not kill, and that we felt nothing
but repugnance at the very idea.

But if we grant the testimony of our conscience the importance it
claims, then the prohibition--the taboo as well as our moral
prohibitions--becomes superfluous, while the existence of a conscience,
in turn, remains unexplained and the connection between conscience,
taboo and neurosis disappears. The net result of this would then be our
present state of understanding unless we view the problem
psychoanalytically.

But if we take into account the following results of psychoanalysis, our
understanding of the problem is greatly advanced. The analysis of
dreams of normal individuals has shown that our own temptation to kill
others is stronger and more frequent than we had suspected and that it
produces psychic effects even where it does not reveal itself to our
consciousness. And when we have learnt that the obsessive rules of
certain neurotics are nothing but measures of self-reassurance and
self-punishment erected against the reinforced impulse to commit murder,
we can return with fresh appreciation to our previous hypothesis that
every prohibition must conceal a desire. We can then assume that this
desire to murder actually exists and that the taboo as well as the moral
prohibition are psychologically by no means superfluous but are, on the
contrary, explained and justified through our ambivalent attitude
towards the impulse to slay.

The nature of this ambivalent relation so often emphasized as
fundamental, namely, that the positive underlying desire is unconscious,
opens the possibility of showing further connections and explaining
further problems. The pyschic processes in the unconscious are not
entirely identical with those known to us from our conscious psychic
life, but have the benefit of certain notable liberties of which the
latter are deprived. An unconscious impulse need not have originated
where we find it expressed, it can spring from an entirely different
place and may originally have referred to other persons and relations,
but through the mechanism of _displacement_, it reaches the point where
it comes to our notice. Thanks to the indestructibility of unconscious
processes and their inaccessibility to correction, the impulse may be
saved over from earlier times to which it was adapted to later periods
and conditions in which its manifestations must necessarily seem
foreign. These are all only hints, but a careful elaboration of them
would show how important they may become for the understanding of the
development of civilization.

In closing these discussions we do not want to neglect to make an
observation that will be of use for later investigations. Even if we
insist upon the essential similarity between taboo and moral
prohibitions we do not dispute that a psychological difference must
exist between them. A change in the relations of the fundamental
ambivalence can be the only reason why the prohibition no longer appears
in the form of a taboo.

In the analytical consideration of taboo phenomena we have hitherto
allowed ourselves to be guided by their demonstrable agreements with
compulsion neurosis; but as taboo is not a neurosis but a social
creation we are also confronted with the task of showing wherein lies
the essential difference between the neurosis and a product of culture
like the taboo.

Here again I will take a single fact as my starting point. Primitive
races fear a punishment for the violation of a taboo, usually a serious
disease or death. This punishment threatens only him who has been guilty
of the violation. It is different with the compulsion neurosis. If the
patient wants to do something that is forbidden to him he does not fear
punishment for himself, but for another person. This person is usually
indefinite, but, by means of analysis, is easily recognized as some one
very near and dear to the patient. The neurotic therefore acts as if he
were altruistic, while primitive man seems egotistical. Only if
retribution fails to overtake the taboo violator spontaneously does a
collective feeling awaken among savages that they are all threatened
through the sacrilege, and they hasten to inflict the omitted punishment
themselves. It is easy for us to explain the mechanism of this
solidarity. It is a question of fear of the contagious example, the
temptation to imitate, that is to say, of the capacity of the taboo to
infect. If some one has succeeded in satisfying the repressed desire,
the same desire must manifest itself in all his companions; hence, in
order to keep down this temptation, this envied individual must be
despoiled of the fruit of his daring. Not infrequently the punishment
gives the executors themselves an opportunity to commit the same
sacrilegious act by justifying it as an expiation. This is really one of
the fundamentals of the human code of punishment which rightly presumes
the same forbidden impulses in the criminal and in the members of
society who avenge his offence.

Psychoanalysis here confirms what the pious were wont to say, that we
are all miserable sinners. How then shall we explain the unexpected
nobility of the neurosis which fears nothing for itself and everything
for the beloved person? Psychoanalytic investigation shows that this
nobility is not primary. Originally, that is to say at the beginning of
the disease, the threat of punishment pertained to one’s own person; in
every case the fear was for one’s own life; the fear of death being only
later displaced upon another beloved person. The process is somewhat
complicated but we have a complete grasp of it. An evil impulse--a death
wish--towards the beloved person is always at the basis of the formation
of a prohibition. This is repressed through a prohibition, and the
prohibition is connected with a certain act which by displacement
usually substitutes the hostile for the beloved person, and the
execution of this act is threatened with the penalty of death. But the
process goes further and the original wish for the death of the beloved
other person is then replaced by fear for his death. The tender
altruistic trait of the neurosis therefore merely _compensates_ for the
opposite attitude of brutal egotism which is at the basis of it. If we
designate as social those emotional impulses which are determined
through regard for another person who is not taken as a sexual object,
we can emphasize the withdrawal of these social factors as an essential
feature of the neurosis, which is later disguised through
overcompensation.

Without lingering over the origin of these social impulses and their
relation to other fundamental impulses of man, we will bring out the
second main characteristic of the neurosis by means of another example.
The form in which taboo manifests itself has the greatest similarity to
the touching phobia of neurotics, the _Délire de toucher_. As a matter
of fact this neurosis is regularly concerned with the prohibition of
sexual touching and psychoanalysis has quite generally shown that the
motive power which is deflected and displaced in the neurosis is of
sexual origin. In taboo the forbidden contact has evidently not only
sexual significance but rather the more, general one of attack, of
acquisition and of personal assertion. If it is prohibited to touch the
chief or something that was in contact with him it means that an
inhibition should be imposed upon the same impulse which on other
occasions expresses itself in suspicious surveillance of the chief and
even in physical ill-treatment of him before his coronation (see above).
_Thus the preponderance of sexual components of the impulse over the
social components is the determining factor of the neurosis._ But the
social impulses themselves came into being through the union of
egotistical and erotic components into special entities.

From this single example of a comparison between taboo and compulsion
neurosis it is already possible to guess the relation between individual
forms of the neurosis and the creations of culture, and in what respect
the study of the psychology of the neurosis is important for the
understanding of the development of culture.

In one way the neuroses show a striking and far-reaching correspondence
with the great social productions of art, religion and philosophy, while
again they seem like distortions of them. We may say that hysteria is a
caricature of an artistic creation, a compulsion neurosis, a caricature
of a religion, and a paranoic delusion, a caricature of a philosophic
system. In the last analysis this deviation goes back to the fact that
the neuroses are asocial formations; they seek to accomplish by private
means what arose in society through collective labour. In analysing the
impulse of the neuroses one learns that motive powers of sexual origin
exercise the determining influence in them, while the corresponding
cultural creations rest upon social impulses and on such as have issued
from the combination of egotistical and sexual components. It seems that
the sexual need is not capable of uniting men in the same way as the
demands of self preservation; sexual satisfaction is in the first place
the private concern of the individual.

Genetically the asocial nature of the neurosis springs from its original
tendency to flee from a dissatisfying reality to a more pleasurable
world of phantasy. This real world which neurotics shun is dominated by
the society of human beings and by the institutions created by them; the
estrangement from reality is at the same time a withdrawal from human
companionship.



CHAPTER III

ANIMISM, MAGIC AND THE OMNIPOTENCE OF THOUGHT


1

It is a necessary defect of studies which seek to apply the point of
view of psychoanalysis to the mental sciences that they cannot do
justice to either subject. They therefore confine themselves to the rôle
of incentives and make suggestions to the expert which he should take
into consideration in his work. This defect will make itself felt most
strongly in an essay such as this which tries to treat of the enormous
sphere called animism[90].

Animism in the narrower sense is the theory of psychic concepts, and in
the wider sense, of spiritual beings in general. Animatism, the
animation theory of seemingly inanimate nature, is a further
subdivision which also includes animatism and animism. The name animism,
formerly applied to a definite philosophic system, seems to have
acquired its present meaning through E. B. Tylor[91].

What led to the formulation of these names is the insight into the very
remarkable conceptions of nature and the world of those primitive races
known to us from history and from our own times. These races populate
the world with a multitude of spiritual beings which are benevolent or
malevolent to them, and attribute the causation of natural processes to
these spirits and demons; they also consider that not only animals and
plants, but inanimate things as well are animated by them. A third and
perhaps the most important part of this primitive ‘nature philosophy’
seems far less striking to us because we ourselves are not yet far
enough removed from it, though we have greatly limited the existence of
spirits and to-day explain the processes of nature by the assumption of
impersonal physical forces. For primitive people believe in a similar
‘animation’ of human individuals as well. Human beings have souls which
can leave their habitation and enter into other beings; these souls are
the bearers of spiritual activities and are, to a certain extent,
independent of the ‘bodies’. Originally souls were thought of as being
very similar to individuals; only in the course of a long evolution did
they lose their material character and attain a high degree of
‘spiritualization’[92].

Most authors incline to the assumption that these soul conceptions are
the original nucleus of the animistic system, that spirits merely
correspond to souls that have become independent, and that the souls of
animals, plants and things were formed after the analogy of human souls.

How did primitive people come to the peculiarly dualistic fundamental
conceptions on which this animistic system rests? Through the
observation, it is thought, of the phenomena of sleep (with dreams) and
death which resemble sleep, and through the effort to explain these
conditions, which affect each individual so intimately. Above all, the
problem of death must have become the starting point of the formation of
the theory. To primitive man the continuation of
life--immortality--would be self-evident. The conception of death is
something accepted later, and only with hesitation, for even to us it is
still devoid of content and unrealizable. Very likely discussions have
taken place over the part which may have been played by other
observations and experiences in the formation of the fundamental
animistic conceptions such as dream imagery, shadows and reflections,
but these have led to no conclusion[93].

If primitive man reacted to the phenomena that stimulated his reflection
with the formation of conceptions of the soul, and then transferred
these to objects of the outer world, his attitude will be judged to be
quite natural and in no way mysterious. In view of the fact that
animistic conceptions have been shown to be similar among the most
varied races and in all periods, Wundt states that these “are the
necessary psychological product of the myth-forming consciousness, and
primitive animism may be looked upon as the spiritual expression of
man’s natural state in so far as this is at all accessible to our
observation”[94]. Hume has already justified the animation of the
inanimate in his _Natural History of Religions_, where he said: “There
is a universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like
themselves and to transfer to every object those qualities with which
they are familiarly acquainted and of which they are intimately
conscious”[95].

Animism is a system of thought, it gives not only the explanation of a
single phenomenon, but makes it possible to comprehend the totality of
the world from one point, as a continuity. Writers maintain that in the
course of time three such systems of thought, three great world systems
came into being: the animistic (mythological), the religious, and the
scientific. Of these animism, the first system is perhaps the most
consistent and the most exhaustive, and the one which explains the
nature of the world in its entirety. This first world system, of mankind
is now a psychological theory. It would go beyond our scope to show how
much of it can still be demonstrated in the life of to-day, either as a
worthless survival in the form of superstition, or in living form, as
the foundation of our language, our belief, and our philosophy.

It is in reference to the successive stages of these three world systems
that we say that animism in itself was not yet a religion but contained
the prerequisites from which religions were later formed. It is also
evident that myths are based upon animistic foundations, but the
detailed relation of myths to animism seem unexplained in some essential
points.


2

Our psychoanalytic work will begin at a different point. It must not be
assumed that mankind came to create its first world system through a
purely speculative thirst for knowledge. The practical need of mastering
the world must have contributed to this effort. We are therefore not
astonished to learn that something else went hand in hand with the
animistic system, namely the elaboration of directions for making
oneself master of men, animals and things, as well as of their spirits.
S. Reinach[96] wants to call these directions, which are known under the
names of ‘sorcery and magic’, the strategy of animism; With Mauss and
Hubert, I should prefer to compare them to a technique[97].

Can the conceptions of sorcery and magic be separated? It can be done if
we are willing on our own authority to put ourselves above the vagaries
of linguistic usage. Then sorcery is essentially the art of influencing
spirits by treating them like people under the same circumstances, that
is to say by appeasing them, reconciling them, making them more
favourably disposed to one, by intimidating them, by depriving them of
their power and by making them subject to one’s will; all that is
accomplished through the same methods that have been found effective
with living people. Magic, however, is something else; it does not
essentially concern itself with spirits, and uses special means, not
the ordinary psychological method. We can easily guess that magic is the
earlier and the more important part of animistic technique, for among
the means with which spirits are to be treated there are also found the
magic kind[98], and magic is also applied where spiritualization of
nature has not yet, as it seems to us, been accomplished.

Magic must serve the most varied purposes. It must subject the processes
of nature to the will of man, protect the individual against enemies and
dangers, and give him the power to injure his enemies. But the
principles on whose assumptions the magic activity is based, or rather
the principle of magic, is so evident that it was recognized by all
authors. If we may take the opinion of E. B. Tylor at its face value it
can be most tersely expressed in his words: “mistaking an ideal
connection for a real one”. We shall explain this characteristic in the
case of two groups of magic acts.

One of the most widespread magic procedures for injuring an enemy
consists of making an effigy of him out of any kind of material. The
likeness counts for little, in fact any object may be ‘named’ as his
image. Whatever is subsequently done to this image will also happen to
the hated prototype; thus if the effigy has been injured in any place he
will be afflicted by a disease in the corresponding part of the body.
This same magic technique, instead of being used for private enmity can
also be employed for pious purposes and can thus be used to aid the gods
against evil demons. I quote Frazer[99]: “Every night when the sun-god
Ra in ancient Egypt sank to his home in the glowing west he was assailed
by hosts of demons under the leadership of the archfiend Apepi. All
night long he fought them, and sometimes by day the powers of darkness
sent up clouds even into the blue Egyptian sky to obscure his light and
weaken his power. To aid the sun-god in this daily struggle, a ceremony
was daily performed in his temple at Thebes. A figure of his foe Apepi,
represented as a crocodile with a hideous face or a serpent with many
coils, was made of wax, and on it the demon’s name was written in green
ink. Wrapt in a papyrus case, on which another likeness of Apepi had
been drawn in green ink, the figure was then tied up with black hair,
spat upon, hacked with a stone knife and cast on the ground. There the
priest trod on it with his left foot again and again, and then burned it
in a fire made of a certain plant or grass. When Apepi himself had thus
been effectively disposed of, waxen effigies of each of his principle
demons, and of their fathers, mothers, and children, were made and burnt
in the same way. The service accompanied by the recitation of certain
prescribed spells, was repeated not merely morning, noon and night, but
whenever a storm was raging or heavy rain had set in, or black clouds
were stealing across the sky to hide the sun’s bright disk. The fiends
of darkness, clouds and rain, felt the injury inflicted on their images
as if it had been done to themselves; they passed away, at least for a
time, and the beneficent sun-god shone out triumphant once more”[100].

There is a great mass of magic actions which show a similar motivation,
but I shall lay stress upon only two, which have always played a great
rôle among primitive races and which have been partly preserved in the
myths and cults of higher stages of evolution: the art of causing rain
and fruitfulness by magic. Rain is produced by magic means, by imitating
it, and perhaps also by imitating the clouds and storm which produce it.
It looks as if they wanted to ‘play rain’. The Ainos of Japan, for
instance, make rain by pouring out water through a big sieve, while
others fit out a big bowl with sails and oars as if it were a ship,
which is then dragged about the village and gardens. But the
fruitfulness of the soil was assured by magic means by showing it the
spectacle of human sexual intercourse. To cite one out of many examples;
in some part of Java, the peasants used to go out into the fields at
night for sexual intercourse when the rice was about to blossom in order
to stimulate the rice to fruitfulness through their example[101]. At the
same time it was feared that proscribed incestuous relationships would
stimulate the soil to grow weeds and render it unfruitful[102].

Certain negative rules, that is to say magic precautions, must be put
into this first group. If some of the inhabitants of a Dayak village had
set out on a hunt for wild-boars, those remaining behind were in the
meantime not permitted to touch either oil or water with their hands, as
such acts would soften the hunters’ fingers and would let the quarry
slip through their hands[103]. Or when a Gilyak hunter was pursuing game
in the woods, his children were forbidden to make drawings on wood or in
the sand, as the paths in the thick woods might become as intertwined as
the lines of the drawing and the hunter would not find his way
home[104].

The fact that in these as in a great many other examples of magic
influence, distance plays no part, telepathy is taken as a matter of
course--will cause us no difficulties in grasping the peculiarity of
magic.

There is no doubt about what is considered the effective force in all
these examples. It is the _similarity_ between the performed action and
the expected happening. Frazer therefore calls this kind of magic
_imitative_ or _homœopathic_. If I want it to rain I only have to
produce something that looks like rain or recalls rain. In a later phase
of cultural development, instead of these magic conjurations of rain,
processions are arranged to a house of god, in order to supplicate the
saint who dwells there to send rain. Finally also this religious
technique will be given up and instead an effort will be made to find
out what would influence the atmosphere to produce rain.

In another group of magic actions the principle of similarity is no
longer involved, but in its stead there is another principle the nature
of which is well brought out in the following examples.

Another method may be used to injure an enemy. You possess yourself of
his hair, his nails, anything that he has discarded, or even a part of
his clothing, and do something hostile to these things. This is just as
effective as if you had dominated the person himself, and anything that
you do to the things that belong to him must happen to him too.
According to the conception of primitive men a name is an essential part
of a personality; if therefore you know the name of a person or a spirit
you have acquired a certain power over its bearer. This explains the
remarkable precautions and restrictions in the use of names which we
have touched upon in the essay on taboo[105]. In these examples
similarity is evidently replaced by relationship.

The cannibalism of primitive races derives its more sublime motivation
in a similar manner. By absorbing parts of the body of a person through
the act of eating we also come to possess the properties which belonged
to that person. From this there follow precautions and restrictions as
to diet under special circumstances. Thus a pregnant woman will avoid
eating the meat of certain animals because their undesirable properties,
for example, cowardice, might thus be transferred to the child she is
nourishing. It makes no difference to the magic influence whether the
connection is already abolished or whether it had consisted of only one
very important contact. Thus, for instance, the belief in a magic bond
which links the fate of a wound with the weapon which caused it can be
followed unchanged through thousands of years. If a Melanesian gets
possession of the bow by which he was wounded he will carefully keep it
in a cool place in order thus to keep down the inflammation of the
wound. But if the bow has remained in the possession of the enemy it
will certainly be kept in close proximity to a fire in order that the
wound may burn and become thoroughly inflamed. Pliny, in his _Natural
History_, XXVIII, advises spitting on the hand which has caused the
injury if one regrets having injured some one; the pain of the injured
person will then immediately be eased. Francis Bacon, in his _Natural
History_, mentions the generally accredited belief that putting a salve
on the weapon which has made a wound will cause this wound to heal of
itself. It is said that even to-day English peasants follow this
prescription, and that if they have cut themselves with a scythe they
will from that moment on carefully keep the instrument clean in order
that the wound may not fester. In June, 1902, a local English weekly
reported that a woman called Matilde Henry of Norwich accidentally ran
an iron nail into the sole of her foot. Without having the wound
examined or even taking off her stocking she bade her daughter to oil
the nail thoroughly in the expectation that then nothing could happen to
her. She died a few days later of tetanus[106] in consequence of
postponed antisepsis.

The examples from this last group illustrate Frazer’s distinction
between _contagious_ magic and _imitative_ magic. What is considered as
effective in these examples is no longer the similarity, but the
association in space, the contiguity, or at least the imagined
contiguity, or the memory of its existence. But since similarity and
contiguity are the two essential principles of the processes of
association of ideas, it must be concluded that the dominance of
associations of ideas really explains all the madness of the rules of
magic. We can see how true Tylor’s quoted characteristic of magic:
“mistaking an ideal connection for a real one”, proves to be. The same
may be said of Frazer’s idea, who has expressed it in almost the same
terms: “men mistook the order of their ideas for the order of nature,
and hence imagined that the control which they have, or seem to have,
over their thoughts, permitted them to have a corresponding control over
things”[107].

It will at first seem strange that this illuminating explanation of
magic could have been rejected by some authors as unsatisfactory[108].
But on closer consideration we must sustain the objection that the
association theory of magic merely explains the paths that magic
travels, and not its essential nature, that is, it does not explain the
misunderstanding which bids it put psychological laws in place of
natural ones. We are apparently in need here of a dynamic factor; but
while the search for this leads the critics of Frazer’s theory astray,
it will be easy to give a satisfactory explanation of magic by carrying
its association theory further and by entering more deeply into it.

First let us examine the simpler and more important case of imitative
magic. According to Frazer this may be practised by itself, whereas
contagious magic as a rule presupposes the imitative[109]. The motives
which impel one to exercise magic are easily recognized; they are the
wishes of men. We need only assume that primitive man had great
confidence in the power of his wishes. At bottom everything which he
accomplished by magic means must have been done solely because he wanted
it. Thus in the beginning only his wish is accentuated.

In the case of the child which finds itself under analogous psychic
conditions, without being as yet capable of motor activity, we have
elsewhere advocated the assumption that it at first really satisfies
its wishes by means of hallucinations, in that it creates the satisfying
situation through centrifugal excitements of its sensory organs[110].
The adult primitive man knows another way. A motor impulse, the will,
clings to his wish and this will which later will change the face of the
earth in the service of wish fulfilment is now used to represent the
gratification so that one may experience it, as it were, through motor
hallucination. Such a _representation_ of the gratified wish is
altogether comparable to the _play_ of children, where it replaces the
purely sensory technique of gratification. If play and imitative
representation suffice for the child and for primitive man, it must not
be taken as a sign of modesty, in our sense, or of resignation due to
the realization of their impotence, on the contrary; it is the very
obvious result of the excessive valuation of their wish, of the will
which depends upon the wish and of the paths the wish takes. In time the
psychic accent is displaced from the motives of the magic act to its
means, namely to the act itself. Perhaps it would be more correct to say
that primitive man does not become aware of the over-valuation of his
psychic acts until it becomes evident to him through the means
employed. It would also seem as if it were the magic act itself which
compels the fulfilment of the wish by virtue of its similarity to the
object desired. At the stage of animistic thinking there is as yet no
way of demonstrating objectively the true state of affairs, but this
becomes possible at later stages when, though such procedures are still
practised, the psychic phenomenon of scepticism already manifests itself
as a tendency to repression. At that stage men will acknowledge that the
conjuration of spirits avails nothing unless accompanied by belief, and
that the magic effect of prayer fails if there is no piety behind
it[111].

The possibility of a contagious magic which depends upon contiguous
association will then show us that the psychic valuation of the wish and
the will has been extended to all psychic acts which the will can
command. We may say that at present there is a general over-valuation of
all psychic processes, that is to say there is an attitude towards the
world which according to our understanding of the relation of reality to
thought must appear like an over-estimation of the latter. Objects as
such are over-shadowed by the ideas representing them; what takes place
in the latter must also happen to the former, and the relations which
exist between ideas are also postulated as to things. As thought does
not recognize distances and easily brings together in one act of
consciousness things spatially and temporally far removed, the magic
world also puts itself above spatial distance by telepathy, and treats a
past association as if it were a present one. In the animistic age the
reflection of the inner world must obscure that other picture of the
world which we believe we recognize.

Let us also point out that the two principles of association, similarity
and contiguity, meet in the higher unity of contact. Association by
contiguity is contact in the direct sense, and association by similarity
is contact in the transferred sense. Another identity in the psychic
process which has not yet been grasped by us is probably concealed in
the use of the same word for both kinds of associations. It is the same
range of the concept of contact which we have found in the analysis of
taboo[112].

In summing up we may now say that the principle which controls magic,
and the technique of the animistic method of thought, is ‘Omnipotence of
Thought’.


3

I have adopted the term ‘Omnipotence of Thought’ from a highly
intelligent man, a former sufferer from compulsion neurosis, who, after
being cured through psychoanalytic treatment, was able to demonstrate
his efficiency and good sense[113]. He had coined this phrase to
designate all those peculiar and uncanny occurrences which seemed to
pursue him just as they pursue others afflicted with his malady. Thus if
he happened to think of a person, he was actually confronted with this
person as if he had conjured him up; if he inquired suddenly about the
state of health of an acquaintance whom he had long missed he was sure
to hear that this acquaintance had just died, so that he could believe
that the deceased had drawn his attention to himself by telepathic
means; if he uttered a half meant imprecation against a stranger, he
could expect to have him die soon thereafter and burden him with the
responsibility for his death. He was able to explain most of these cases
in the course of the treatment, he could tell how the illusion had
originated, and what he himself had contributed towards furthering his
superstitious expectations[114]. All compulsion neurotics are
superstitious in this manner and often against their better judgment.

The existence of omnipotence of thought is most clearly seen in
compulsion neurosis, where the results of this primitive method of
thought are most often found or met in consciousness. But we must guard
against seeing in this a distinguishing characteristic of this neurosis,
for analytic investigation reveals the same mechanism in the other
neuroses. In every one of the neuroses it is not the reality of the
experience but the reality of the thought which forms the basis for the
symptom formation. Neurotics live in a special world in which, as I have
elsewhere expressed it, only the ‘neurotic standard of currency’ counts,
that is to say, only things intensively thought of or affectively
conceived are effective with them, regardless of whether these things
are in harmony with outer reality. The hysteric repeats in his attacks
and fixates through his symptoms, occurrences which have taken place
only in his phantasy, though in the last analysis they go back to real
events or have been built up from them. The neurotic’s guilty conscience
is just as incomprehensible if traced to real misdeeds. A compulsion
neurotic may be oppressed by a sense of guilt which is appropriate to a
wholesale murderer, while at the same time he acts towards his fellow
beings in a most considerate and scrupulous manner, a behaviour which he
evinced since his childhood. And yet his sense of guilt is justified; it
is based upon intensive and frequent death wishes which unconsciously
manifest themselves towards his fellow beings. It is motivated from the
point of view of unconscious thoughts, but not of intentional acts. Thus
the omnipotence of thought, the over-estimation of psychic processes as
opposed to reality, proves to be of unlimited effect in the neurotic’s
affective life and in all that emanates from it. But if we subject him
to psychoanalytic treatment, which makes his unconscious thoughts
conscious to him he refuses to believe that thoughts are free and is
always afraid to express evil wishes lest they be fulfilled in
consequence of his utterance. But through this attitude as well as
through the superstition which plays an active part in his life he
reveals to us how close he stands to the savage who believes he can
change the outer world by a mere thought of his.

The primary obsessive actions of these neurotics are really altogether
of a magical nature. If not magic they are at least anti-magic and are
destined to ward off the expectation of evil with which the neurosis is
wont to begin. Whenever I was able to pierce these secrets it turned out
that the content of this expectation of evil was death. According to
Schopenhauer the problem of death stands at the beginning of every
philosophy; we have heard that the formation of the soul conception and
of the belief in demons which characterize animism, are also traced back
to the impression which death makes upon man. It is hard to decide
whether these first compulsive and protective actions follow the
principle of similarity, or of contrast, for under the conditions of the
neurosis they are usually distorted through displacement upon some
trifle, upon some action which in itself is quite insignificant[115].
The protective formulæ of the compulsion neurosis also have a
counterpart in the incantations of magic. But the evolution of
compulsive actions may be described by pointing out how these actions
begin as a spell against evil wishes which are very remote from anything
sexual, only to end up as a substitute for forbidden sexual activity,
which they imitate as faithfully as possible.

If we accept the evolution of man’s conceptions of the universe
mentioned above, according to which the _animistic_ phase is
_succeeded_ by the _religious_, and this in turn by the _scientific_, we
have no difficulty in following the fortunes of the ‘omnipotence of
thought’ through all these phases. In the animistic stage man ascribes
omnipotence to himself; in the religious he has ceded it to the gods,
but without seriously giving it up, for he reserves to himself the right
to control the gods by influencing them in some way or other in the
interest of his wishes. In the scientific attitude towards life there is
no longer any room for man’s omnipotence; he has acknowledged his
smallness and has submitted to death as to all other natural necessities
in a spirit of resignation. Nevertheless, in our reliance upon the power
of the human spirit which copes with the laws of reality, there still
lives on a fragment of this primitive belief in the omnipotence of
thought.

In retracing the development of libidinous impulses in the individual
from its mature form back to its first beginnings in childhood, we at
first found an important distinction which is stated in the _Three
Contributions to the Theory of Sex_[116]. The manifestations of sexual
impulses can be recognized from the beginning, but at first they are not
yet directed to any outer object. Each individual component of the
sexual impulse works for a gain in pleasure and finds its gratification
in its own body. This stage is called _autoerotism_ and is distinguished
from the stage of object selection.

In the course of further study it proved to be practical and really
necessary to insert a third stage between these two or, if one prefers,
to divide the first stage of autoerotism into two. In this intermediary
stage, the importance of which increases the more we investigate it, the
sexual impulses which formerly were separate, have already formed into a
unit and have also found an object; but this object is not external and
foreign to the individual, but is his own ego, which is formed at this
period. This new stage is called _narcism_, in view of the pathological
fixation of this condition which may be observed later on. The
individual acts as if he were in love with himself; for the purposes of
our analysis the ego impulses and the libidinous wishes cannot yet be
separated from each other.

Although this narcistic stage, in which the hitherto dissociated sexual
impulses combine into a unity and take the ego as their object, cannot
as yet be sharply differentiated, we can already surmise that the
narcistic organization is never altogether given up again. To a certain
extent man remains narcistic, even after he had found outer subjects for
his libido, and the objects on which he bestows it represent, as it
were, emanations of the libido which remain with his ego and which can
be withdrawn into it. The state of being in love, so remarkable
psychologically, and the normal prototype of the psychoses, corresponds
to the highest stage of these emanations, in contrast to the state of
self-love.

This high estimation of psychic acts found among primitives and
neurotics, which we feel to be an overestimation, may now appropriately
be brought into relation to narcism, and interpreted as an essential
part of it. We would say that among primitive people thinking is still
highly sexualized and that this accounts for the belief in the
omnipotence of thought, the unshaken confidence in the capacity to
dominate the world and the inaccessibility to the obvious facts which
could enlighten man as to his real place in the world. In the case of
neurotics a considerable part of this primitive attitude had remained as
a constitutional factor, while on the other hand the sexual repression
occurring in them has brought about a new sexualization of the processes
of thought. In both cases, whether we deal with an original libidinous
investment of thought or whether the same process has been accomplished
regressively, the psychic results are the same, namely, intellectual
narcism and omnipotence of thought[117].

If we may take the now established omnipotence of thought among
primitive races as a proof of their narcism, we may venture to compare
the various evolutionary stages of man’s conception of the universe with
the stages of the libidinous evolution of the individual. We find that
the animistic phase corresponds in time as well as in content with
narcism, the religious phase corresponds to that stage of object finding
which is characterized by dependence on the parents, while the
scientific stage has its full counterpart in the individual’s stage of
maturity where, having renounced the pleasure principle and having
adapted himself to reality, he seeks his object in the outer world[118].

Only in one field has the omnipotence of thought been retained in our
own civilization, namely in art. In art alone it still happens that man,
consumed by his wishes, produces something similar to the gratification
of these wishes, and this playing, thanks to artistic illusion, calls
forth effects as if it were something real. We rightly speak of the
magic of art and compare the artist with a magician. But this comparison
is perhaps more important than it claims to be. Art, which certainly did
not begin as art for art’s sake, originally served tendencies which
to-day have for the greater part ceased to exist. Among these we may
suspect various magic intentions[119].


4

Animism, the first conception of the world which man succeeded in
evolving, was therefore psychological. It did not yet require any
science to establish it, for science sets in only after we have realized
that we do not know the world and that we must therefore seek means of
getting to know it. But animism was natural and self-evident to
primitive man; he knew how the things of the world were constituted, and
as man conceived himself to be. We are therefore prepared to find that
primitive man transferred the structural relations of his own psyche to
the outer world[120], and on the other hand we may make the attempt to
transfer back into the human soul what animism teaches about the nature
of things.

Magic, the technique of animism, clearly and unmistakably shows the
tendency of forcing the laws of psychic life upon the reality of things,
under conditions where spirits did not yet have to play any rôle, and
could still be taken as objects of magic treatment. The assumptions of
magic are therefore of older origin than the spirit theory, which forms
the nucleus of animism. Our psychoanalytic view here coincides with a
theory of R. R. Marett, according to which animism is preceded by a
pre-animistic stage the nature of which is best indicated by the name
Animatism (the theory of general animation). We have practically no
further knowledge of pre-animism, as no race has yet been found without
conceptions of spirits[121].

While magic still retains the full omnipotence of ideas, animism has
ceded part of this omnipotence to spirits and thus has started on the
way to form a religion. Now what could have moved primitive man to this
first act of renunciation? It could hardly have been an insight into the
incorrectness of his assumptions, for he continued to retain the magic
technique.

As pointed out elsewhere, spirits and demons were nothing but the
projection of primitive man’s emotional impulses[122]; he personified
the things he endowed with effects, populated the world with them and
then rediscovered his inner psychic processes outside himself, quite
like the ingenious paranoiac Schreber, who found the fixations and
detachments of his libido reflected in the fates of the ‘God-rays’ which
he invented[123].

As on a former occasion[124], we want to avoid the problem as to the
origin of the tendency to project psychic processes into the outer
world. It is fair to assume, however, that this tendency becomes
stronger where the projection into the outer world offers psychic
relief. Such a state of affairs can with certainty be expected if the
impulses struggling for omnipotence have come into conflict with each
other, for then they evidently cannot all become omnipotent. The morbid
process in paranoia actually uses the mechanism of projection to solve
such conflicts which arise in the psychic life. However, it so happens
that the model case of such a conflict between two parts of an
antithesis is the ambivalent attitude which we have analysed in detail
in the situation of the mourner at the death of one dear to him. Such a
case appeals to us especially fitted to motivate the creation of
projection formations. Here again we are in agreement with those authors
who declare that evil spirits were the first born among spirits, and
find the origin of soul conceptions in the impression which death makes
upon the survivors. We differ from them only in not putting the
intellectual problem which death imposes upon the living into the
foreground, instead of which we transfer the force which stimulates
inquiry to the conflict of feelings into which this situation plunges
the survivor.

The first theoretical accomplishment of man, the creation of spirits
would therefore spring from the same source as the first moral
restrictions to which he subjects himself, namely, the rules of taboo.
But the fact that they have the same source should not prejudice us in
favour of a simultaneous origin. If it really were the situation of the
survivor confronted by the dead which first caused primitive man to
reflect, so that he was compelled to surrender some of his omnipotence
to spirits and to sacrifice a part of the free will of his actions,
these cultural creations would be a first recognition of the [Greek:
ἁνἁγκη anagkê], which opposes man’s narcism. Primitive man would bow to the
superior power of death with the same gesture with which he seems to
deny it.

If we have the courage to follow our assumptions further, we may ask
what essential part of our psychological structure is reflected and
reviewed in the projection formation of souls and spirits. It is then
difficult to dispute that the primitive conception of the soul, though
still far removed from the later and wholly immaterial soul,
nevertheless shares its nature and therefore looks upon a person or a
thing as a duality, over the two elements of which the known properties
and changes of the whole are distributed. This origin duality, we have
borrowed the term from Herbert Spencer[125], is already identical with
the dualism which manifests itself in our customary separation of spirit
from body, and whose indestructible linguistic manifestations we
recognize, for instance, in the description of a person who faints or
raves as one who is ‘beside himself.’[126]

The thing which we, just like primitive man, project in outer reality,
can hardly be anything else than the recognition of a state in which a
given thing is present to the senses and to consciousness, next to which
another state exists in which the thing is _latent_, but can reappear,
that is to say, the co-existence of perception and memory, or, to
generalize it, the existence of unconscious psychic processes next to
conscious ones[127]. It might be said that in the last analysis the
‘spirit’ of a person or thing is the faculty of remembering and
representing the object, after he or it was withdrawn from conscious
perception.

Of course we must not expect from either the primitive or the current
conception of the ‘soul’ that its line of demarcation from other parts
should be as marked as that which contemporary science draws between
conscious and unconscious psychic activity. The animistic soul, on the
contrary, unites determinants from both sides. Its flightiness and
mobility, its faculty of leaving the body, of permanently or temporarily
taking possession of another body, all these are characteristics which
remind us unmistakably of the nature of consciousness. But the way in
which it keeps itself concealed behind the personal appearance reminds
us of the unconscious; to-day we no longer ascribe its unchangeableness
and indestructibility to conscious but to unconscious processes and look
upon these as the real bearers of psychic activity.

We said before that animism is a system of thought, the first complete
theory of the world; we now want to draw certain inferences through
psychoanalytic interpretation of such a system. Our everyday experience
is capable of constantly showing us the main characteristics of the
‘system’. We dream during the night and have learnt to interpret the
dream in the daytime. The dream can, without being untrue to its nature,
appear confused and incoherent; but on the other hand it can also
imitate the order of impressions of an experience, infer one occurrence
from another, and refer one part of its contents to another. The dream
succeeds more or less in this, but hardly ever succeeds so completely
that an absurdity or a gap in the structure does not appear somewhere.
If we subject the dream to interpretation we find that this unstable and
irregular order of its components is quite unimportant for our
understanding of it. The essential part of the dream are the dream
thoughts, which have, to be sure, a significant, coherent, order. But
their order is quite different from that which we remember from the
manifest content of the dream. The coherence of the dream thoughts has
been abolished and may either remain altogether lost or can be replaced
by the new coherence of the dream content. Besides the condensation of
the dream elements there is almost regularly a re-grouping of the same
which is more or less independent of the former order. We say in
conclusion, that what the dream-work has made out of the material of the
dream thoughts has been subjected to a new influence, the so-called
secondary elaboration, the object of which evidently is to do away with
the incoherence and incomprehensibility caused by the dream-work, in
favour of a new ‘meaning’. This new meaning which has been brought about
by the secondary elaboration is no longer the meaning of the dream
thoughts.

The secondary elaboration of the product of the dream-work is an
excellent example of the nature and the pretensions of a system. An
intellectual function in us demands the unification, coherence and
comprehensibility of everything perceived and thought of, and does not
hesitate to construct a false connexion if, as a result of special
circumstances, it cannot grasp the right one. We know such system
formation not only from the dream, but also from phobias, from
compulsive thinking and from the types of delusions. The system
formation is most ingenious in delusional states (paranoia) and
dominates the clinical picture, but it also must not be overlooked in
other forms of neuropsychoses. In every case we can show that a
re-arrangement of the psychic material takes place, which may often be
quite violent, provided it seems comprehensible from the point of view
of the system. The best indication that a system has been formed then
lies in the fact that each result of it can be shown to have at least
two motivations one of which springs from the assumptions of the system
and is therefore eventually delusional,--and a hidden one which,
however, we must recognize as the real and effective motivation.

An example from a neurosis may serve as illustration. In the chapter on
taboo I mentioned a patient whose compulsive prohibitions correspond
very neatly to the taboo of the Maori.[128] The neurosis of this woman
was directed against her husband and culminated in the defence against
the unconscious wish for his death. But her manifest systematic phobia
concerned the mention of death in general, in which her husband was
altogether eliminated and never became the object of conscious
solicitude. One day she heard her husband give an order to have his dull
razors taken to a certain shop to have them sharpened. Impelled by a
peculiar unrest she went to the shop herself, and on her return from
this reconnoitre she asked her husband to lay the razors aside for good
because she had discovered that there was a warehouse of coffins and
funeral accessories next to the shop he mentioned. She claimed that he
had intentionally brought the razors into permanent relation with the
idea of death. This was then the systematic motivation of the
prohibition, but we may be sure that the patient would have brought home
the prohibition relating to the razors even if she had not discovered
this warehouse in the neighbourhood. For it would have been sufficient
if on her way to the shop she had met a hearse, a person in mourning, or
somebody carrying a wreath. The net of determinants was spread out far
enough to catch the prey in any case, it was simply a question whether
she should pull it in or not. It could be established with certainty
that she did not mobilize the determinants of the prohibition in other
circumstances. She would then have said it had been one of her ‘better
days’. The real reason for the prohibition of the razor was, of course,
as we can easily guess, her resistance against a pleasurably
accentuated idea that her husband might cut his throat with the
sharpened razors.

In much the same way a motor inhibition, an abasia or an agoraphobia,
becomes perfected and detailed if the symptom once succeeds in
representing an unconscious wish and of imposing a defence against it.
All the patient’s remaining unconscious phantasies and effective
reminiscences strive for symptomatic expression through this outlet,
when once it has been opened, and range themselves appropriately in the
new order within the sphere of the disturbance of gait. It would
therefore be a futile and really foolish way to begin to try to
understand the symptomatic structure, and the details of, let us say, an
agoraphobia, in terms of its basic assumptions. For the whole logic and
strictness of connexion is only apparent. Sharper observation can
reveal, as in the formation of the façade in the dream, the greatest
inconsistency and arbitrariness in the symptom formation. The details of
such a systematic phobia take their real motivation from concealed
determinants which must have nothing to do with the inhibition in gait;
it is for this reason that the form of such a phobia varies so and is so
contradictory in different people.

If we now attempt to retrace the system of animism with which we are
concerned, we may conclude from our insight into other psychological
systems that ‘superstition’ need not be the only and actual motivation
of such a single rule or custom even among primitive races, and that we
are not relieved of the obligation of seeking for concealed motives.
Under the dominance of an animistic system it is absolutely essential
that each rule and activity should receive a systematic motivation which
we to-day call ‘superstitious’. But ‘superstition’, like ‘anxiety’,
‘dreams’, and ‘demons’, is one of the preliminaries of psychology which
have been dissipated by psychoanalytic investigation. If we get behind
these structures, which like a screen conceal understanding, we realize
that the psychic life and the cultural level of savages have hitherto
been inadequately appreciated.

If we regard the repression of impulses as a measure of the level of
culture attained, we must admit that under the animistic system too,
progress and evolution have taken place, which unjustly have been
under-estimated on account of their superstitious motivation. If we hear
that the warriors of a savage tribe impose the greatest chastity and
cleanliness upon themselves as soon as they go upon the war-path[129],
the obvious explanation is that they dispose of their refuse in order
that the enemy may not come into possession of this part of their person
in order to harm them by magical means, and we may surmise analogous
superstitious motivations for their abstinence. Nevertheless the fact
remains that the impulse is renounced and we probably understand the
case better if we assume that the savage warrior imposes such
restrictions upon himself in compensation, because he is on the point of
allowing himself the full satisfaction of cruel and hostile impulses
otherwise forbidden. The same holds good for the numerous cases of
sexual restriction while he is preoccupied with difficult or responsible
tasks[130]. Even if the basis of these prohibitions can be referred to
some association with magic, the fundamental conception of gaining
greater strength by foregoing gratification of desires nevertheless
remains unmistakable, and besides the magic rationalization of the
prohibition, one must not neglect its hygienic root. When the men of a
savage tribe go away to hunt, fish, make war, or collect valuable
plants, the women at home are in the meantime subjected to numerous
oppressive restrictions which, according to the savages themselves,
exert a sympathetic effect upon the success of the far away expedition.
But it does not require much acumen to guess that this element acting
at a distance is nothing but a thought of home, the longing of the
absent, and that these disguises conceal the sound psychological insight
that the men will do their best only if they are fully assured of the
whereabouts of their guarded women. On other occasions the thought is
directly expressed without magic motivation that the conjugal infidelity
of the wife thwarts the absent husband’s efforts.

The countless taboo rules to which the women of savages are subject
during their menstrual periods are motivated by the superstitious dread
of blood which in all probability actually determines it. But it would
be wrong to overlook the possibility that this blood dread also serves
æsthetic and hygienic purposes which in every case have to be covered by
magic motivations.

We are probably not mistaken in assuming that such attempted
explanations expose us to the reproach of attributing a most improbable
delicacy of psychic activities to contemporary savages.

But I think that we may easily make the same mistake with the psychology
of these races who have remained at the animistic stage that we made
with the psychic life of the child, which we adults understood no better
and whose richness and fineness of feeling we have therefore so greatly
undervalued.

I want to consider another group of hitherto unexplained taboo rules
because they admit of an explanation with which the psychoanalyst is
familiar. Under certain conditions it is forbidden to many savage races
to keep in the house sharp weapons and instruments for cutting[131].
Frazer sites a German superstition that a knife must not be left lying
with the edge pointing upward because God and the angels might injure
themselves with it. May we not recognize in this taboo a premonition of
certain ‘symptomatic actions’[132] for which the sharp weapon might be
used by unconscious evil impulses?



CHAPTER IV

THE INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM


The reader need not fear that psychoanalysis, which first revealed the
regular over-determination of psychic acts and formations, will be
tempted to derive anything so complicated as religion from a single
source. If it necessarily seeks, as in duty bound, to gain recognition
for one of the sources of this institution, it by no means claims
exclusiveness for this source or even first rank among the concurring
factors. Only a synthesis from various fields of research can decide
what relative importance in the genesis of religion is to be assigned to
the mechanism which we are to discuss; but such a task exceeds the means
as well as the intentions of the psychoanalyst.


1

The first chapter of this book made us acquainted with the conception of
totemism. We heard that totemism is a system which takes the place of
religion among certain primitive races in Australia, America, and
Africa, and furnishes the basis of social organization. We know that in
1869 the Scotchman MacLennan attracted general interest to the phenomena
of totemism, which until then had been considered merely as curiosities,
by his conjecture that a large number of customs and usages in various
old as well as modern societies were to be taken as remnants of a
totemic epoch. Science has since then fully recognized this significance
of totemism. I quote a passage from the _Elements of the Psychology of
Races_ by W. Wundt (1912), as the latest utterance on this
question[133]: ‘Taking all this together it becomes highly probable that
a totemic culture was at one time the preliminary stage of every later
evolution as well as a transition stage between the state of primitive
man and the age of gods and heroes.’

It is necessary for the purposes of this chapter to go more deeply into
the nature of totemism. For reasons that will be evident later I here
give preference to an outline by S. Reinach, who in the year 1900
sketched the following _Code du Totémisme_ in twelve articles, like a
catechism of the totemic religion[134]:

1. Certain animals must not be killed or eaten, but men bring up
individual animals of these species and take care of them.

2. An animal that dies accidentally is mourned and buried with the same
honours as a member of the tribe.

3. The prohibition as to eating sometimes refers only to a certain part
of the animal.

4. If pressure of necessity compels the killing of an animal usually
spared, it is done with excuses to the animal and the attempt is made to
mitigate the violation of the taboo, namely the killing, through various
tricks and evasions.

5. If the animal is sacrificed by ritual, it is solemnly mourned.

6. At specified solemn occasions, like religious ceremonies, the skins
of certain animals are donned. Where totemism still exists, these are
totem animals.

7. Tribes and individuals assume the names of totem animals.

8. Many tribes use pictures of animals as coats of arms and decorate
their weapons with them; the men paint animal pictures on their bodies
or have them tattooed.

9. If the totem is one of the feared and dangerous animals it is assumed
that the animal will spare the members of the tribe named after it.

10. The totem animal protects and warns the members of the tribe.

11. The totem animal foretells the future to those faithful to it and
serves as their leader.

12. The members of a totem tribe often believe that they are connected
with the totem animal by the bond of common origin.

The value of this catechism of the totem religion can be more
appreciated if one bears in mind that Reinach has here also incorporated
all the signs and clews which lead to the conclusion that the totemic
system had once existed. The peculiar attitude of this author to the
problem is shown by the fact that to some extent he neglects the
essential traits of totemism, and we shall see that of the two main
tenets of the totemistic catechism he has forced one into the background
and completely lost sight of the other.

In order to get a more correct picture of the characteristics of
totemism we turn to an author who has devoted four volumes to the theme,
combining the most complete collection of the observations in question
with the most thorough discussion of the problems they raise. We shall
remain indebted to J. G. Frazer, the author of _Totemism and
Exogamy_[135], for the pleasure and information he affords, even though
psychoanalytic investigation may lead us to results which differ widely
from his[136].

“A totem,” wrote Frazer in his first essay[137], “is a class of material
objects which a savage regards with superstitious respect, believing
that there exists between him and every member of the class an intimate
and altogether special relation. The connexion between a person and his
totem is mutually beneficent; the totem protects the man and the man
shows his respect for the totem in various ways, by not killing it if it
be an animal, and not cutting or gathering it if it be a plant. As
distinguished from a fetich, a totem is never an isolated individual but
always a class of objects, generally a species of animals or of plants,
more rarely a class of inanimate natural objects, very rarely a class of
artificial objects.”

At least three kinds of totem can be distinguished:

1. The tribal totem which a whole tribe shares and which is hereditary
from generation to generation,

2. The sex totem which belongs to all the masculine or feminine members
of a tribe to the exclusion of the opposite sex, and

3. The individual totem which belongs to the individual and does not
descend to his successors.

The last two kinds of totem are comparatively of little importance
compared to the tribal totem. Unless we are mistaken they are recent
formations and of little importance as far as the nature of the taboo is
concerned.

The tribal totem (clan totem) is the object of veneration of a group of
men and women who take their name from the totem and consider themselves
consanguineous offspring of a common ancestor, and who are firmly
associated with each other through common obligations towards each other
as well as by the belief in their totem.

Totemism is a religious as well as a social system. On its religious
side it consists of the relations of mutual respect and consideration
between a person and his totem, and on its social side it is composed of
obligations of the members of the clan towards each other and towards
other tribes. In the later history of totemism these two sides show a
tendency to part company; the social system often survives the religious
and conversely remnants of totemism remain in the religion of countries
in which the social system based upon totemism had disappeared. In the
present state of our ignorance about the origin of totemism we cannot
say with certainty how these two sides were originally combined. But
there is on the whole a strong probability that in the beginning the two
sides of totemism were indistinguishable from each other. In other
words, the further we go back the clearer it becomes that a member of a
tribe looks upon himself as being of the same genus as his totem and
makes no distinction between his attitude towards the totem and his
attitude towards his tribal companions.

In the special description of totemism as a religious system, Frazer
lays stress on the fact that the members of a tribe assume the name of
their totem and also as a _rule believe that they are descended from
it._ It is due to this belief that they do not hunt the totem animal or
kill or eat it, and that they deny themselves every other use of the
totem if it is not an animal. The prohibitions against killing or eating
the totem are not the only taboos affecting it; sometimes it is also
forbidden to touch it and even to look at it; in a number of cases the
totem must not be called by its right name. Violation of the taboo
prohibitions which protect the totem is punished automatically by
serious disease or death[138].

Specimens of the totem animals are sometimes raised by the clan and
taken care of in captivity[139]. A totem animal found dead is mourned
and buried like a member of the clan. If a totem animal had to be killed
it was done with a prescribed ritual of excuses and ceremonies of
expiation.

The tribe expected protection and forbearance from its totem. If it was
a dangerous animal (a beast of prey or a poisonous snake), it was
assumed that it would not harm, and where this assumption did not come
true the person attacked was expelled from the tribe. Frazer thinks that
oaths were originally ordeals, many tests as to descent and genuineness
being in this way left to the decision of the totem. The totem helps in
case of illness and gives the tribe premonitions and warnings. The
appearance of the totem animal near a house was often looked upon as an
announcement of death. The totem had come to get its relative[140].

A member of a clan seeks to emphasize his relationship to the totem in
various significant ways; he imitates an exterior similarity by dressing
himself in the skin of the totem animal, by having the picture of it
tattooed upon himself, and in other ways. On the solemn occasions of
birth, initiation into manhood or funeral obsequies this identification
with the totem is carried out in deeds and words. Dances in which all
the members of the tribe disguise themselves as their totem and act like
it, serve various magic and religious purposes. Finally there are the
ceremonies at which the totem animal is killed in a solemn manner[141].

The social side of totemism is primarily expressed in a sternly
observed commandment and in a tremendous restriction. The members of a
totem clan are brothers and sisters, pledged to help and protect each
other; if a member of the clan is slain by a stranger the whole tribe of
the slayer must answer for the murder and the clan of the slain man
shows its solidarity in the demand for expiation for the blood that has
been shed. The ties of the totem are stronger than our ideas of family
ties, with which they do not altogether coincide, since the transfer of
the totem takes place as a rule through maternal inheritance, paternal
inheritance possibly not counting at all in the beginning.

But the corresponding taboo restriction consists in the prohibition
against members of the same clan marrying each other or having any kind
of sexual intercourse whatsoever with each other. This is the famous and
enigmatic _exogamy_ connexion with totemism. We have devoted the whole
first chapter of this book to it, and therefore need only mention here
that this exogamy springs from the intensified incest dread of primitive
races, that it becomes entirely comprehensible as a security against
incest in group marriages, and that at first it accomplishes the
avoidance of incest for the younger generation and only in the course
of further development becomes a hindrance to the older generation as
well[142].

To this presentation of totemism by Frazer, one of the earliest in the
literature on the subject, I will now add a few excerpts from one of the
latest summaries. In the _Elements of the Psychology of Races_, which
appeared in 1912, W. Wundt says[143]: “The totem animal is considered
the ancestral animal. ‘Totem’ is therefore both a group name and a birth
name and in the latter aspect this name has at the same time a
mythological meaning. But all these uses of the conception play into
each other and the particular meanings may recede so that in some cases
the totems have become almost a mere nomenclature of the tribal
divisions, while in others the idea of the descent or else the cultic
meaning of the totem remains in the foreground.... The conception of the
totem determines the _tribal_ arrangement and the _tribal organization_.
These norms and their establishment in the belief and feelings of the
members of the tribe account for the fact that originally the totem
animal was certainly not considered merely a name for a group division
but that it usually was considered the progenitor of the corresponding
division.... This accounted for the fact that these animal ancestors
enjoyed a cult.... This animal cult expresses itself primarily in the
attitude towards the totem animal, quite aside from special ceremonies
and ceremonial festivities: not only each individual animal but every
representative of the same species was to a certain degree a sanctified
animal; the member of the totem was forbidden to eat the flesh of the
totem animal or he was allowed to eat it only under special
circumstances. This is in accord with the significant contradictory
phenomenon found in this connexion, namely, that under certain
conditions there was a kind of ceremonial consumption of the totem
flesh....”

“ ...But the most important social side of this totemic tribal
arrangement consists in the fact that it was connected with certain
rules of conduct for the relations of the groups with each other. The
most important of these were the rules of conjugal relations. This
tribal division is thus connected with an important phenomenon which
first made its appearance in the totemic age, namely with exogamy.”

If we wish to arrive at the characteristics of the original totemism by
sifting through everything that may correspond to later development or
decline, we find the following essential facts: _The totems were
originally only animals and were considered the ancestors of single
tribes. The totem was hereditary only through the female line; it was
forbidden to kill the totem_ (or to eat it, which under primitive
conditions amounts to the same thing); _members of a totem were
forbidden to have sexual intercourse with each other_[144].

It may now seem strange to us that in the _Code du totémisme_ which
Reinach has drawn up the one principal taboo, namely exogamy, does not
appear at all while the assumption of the second taboo, namely the
descent from the totem animal, is only casually mentioned. Yet Reinach
is an author to whose work in this field we owe much and I have chosen
his presentation in order to prepare us for the differences of opinion
among the authors, which will now occupy our attention.


2

The more convinced we became that totemism had regularly formed a phase
of every culture, the more urgent became the necessity of arriving at an
understanding of it and of casting light upon the riddle of its nature.
To be sure, everything about totemism is in the nature of a riddle; the
decisive questions are the origin of the totem, the motivation of
exogamy (or rather of the incest taboo which it represents) and the
relation between the two, the totem organization and the incest
prohibition. The understanding should be at once historical and
psychological; it should inform us under what conditions this peculiar
institution developed and to what psychic needs of man it has given
expression.

The reader will certainly be astonished to hear from how many different
points of view the answer to these questions has been attempted and how
far the opinions of expert investigators vary. Almost everything that
might be asserted in general about totemism is doubtful; even the above
statement of it, taken from an article by Frazer in 1887, cannot escape
the criticism that it expresses an arbitrary preference of the author
and would be challenged to-day by Frazer himself, who has repeatedly
changed his view on the subject[145].

It is quite obvious that the nature of totemism and exogamy could be
most readily grasped if we could get into closer touch with the origin
of both institutions. But in judging the state of affairs we must not
forget the remark of Andrew Lang, that even primitive races have not
preserved these original forms and the conditions of their origin, so
that we are altogether dependent upon hypotheses to take the place of
the observation we lack[146]. Among the attempted explanations some seem
inadequate from the very beginning in the judgment of the psychologist.
They are altogether too rational and do not take into consideration the
effective character of what they are to explain. Others rest on
assumptions which observation fails to verify; while still others appeal
to facts which could better be subjected to another interpretation. The
refutation of these various opinions as a rule hardly presents any
difficulties; the authors are, as usual, stronger in the criticism which
they practice on each other than in their own work. The final result as
regards most of the points treated is a _non liquet_. It is therefore
not surprising that most of the new literature on the subject, which we
have largely omitted here, shows the unmistakable effort to reject a
general solution of totemic problems as unfeasible. (See, for instance,
B. Goldenweiser in the _Journal of American Folklore_ XXIII, 1910.
Reviewed in the _Brittanica Year Book_, 1913.) I have taken the liberty
of disregarding the chronological order in stating these contradictory
hypotheses.


(_a_) THE ORIGIN OF TOTEMISM

The question of the origin of totemism can also be formulated as
follows: How did primitive people come to select the names of animals,
plants and inanimate objects for themselves and their tribes?[147]

The Scotchman, MacLennan, who discovered totemism and exogamy for
science[148], refrained from publishing his views of the origin of
totemism. According to a communication of Andrew Lang[149] he was for a
time inclined to trace totemism back to the custom of tattooing. I shall
divide the accepted theories of the derivation of totemism into three
groups, ([Greek: α a]) nominalistic, ([Greek: β b]) sociological, ([Greek:
γ g]) psychological.


([Greek: α a]) _The Nominalistic Theories_

The information about these theories will justify their summation under
the headings I have used.

Garcilaso de La Vega, a descendant of the Peruvian Inkas, who wrote the
history of his race in the seventeenth century, is already said to have
traced back what was known to him about totemic phenomena to the need of
the tribes to differentiate themselves from each other by means of
names[150]. The same idea appears centuries later in the _Ethnology_ of
A. K. Keane where totems are said to be derived from heraldic badges
through which individuals, families and tribes wanted to differentiate
themselves[151].

Max Müller expresses the same opinion about the meaning of the totem in
his _Contributions to the Science of Mythology_[152]. A totem is said to
be, 1. a mark of the clan, 2. a clan name, 3. the name of the ancestor
of the clan, 4. the name of the object which the clan reveres. J. Pikler
wrote later, in 1899, that men needed a permanent name for communities
and individuals that could be preserved in writing.... Thus totemism
arises, not from a religious, but from a prosaic everyday need of
mankind. The giving of names, which is the essence of totemism, is a
result of the technique of primitive writing. The totem is of the nature
of an easily represented writing symbol. But if savages first bore the
name of an animal they deduced the idea of relationship from this
animal[153].

Herbert Spencer[154], also, thought that the origin of totemism was to
be found in the giving of names. The attributes of certain individuals,
he showed, had brought about their being named after animals so that
they had come to have names of honour or nicknames which continued in
their descendants. As a result of the indefiniteness and
incomprehensibility of primitive languages, these names are said to have
been taken by later generations as proof of their descent from the
animals themselves. Totemism would thus be the result of a mistaken
reverence for ancestors.

Lord Avebury (better known under his former name, Sir John Lubbock) has
expressed himself quite similarly about the origin of totemism, though
without emphasizing the misunderstanding. If we want to explain the
veneration of animals we must not forget how often human names are
borrowed from animals. The children and followers of a man who was
called bear or lion naturally made this their ancestral name. In this
way it came about that the animal itself came to be respected and
finally venerated.

Fison has advanced what seems an irrefutable objection to such a
derivation of the totem name from the names of individuals[155]. He
shows from conditions in Australia that the totem is always the mark of
a group of people and never of an individual. But if it were otherwise,
if the totem was originally the name of a single individual, it could
never, with the system of maternal inheritance, descend to his children.

The theories thus far stated are evidently inadequate. They may explain
how animal names came to be applied to primitive tribes but they can
never explain the importance attached to the giving of names which
constitutes the totemic system. The most noteworthy theory of this
group has been developed by Andrew Lang in his books, _Social Origins_,
1903, and _The Secret of the Totem_, 1905. This theory still makes
naming the centre of the problem, but it uses two interesting
psychological factors and thus may claim to have contributed to the
final solution of the riddle of totemism.

Andrew Lang holds that it does not make any difference how clans
acquired their animal names. It might be assumed that one day they awoke
to the consciousness that they had them without being able to account
from where they came. _The origin of these names had been forgotten._ In
that case they would seek to acquire more information by pondering over
their names, and with their conviction of the importance of names they
necessarily came to all the ideas that are contained in the totemic
system. For primitive men, as for savages of to-day and even for our
children[156], a name is not indifferent and conventional as it seems to
us, but is something important and essential. A man’s name is one of the
main constituents of his person and perhaps a part of his psyche. The
fact that they had the same names as animals must have led primitive men
to assume a secret and important bond between their persons and the
particular animal species. What other bond than consanguinity could it
be? But if the similarity of names once led to this assumption it could
also account directly for all the totemic prohibitions of the blood
taboo, including exogamy.

“No more than these three things--a group animal name of unknown origin;
belief in a transcendental connexion between all bearers, human and
bestial, of the same name; and belief in the blood superstitions--were
needed to give rise to all the totemic creeds and practices, including
exogamy” (_Secret of the Totem_, p. 126).

Lang’s explanation extends over two periods. It derives the totemic
system of psychological necessity from the totem names, on the
assumption that the origin of the naming has been forgotten. The other
part of the theory now seeks to clear up the origin of these names. We
shall see that it bears an entirely different stamp.

This other part of the Lang theory is not markedly different from those
which I have called ‘nominalistic’. The practical need of
differentiation compelled the individual tribes to assume names and
therefore they tolerated the names which every tribe ascribed to the
other. This ‘naming from without’ is the peculiarity of Lang’s
construction. The fact that the names which thus originated were
borrowed from animals is not further remarkable and need not have been
felt by primitive men as abuse or derision. Besides, Lang has cited
numerous cases from later epochs of history in which names given from
without that were first meant to be derisive were accepted by those
nicknamed and voluntarily borne (The Guises, Whigs and Tories). The
assumption that the origin of these names was forgotten in the course of
time connects this second part of the Lang theory with the first one
just mentioned.


([Greek: β b]) _The Sociological Theories_

S. Reinach, who successfully traced the relics of the totemic system in
the cult and customs of later periods, though attaching from the very
beginning only slight value to the factor of descent from the totem
animal, once made the casual remark that totemism seemed to him to be
nothing but “_une hypertrophie de l’instinct social_.”[157]

The same interpretation seems to permeate the new work of E. Durkheim,
_Les Formes Élémentaires de la Vie Religieuse; Le Systême Totémique en
Australie_, 1912. The totem is the visible representative of the social
religion of these races. It embodies the community, which is the real
object of veneration.

Other authors have sought a more intimate reason for the share which
social impulses have played in the formation of totemic institutions.
Thus A. C. Haddon has assumed that every primitive tribe originally
lived on a particular plant or animal species and perhaps also traded
with this food and exchanged it with other tribes. It then was
inevitable that a tribe should become known to other tribes by the name
of the animal which played such weighty rôle with it. At the same time
this tribe would develop a special familiarity with this animal, and a
kind of interest for it which, however, was based upon the psychic
motive of man’s most elementary and pressing need, namely, hunger[158].

The objections against this most rational of all the totem theories are
that such a state of the food supply is never found among primitive men
and probably never existed. Savages are the more omnivorous the lower
they stand in the social scale. Besides, it is incomprehensible how such
an exclusive diet could have developed an almost religious relation to
the totem, culminating in an absolute abstention from the referred food.

The first of the three theories about the origin of totemism which
Frazer stated was a psychological one. We shall report it elsewhere.

Frazer’s second theory, which we will discuss here, originated under the
influence of an important publication by two investigators of the
inhabitants of Central Australia[159].

Spencer and Gillen describe a series of peculiar institutions, customs,
and opinions of a group of tribes, the so-called Arunta nation, and
Frazer subscribes to their opinion that these peculiarities are to be
looked upon as characteristics of a primary state and that they can
explain the first and real meaning of totemism.

In the Arunta tribe itself (a part of the Arunta nation) these
peculiarities are as follows:

1. They have the division into totem clans but the totem is not
hereditary but is individually determined (as will be shown later).

2. The totem clans are not exogamous, and the marriage restrictions are
brought about by a highly developed division into marriage classes which
have nothing to do with the totems.

3. The function of the totem clan consists of carrying out a ceremony
which in a subtle magic manner brings about an increase of the edible
totem. (This ceremony is called _Intichiuma_.)

4. The Aruntas have a peculiar theory about conception and re-birth.
They assume that the spirits of the dead who belonged to their totem
wait for their re-birth in definite localities and penetrate into the
bodies of the women who pass such a spot. When a child is born the
mother states at which spirit abode she thinks she conceived her child.
This determines the totem of the child. It is further assumed that the
spirits (of the dead as well as of the re-born) are bound to peculiar
stone amulets, called _Churinga_, which are found in these places.

Two factors seem to have induced Frazer to believe that the oldest form
of totemism had been found in the institution of the Aruntas. In the
first place the existence of certain myths which assert that the
ancestors of the Aruntas always lived on their totem animal, and that
they married no other women except those of their own totem. Secondly,
the apparent disregard of the sexual act in their theory of conception.
People who have not yet realized that conception was the result of the
sexual act might well be considered the most backward and primitive
people living to-day.

Frazer, in having recourse to the _Intichiuma_ ceremony to explain
totemism, suddenly saw the totemic system in a totally different light
as a thoroughly practical organization for accomplishing the most
natural needs of man. (Compare Haddon above[160].) The system was simply
an extraordinary piece of ‘co-operative magic’. Primitive men formed
what might be called a magic production and consumption club. Each totem
clan undertook to see to the cleanliness of a certain article of food.
If it were a question of inedible totems like harmful animals, rain,
wind, or similar objects, it was the duty of the totem clan to dominate
this part of nature and to ward off its injuriousness. The efforts of
each clan were for the good of all the others. As the clan could not eat
its totem or could eat only a very little of it, it furnished this
valuable product for the rest and was in turn furnished with what these
had to take care of as their social totem duty. In the light of this
interpretation furnished by the _Intichiuma_ ceremony, it appeared to
Frazer as if the prohibition against eating the totem had misled
observers to neglect the more important side of the relation, namely the
commandment to supply as much as possible of the edible totem for the
needs of others.

Frazer accepted the tradition of the Aruntas that each totem clan had
originally lived on its totem without any restriction. It then became
difficult to understand the evolution that followed through which
savages were satisfied to ensure the totem for others while they
themselves abstained from eating it. He then assumed that this
restriction was by no means the result of a kind of religious respect,
but came about through the observation that no animal devoured its own
kind, so that this break in the identification with the totem was
injurious to the power which savages sought to acquire over the totem.
Or else it resulted from the endeavour to make the being favourably
disposed by sparing it. Frazer did not conceal the difficulties of this
explanation from himself[161], nor did he dare to indicate in what way
the habit of marrying within the totem, which the myths of the Aruntas
proclaimed, was converted into exogamy.

Frazer’s theory based on the _Intichiuma_, stands or falls with the
recognition of the primitive nature of the Arunta institutions. But it
seems impossible to hold to this in the fact of the objections advanced
by Durkheim[162] and Lang[163]. The Aruntas seem on the contrary to be
the most developed of the Australian tribes and to represent rather a
dissolution stage of totemism than its beginning. The myths that made
such an impression on Frazer because they emphasize, in contrast to
prevailing institutions of to-day, that the Aruntas are free to eat the
totem and to marry within it, easily explain themselves to us as wish
phantasies, which are projected into the past, like the myths of the
Golden Age.


([Greek: γ g]) _The Psychological Theories_

Frazer’s first psychological theories, formed before his acquaintance
with the observations of Spencer and Gillen, were based upon the belief
in an ‘outward soul’[164]. The totem was meant to represent a safe place
of refuge where the soul is deposited in order to avoid the dangers
which threaten it. After primitive man had housed his soul in his totem
he himself became invulnerable and he naturally took care himself not to
harm the bearer of his soul. But as he did not know which individual of
the species in question was the bearer of his soul he was concerned in
sparing the whole species. Frazer himself later gave up this derivation
of totemism from the belief in souls.

When he became acquainted with the observations of Spencer and Gillen
he set up the other social theory which has just been stated, but he
himself then saw that the motive from which he had derived totemism was
altogether too ‘rational’ and that he had assumed a social organization
for it which was altogether too complicated to be called primitive[165].
The magic co-operative companies now appeared to him rather as the fruit
than as the germ of totemism. He sought a simpler factor for the
derivation of totemism in the shape of a primitive superstition behind
these forms. He then found this original factor in the remarkable
conception theory of the Aruntas.

As already stated, the Aruntas establish no connexion between conception
and the sexual act. If a woman feels herself to be a mother it means
that at that moment one of the spirits from the nearest spirit abode who
has been watching for a re-birth, has penetrated into her body and is
born as her child. This child has the same totem as all the spirits that
lurk in that particular locality. But if we are willing to go back a
step further and assume that the woman originally believed that the
animal, plant, stone, or other object which occupied her fancy at the
moment when she first felt herself pregnant had really penetrated into
her and was being born through her in human form, then the identity of a
human being with his totem would really be founded on the belief of the
mother, and all the other totem commandments (with the exception of
exogamy) could easily be derived from this belief. Men would refuse to
eat the particular animal or plant because it would be just like eating
themselves. But occasionally they would be impelled to eat some of their
totem in a ceremonial manner because they could thus strengthen their
identification with the totem, which is the essential part of totemism.
W. H. R. Rivers’ observations among the inhabitants of the Bank Islands
seemed to prove men’s direct identification with their totems on the
basis of such a conception theory[166].

The ultimate sources of totemism would then be the ignorance of savages
as to the process of procreation among human beings and animals;
especially their ignorance as to the rôle which the male plays in
fertilization. This ignorance must be facilitated by the long interval
which is interposed between the fertilizing act and the birth of the
child or the sensation of the child’s first movements. Totemism is
therefore a creation of the feminine mind and not of the masculine. The
sick fancies of the pregnant woman are the roots of it. Anything indeed
that struck a woman at that mysterious moment of her life when she first
knows herself to be a mother might easily be identified by her with the
child in her womb. Such maternal fancies, so natural and seemingly so
universal, appear to be the root of totemism[167].

The main objection to this third theory of Frazer’s is the same which
has already been advanced against his second, sociological theory. The
Aruntas seem to be far removed from the beginnings of totemism. Their
denial of fatherhood does not apparently rest upon primitive ignorance;
in many cases they even have paternal inheritance. They seem to have
sacrificed fatherhood to a kind of a speculation which strives to honour
the ancestral spirits[168]. Though they raise the myth of immaculate
conception through a spirit to a general theory of conception, we cannot
for that reason credit them with ignorance as to the conditions of
procreation any more than we could the old races who lived during the
rise of the Christian myths.

Another psychological theory of the origin of totemism has been
formulated by the Dutch writer, G. A. Wilcken. It establishes a
connexion between totemism and the migration of souls. “The animal into
which, according to general belief, the souls of the dead passed, became
a blood relative, an ancestor, and was revered as such.” But the belief
in the soul’s migration to animals is more readily derived from totemism
than inversely[169].

Still another theory of totemism is advanced by the excellent American
ethnologists, Franz Boas, Hill-Tout, and others. It is based on
observations of totemic Indian tribes and asserts that the totem is
originally the guardian spirit of an ancestor who has acquired it
through a dream and handed it on to his descendants. We have already
heard the difficulties which the derivation of totemism through
inheritance from a single individual offers; besides, the Australian
observations seem by no means to support the tracing back of the totem
to the guardian spirit[170].

Two facts have become decisive for the last of the psychological
theories as stated by Wundt; in the first place, that the original and
most widely known totem object was an animal, and secondly, that the
earliest totem animals corresponded to animals which had a soul[171].
Such animals as birds, snakes, lizards, mice are fitted by their extreme
mobility, their flight through the air, and by other characteristics
which arouse surprise and fear, to become the bearers of souls which
leave their bodies. The totem animal is a descendant of the animal
transformations of the spirit-soul. Thus with Wundt totemism is directly
connected with the belief in souls or with animism.


(b) and (c) THE ORIGIN OF EXOGAMY AND ITS RELATION TO TOTEMISM

I have put forth the theories of totemism with considerable detail and
yet I am afraid that I have not made them clear enough on account of the
condensation that was constantly necessary. In the interest of the
reader I am taking the liberty of further condensing the other questions
that arise. The discussions about the exogamy of totem races become
especially complicated and untractable, one might even say confused, on
account of the nature of the material used. Fortunately the object of
this treatise permits me to limit myself to pointing out several
guide-posts and referring to the frequently quoted writings of experts
in the field for a more thorough pursuit of the subject.

The attitude of an author to the problems of exogamy is of course not
independent of the stand he has taken toward one or the other of the
totem theories. Some of these explanations of totemism lack all
connexion with exogamy so that the two institutions are entirely
separated. Thus we find here two opposing views, one of which clings to
the original likelihood that exogamy is an essential part of the totemic
system while the other disputes such a connection and believes in an
accidental combination of these two traits of the most ancient cultures.
In his later works Frazer has emphatically stood for this latter point
of view.

“I must request the reader to bear constantly in mind that the two
institutions of totemism and exogamy are fundamentally distinct in
origin and nature though they have accidentally crossed and blended in
many tribes.” (_Totemism and Exogamy_ I, Preface XII.)

He warns directly against the opposite view as being a source of endless
difficulties and misunderstandings. In contrast to this, many authors
have found a way of conceiving exogamy as a necessary consequence of the
basic views on totemism. Durkheim[172] has shown in his writings how
the taboo, which is attached to the totem, must have entailed the
prohibition against putting a woman of the same totem to sexual uses.
The totem is of the same blood as the human being and for this reason
the blood bann (in reference to defloration and menstruation) forbids
sexual intercourse with a woman of the same totem[173]. Andrew Lang, who
here agrees with Durkheim, goes so far as to believe that the blood
taboo was not necessary to bring about the prohibition in regard to the
women of the same tribe[174]. The general totem taboo which, for
instance, forbids any one to sit in the shadow of the totem tree, would
have sufficed. Andrew Lang also contends for another derivation of
exogamy (see below) and leaves it in doubt how these two explanations
are related to each other.

As regards the temporal relations, the majority of authors subscribe to
the opinion that totemism is the older institution and that exogamy came
later[175].

Among the theories which seek to explain exogamy independently of
totemism only a few need be mentioned in so far as they illustrate
different attitudes of the authors towards the problem of incest.

MacLennan[176] had ingeniously guessed that exogamy resulted from the
remnants of customs pointing to earlier forms of female rape. He assumed
that it was the general custom in ancient times to procure women from
strange tribes so that marriage with a woman from the same tribe
gradually became “improper because it was unusual”. He sought the motive
for the exogamous habit in the scarcity of women among these tribes,
which had resulted from the custom of killing most female children at
birth. We are not concerned here with investigation whether actual
conditions corroborate MacLennan’s assumptions. We are more interested
in the argument that these premises still leave it unexplained why the
male members of the tribe should have made these few women of their
blood inaccessible to themselves, as well as in the manner in which the
incest problem is here entirely neglected[177].

Other writers have on the contrary assumed, and evidently with more
right, that exogamy is to be interpreted as an institution for the
prevention of incest[178].

If we survey the gradually increasing complication of Australian
marriage restrictions we can hardly help agreeing with the opinion of
Morgan Frazer, Hewitt and Baldwin Spencer[179], that these institutions
bear the stamp of ‘deliberate design’, as Frazer puts it, and that they
were meant to do what they have actually accomplished. “In no other way
does it seem possible to explain in all its details a system at once so
complex and so regular”[180].

It is of interest to point out that the first restrictions which the
introduction of marriage classes brought about affected the sexual
freedom of the younger generation, in other words, incest between
brothers and sisters and between sons and mothers, while incest between
father and daughter was only abrogated by more sweeping measures.

However, to trace back exogamous sexual restrictions to legal intentions
does not add anything to the understanding of the motive which created
these institutions. From what source, in the final analysis, springs the
dread of incest which must be recognized as the root of exogamy? It
evidently does not suffice to appeal to an instinctive aversion against
sexual intercourse with blood relatives, that is to say, to the fact of
incest dread, in order to explain the dread of incest, if social
experience shows that, in spite of this instinct, incest is not a rare
occurrence even in our society, and if the experience of history can
acquaint us with cases in which incestuous marriage of privileged
persons was made the rule.

Westermarck[181] advanced the following to explain the dread of incest:
“that an innate aversion against sexual intercourse exists between
persons who live together from childhood and that this feeling, since
such persons are as a rule consanguineous, finds a natural expression in
custom and law through the abhorrence of sexual intercourse between
those closely related.” Though Havelock Ellis disputed the instinctive
character of this aversion in the _Studies in the Psychology of Sex_, he
otherwise supported the same explanation in its essentials by declaring:
“The normal absence of the manifestation of the pairing instinct where
brothers and sisters or boys and girls living together from childhood
are concerned, is a purely negative phenomenon due to the fact that
under these circumstances the antecedent conditions for arousing the
mating instinct must be entirely lacking.... For persons who have grown
up together from childhood habit has dulled the sensual attraction of
seeing, hearing and touching and has led it into a channel of quiet
attachment, robbing it of its power to call forth the necessary
erethistic excitement required to produce sexual tumescence.”

It seems to me very remarkable that Westermarck looks upon this innate
aversion to sexual intercourse with persons with whom we have shared
childhood as being at the same time a psychic representative of the
biological fact that inbreeding means injury to the species. Such a
biological instinct would hardly go so far astray in its psychological
manifestation as to affect the companions of home and hearth which in
this respect are quite harmless, instead of the blood relatives which
alone are injurious to procreation. And I cannot resist citing the
excellent criticism which Frazer opposes to Westermarck’s assertion.
Frazer finds it incomprehensible that sexual sensibility to-day is not
at all opposed to sexual intercourse with companions of the hearth and
home while the dread of incest, which is said to be nothing but an
offshoot of this reluctance, has nowadays grown to be so overpowering.
But other remarks of Frazer’s go deeper and I set them down here in
unabbreviated form because they are in essential agreement with the
arguments developed in my chapter on taboo.

“It is not easy to see why any deep human instinct should need
reinforcement through law. There is no law commanding men to eat and
drink, or forbidding them to put their hands in the fire. Men eat and
drink and keep their hands out of the fire instinctively, for fear of
natural, not legal penalties, which would be entailed by violence done
to these instincts. The law only forbids men to do what their instincts
incline them to do; what nature itself prohibits and punishes it would
be superfluous for the law to prohibit and punish. Accordingly we may
always safely assume that crimes forbidden by law are crimes which many
men have a natural propensity to commit. If there were no such
propensity there would be no such crimes, and if no such crimes were
committed, what need to forbid them? Instead of assuming therefore, from
the legal prohibition of incest, that there is a natural aversion to
incest we ought rather to assume that there is a natural instinct in
favour of it, and that if the law represses it, it does so because
civilized men have come to the conclusion that the satisfaction of these
natural instincts is detrimental to the general interests of
society”[182].

To this valuable argument of Frazer’s I can add that the experiences of
psychoanalysis make the assumption of such an innate aversion to
incestuous relations altogether impossible. They have taught, on the
contrary, that the first sexual impulses of the young are regularly of
an incestuous nature and that such repressed impulses play a rôle which
can hardly be overestimated as the motive power of later neuroses.

The interpretation of incest dread as an innate instinct must therefore
be abandoned. The same holds true of another derivation of the incest
prohibition which counts many supporters, namely the assumption that
primitive races very soon observed the dangers with which inbreeding
threatened their race and that they therefore had decreed the incest
prohibition with a conscious purpose. The objections to this attempted
explanation crowd upon each other[183]. Not only must the prohibition of
incest be older than all breeding of domestic animals from which men
could derive experience of the effect of inbreeding upon the
characteristics of the breed, but the harmful consequences of inbreeding
are not established beyond all doubt even to-day and in man they can be
shown only with difficulty. Besides, everything that we know about
contemporaneous savages makes it very improbable that the thoughts of
their far-removed ancestors should already have been occupied with
preventing injury to their later descendants. It sounds almost
ridiculous to attribute hygienic and eugenic motives such as have hardly
yet found consideration in our culture, to these children of the race
who lived without thought of the morrow[184].

And finally it must be pointed out that a prohibition against inbreeding
as an element weakening to the race, which is imposed from practical
hygienic motives, seems quite inadequate to explain the deep abhorrence
which our society feels against incest. This dread of incest, as I have
shown elsewhere[185], seems to be even more active and stronger among
primitive races living to-day than among the civilized.

In inquiring into the origin of incest dread it could be expected that
here also there is the choice between possible explanations of a
sociological, biological, and psychological nature in which the
psychological motives might have to be considered as representative of
biological forces. Still, in the end, one is compelled to subscribe to
Frazer’s resigned statement, namely, that we do not know the origin of
incest dread and do not even know how to guess at it. None of the
solutions of the riddle thus far advanced seems satisfactory to us[186].

I must mention another attempt to explain the origin of incest dread
which is of an entirely different nature from those considered up to
now. It might be called an historic explanation.

This attempt is associated with a hypothesis of Charles Darwin about the
primal social state of man. From the habits of the higher apes Darwin
concluded that man, too, lived originally in small hordes in which the
jealousy of the oldest and strongest male prevented sexual promiscuity.
“We may indeed conclude from what we know of the jealousy of all male
quadrupeds, armed, as many of them are, with special weapons for
battling with their rivals, that promiscuous intercourse in a state of
nature is extremely improbable.... If we therefore look back far enough
into the stream of time and judging from the social habits of man as he
now exists, the most probable view is that he originally lived in small
communities, each with a single wife, or if powerful with several, whom
he jealously defended against all other men. Or he may not have been a
social animal and yet have lived with several wives, like the gorilla;
for all the natives agree that only the adult male is seen in a band;
when the young male grows up a contest takes place for mastery, and the
strongest, by killing and driving out the others, establishes himself as
the head of the community (Dr Savage in the Boston _Journal of Natural
History_, Vol. V, 1845-7). The younger males being thus driven out and
wandering about would also, when at last successful in finding a
partner, prevent too close breeding within the limits of the same
family”[187].

Atkinson[188] seems to have been the first to recognize that these
conditions of the Darwinian primal horde would in practice bring about
the exogamy of the young men. Each one of those driven away could found
a similar horde in which, thanks to jealousy of the chief, the same
prohibition as to sexual intercourse obtained, and in the course of time
these conditions would have brought about the rule which is now known as
law: no sexual intercourse with the members of the horde. After the
advent of totemism the rule would have changed into a different form: no
sexual intercourse within the totem.

Andrew Lang[189] declared himself in agreement with this explanation of
exogamy. But in the same book he advocates the other theory of Durkheim
which explains exogamy as a consequence of the totem laws. It is not
altogether easy to combine the two interpretations; in the first case
exogamy would have existed before totemism; in the second case it would
be a consequence of it[190].


3

Into this darkness psychoanalytic experience throws one single ray of
light.

The relation of the child to animals has much in common with that of
primitive man. The child does not yet show any trace of the pride which
afterwards moves the adult civilized man to set a sharp dividing line
between his own nature and that of all other animals. The child
unhesitatingly attributes full equality to animals; he probably feels
himself more closely related to the animal than to the undoubtedly
mysterious adult, in the freedom with which he acknowledges his needs.

Not infrequently a curious disturbance manifests itself in this
excellent understanding between child and animal. The child suddenly
begins to fear a certain animal species and to protect himself against
seeing or touching any individual of this species. There results the
clinical picture of _animal phobia_, which is one of the most frequent
among the psychoneurotic diseases of this age and perhaps the earliest
form of such an ailment. The phobia is as a rule in regard to animals
for which the child has until then shown the liveliest interest and has
nothing to do with the individual animal. In cities the choice of
animals which can become the object of phobia is not great. They are
horses, dogs, cats, more seldom birds, and strikingly often very small
animals like bugs and butterflies. Sometimes animals which are known to
the child only from picture books and fairy stories become objects of
the senseless and inordinate anxiety which is manifested with these
phobias; it is seldom possible to learn the manner in which such an
unusual choice of anxiety has been brought about. I am indebted to Dr
Karl Abraham for the report of a case in which the child itself
explained its fear of wasps by saying that the colour and the stripes of
the body of the wasp had made it think of the tiger of which, from all
that it had heard, it might well be afraid.

The animal phobias have not yet been made the object of careful
analytical investigation, although they very much merit it. The
difficulties of analysing children of so tender an age have probably
been the motive of such neglect. It cannot therefore be asserted that
the general meaning of these illnesses is known, and I myself do not
think that it would turn out to be the same in all cases. But a number
of such phobias directed against larger animals have proved accessible
to analysis and have thus betrayed their secret to the investigator. In
every case it was the same: the fear at bottom was of the father, if the
children examined were boys, and was merely displaced upon the animal.

Every one of any experience in psychoanalysis has undoubtedly seen such
cases and has received the same impression from them. But I can refer to
only a few detailed reports on the subject. This is an accident of the
literature of such cases, from which the conclusion should not be drawn
that our general assertion is based on merely scattered observation. For
instance I mention an author, M. Wulff of Odessa, who has very
intelligently occupied himself with the neuroses of childhood. He tells,
in relating the history of an illness, that a nine year old boy suffered
from a dog phobia at the age of four. “When he saw a dog running by on
the street he wept and cried: ‘Dear dog, don’t touch me, I will be
good.’” By “being good” he meant “not to play violin any more” (to
practise onanism)[A].

The same author later sums up as follows: “His dog phobia is really his
fear of the father displaced upon the dog, for his peculiar expression:
‘Dog, I will be good’--that is to say, I will not masturbate--really
refers to the father who has forbidden masturbation.” He then adds
something in a note which fully agrees with my experience and at the
same time bears witness to the abundance of such experiences: “such
phobias (of horses, dogs, cats, chickens and other domestic animals)
are, I think, at least as prevalent as _pavor nocturnus_ in childhood,
and usually reveal themselves in the analysis as a displacement of fear
from one of the parents to animals. I am not prepared to assert that the
wide-spread mouse and rat phobia has the same mechanism.”

I reported the “Analysis of the Phobia of a five-year-old Boy”[191]
which the father of the little patient had put at my disposal. It was a
fear of horses as a result of which the boy refused to go on the street.
He expressed his apprehension that the horse would come into the room
and bite him. It proves that this was meant to be the punishment for his
wish that the horse should fall over (die). After assurances had
relieved the boy of his fear of his father, it proved that he was
fighting against wishes whose content was the absence (departure or
death) of the father. He indicated only too plainly that he felt the
father to be his rival for the favour of the mother, upon whom his
budding sexual wishes were by dark premonitions directed. He therefore
had the typical attitude of the male child to its parents which we call
the ‘Oedipus complex’ in which we recognize the central complex of the
neuroses in general. Through the analysis, of ‘little John’ we have
learnt a fact which is very valuable in relation to totemism, namely,
that under such conditions the child displaces a part of its feelings
from the father upon some animal.

Analysis showed the paths of association, both significant and
accidental in content, along which such a displacement took place. It
also allowed one to guess the motives for the displacement. The hate
which resulted from the rivalry for the mother could not permeate the
boy’s psychic life without being inhibited; he had to contend with the
tenderness and admiration which he had felt for his father from the
beginning, so that the child assumed a double or ambivalent emotional
attitude towards the father and relieved himself of this ambivalent
conflict by displacing his hostile and anxious feelings upon a
substitute for the father. The displacement could not, however, relieve
the conflict by bringing about a smooth division between the tender and
the hostile feelings. On the contrary, the conflict was continued in
reference to the object to which displacement has been made and to which
also the ambivalence spreads. There was no doubt that little John had
not only fear, but respect and interest for horses. As soon as his fear
was moderated he identified himself with the feared animal; he jumped
around like a horse, and now it was he who bit the father[192]. In
another stage of solution of the phobia he did not scruple to identify
his parents with other large animals[193].

We may venture the impression that certain traits of totemism return as
a negative expression in these animal phobias of children. But we are
indebted to S. Ferenczi for a beautiful individual observation of what
must be called a case of positive totemism in the child[194]. It is true
that with the little Arpád, whom Ferenczi reports, the totemic interests
do not awaken in direct connexion with the Oedipus complex, but on the
basis of a narcistic premise, namely, the fear of castration. But
whoever looks attentively through the history of little John will also
find there abundant proof that the father was admired as the possessor
of large genitals and was feared as threatening the child’s own
genitals. In the Oedipus as well as in the castration complex the father
plays the same rôle of feared opponent to the infantile sexual
interests. Castration and its substitute through blinding is the
punishment he threatens[195].

When little Arpád was two and a half years old he once tried, while at a
summer resort, to urinate into the chicken coop, and on this occasion a
chicken bit his penis or snapped at it. When he returned to the same
place a year later he became a chicken himself, was interested only in
the chicken coop and in everything that occurred there, and gave up
human speech for cackling and crowing. During the period of
observation, at the age of five, he spoke again, but his speech was
exclusively about chickens and other fowl. He played with no other toy
and sang only songs in which there was something about poultry. His
behaviour towards his totem animal was subtly ambivalent, expressing
itself in immoderate hating and loving. He loved best to play killing
chickens. “The slaughtering of poultry was quite a festival for him. He
could dance around the animals’ bodies for hours at a time in a state of
intense excitement[196].” But then he kissed and stroked the slaughtered
animal, and cleaned and caressed the chicken effigies which he himself
had ill-used.

Arpád himself saw to it that the meaning of his curious activity could
not remain hidden. At times he translated his wishes from the totemic
method, of expression back into that of everyday life. “Now I am small,
now I am a chicken. When I get bigger I shall be a fowl. When I am
bigger still, I shall be a cock.” On another occasion he suddenly
expressed the wish to eat a “potted mother” (by analogy, potted fowl).
He was very free with open threats of castration against others, just as
he himself had received them on account of onanistic preoccupation with
his penis.

According to Ferenczi there was no doubt as to the source of his
interest in the activities of the chicken yard: “The continual sexual
activity between cock and hen, the laying of eggs and the creeping out
of the young brood”[197] satisfied his sexual curiosity which really was
directed towards human family life. His object wishes have been formed
on the model of chicken life when we find him saying to a woman
neighbour: “I am going to marry you and your sister and my three cousins
and the cook; no, instead of the cook I’ll marry my mother.”

We shall be able to complete our consideration of these observations
later; at present we will only point out two traits that show a valuable
correspondence with totemism: the complete identification with the totem
animal[198], and the ambivalent affective attitude towards it. In view
of these observations we consider ourselves justified in substituting
the father for the totem animal in the male’s formula of totemism. We
then notice that in doing so we have taken no new or especially daring
step. For primitive men say it themselves and, as far as the totemic
system is still in effect to-day, the totem is called ancestor and
primal father. We have only taken literally an expression of these races
which ethnologists did not know what to do with and were therefore
inclined to put it into the background. Psychoanalysis warns us, on the
contrary, to emphasize this very point and to connect it with the
attempt to explain totemism[199].

The first result of our substitution is very remarkable. If the totem
animal is the father, then the two main commandments of totemism, the
two taboo rules which constitute its nucleus,--not to kill the totem
animal and not to use a woman belonging to the same totem for sexual
purposes,--agree in content with the two crimes of Oedipus, who slew his
father and took his mother to wife, and also with the child’s two primal
wishes whose insufficient repression or whose re-awakening forms the
nucleus of perhaps all neuroses. If this similarity is more than a
deceptive play of accident it would perforce make it possible for us to
shed light upon the origin of totemism in prehistoric times. In other
words, we should succeed in making it probable that the totemic system
resulted from the conditions underlying the Oedipus complex, just as the
animal phobia of ‘little John’ and the poultry perversion of ‘little
Arpád’ resulted from it. In order to trace this possibility we shall in
what follows study a peculiarity of the totemic system or, as we may
say, of the totemic religion, which until now could hardly be brought
into the discussion.


4

W. Robertson Smith, who died in 1894, was a physicist, philologist,
Bible critic, and archæologist, a many-sided as well as keen and
free-thinking man, expressed the assumption in his work, _The Religion
of the Semites_[200], published in 1889, that a peculiar ceremony, the
so-called _totem feast_, had, from the very beginning, formed an
integral part of the totemic system. For the support of this supposition
he had at his disposal at that time only a single description of such an
act from the year 500 A.D.; he knew, however, how to give a high degree
of probability to his assumption through his analysis of the nature of
sacrifice among the old Semites. As sacrifice assumes a godlike person
we are dealing here with an inference from a higher phase of religious
rite to its lowest phase in totemism.

I shall now cite from Robertson Smith’s excellent book[201] those
statements about the origin and meaning of the sacrificial right which
are of great interest to us; I shall omit the only too numerous tempting
details as well as the parts dealing with all later developments. In
such an excerpt it is quite impossible to give the reader any sense of
the lucidity or of the argumentative force of the original.

Robertson Smith shows that sacrifice at the altar was the essential part
of the rite of old religions. It plays the same rôle in all religions,
so that its origin must be traced back to very general causes whose
effects were everywhere the same.

But the sacrifice--the holy action [Greek: κατεξογη katezogê] (sacrificium
[Greek: ἱερουργἱα ieronrgia])--originally meant something different from what
later times understood by it: the offering to the deity in order to
reconcile him or to incline him to be favourable. The profane use of the
word was afterwards derived from the secondary sense of self-denial. As
is demonstrated the first sacrifice was nothing else than “an act of
social fellowship between the deity and his worshipper”.

Things to eat and drink were brought as sacrifice; man offered to his
god the same things as those on which he himself lived, flesh, cereals,
fruits, wine and oil. Only in regard to sacrificial flesh did there
exist restrictions and exceptions. The god partakes of the animal
sacrifices with his worshippers while the vegetable sacrifices are left
to him alone. There is no doubt that animal sacrifices are older and at
one time were the only forms of sacrifice. The vegetable sacrifices
resulted from the offering of the first-fruits and correspond to a
tribute to the lord of the soil and the land. But animal sacrifice is
older than agriculture.

Linguistic survivals make it certain that the part of the sacrifice
destined for the god was looked upon as his real food. This conception
became offensive with the progressive dematerialization of the deity,
and was avoided by offering the deity only the liquid part of the meal.
Later the use of fire, which made the sacrificial flesh ascend in smoke
from the altar, made it possible to prepare human food in such a way
that it was more suitable for the deity. The drink sacrifice was
originally the blood of the sacrificed animals; wine was used later as a
substitute for the blood. Primitive man looked upon wine as the “blood
of the grape”, as our poets still call it.

The oldest form of sacrifice, older than the use of fire and the
knowledge of agriculture, was therefore the sacrifice of animals, whose
flesh and blood the god and his worshippers ate together. It was
essential that both participants should receive their shares of the
meal.

Such a sacrifice was a public ceremony, the celebration of a whole clan.
As a matter of fact all religion was a public affair; religious duty was
a part of the social obligation. Sacrifice and festival go together
among all races; each sacrifice entails a holiday and no holiday can be
celebrated without a sacrifice. The sacrificial festival was an occasion
for joyously transcending one’s own interests and emphasizing social
community and community with god.

The ethical power of the public sacrificial feast was based upon primal
conceptions of the meaning of eating and drinking in common. To eat and
drink with some one was at the same time a symbol and a confirmation of
social community and of the assumption of mutual obligations; the
sacrificial eating gave direct expression to the fact that the god and
his worshippers are communicants, thus confirming all their other
relations. Customs that to-day still are in force among the Arabs of the
desert prove that the binding force resulting from the common meal is
not a religious factor but that the subsequent mutual obligations are
due to the act of eating itself. Whoever has shared the smallest bite
with such a Bedouin, or has taken a swallow of his milk, need not fear
him any longer as an enemy, but may be sure of his protection and help.
Not indeed, forever, strictly speaking this lasts only while it may be
assumed that the food partaken remains in the body. So realistically is
the bond of union conceived; it requires repetition to strengthen it and
make it endure.

But why is this binding power ascribed to eating and drinking in common?
In the most primitive societies there is only one unconditional and
never failing bond, that of kinship. The members of a community stand by
each other jointly and severally, a kin is a group of persons whose life
is so bound into a physical unity that they can be considered as parts
of a common life. In case of the murder of one of this kin they
therefore do not say: the blood of so and so has been spilt, but our
blood has been spilt. The Hebraic phrase by which the tribal relation is
acknowledged is: “Thou art my bone and my flesh”. Kinship therefore
signifies having part in a general substance. It is natural then that it
is based not only upon the fact that we are a part of the substance of
our mother who has borne us, and whose milk nourished us, but also that
the food eaten later through which the body is renewed, can acquire and
strengthen kinship. If one shared a meal with one’s god the conviction
was thus expressed that one was of the same substance as he; no meal was
therefore partaken with any one recognized as a stranger.

The sacrificial repast was therefore originally a feast of the kin,
following the rule that only those of kin could eat together. In our
society the meal unites the members of the family; but the sacrificial
repast has nothing to do with the family. Kinship is older than family
life; the oldest families known to us regularly comprised persons who
belonged to various bonds of kinship. The men married women of strange
clans and the children inherited the clan of the mother; there was no
kinship between the man and the rest of the members of the family. In
such a family there was no common meal. Even to-day savages eat apart
and alone, and the religious prohibitions of totemism as to eating often
make it impossible for them to eat with their wives and children.

Let us now turn to the sacrificial animal. There was, as we have heard,
no meeting of the kin without animal sacrifice, but, and this is
significant, no animal was slaughtered except for such a solemn
occasion. Without any hesitation the people ate fruits, game and the
milk of domestic animals, but religious scruples made it impossible for
the individual to kill a domestic animal for his own use. There is not
the least doubt, says Robertson Smith, that every sacrifice was
originally a clan sacrifice, and that the _killing of a sacrificial
animal_ originally belonged to those acts which were _forbidden to the
individual and were only justified if the whole kin assumed the
responsibility_. Primitive men had only one class of actions, which were
thus characterized, namely, actions which touched the holiness of the
kin’s common blood. A life which no individual might take and which
could be sacrificed only through the consent and participation of all
the members of the clan was on the same plane as the life of a member of
the kin. The rule that every guest of the sacrificial repast must
partake of the flesh of the sacrificial animal, had the same meaning as
the rule that the execution of a guilty member of the kin must be
performed by the whole kin. In other words: the sacrificial animal was
treated like one of kin; _the sacrificing community, its god, and the
sacrificial animal were of the same blood_, and the members of a clan.

On the basis of much evidence Robertson Smith identifies the sacrificial
animal with the old totem animal. In a later age there were two kinds of
sacrifices, those of domestic animals which usually were also eaten, and
the unusual sacrifice of animals which were forbidden as being unclean.
Further investigation then shows that these unclean animals were holy
and that they were sacrificed to the gods to whom they were holy, that
these animals were originally identified with the gods themselves and
that at the sacrifice the worshippers in some way emphasized their blood
relationship to the god and to the animal. But this difference between
usual and ‘mystic’ sacrifices does not hold good for still earlier
times. Originally all animals were holy, their meat was forbidden and
might be eaten only on solemn occasions, with the participation of the
whole kin. The slaughter of the animal amounted to the spilling of the
kin’s blood and had to be done with the same precautions and assurances
against reproach.

The taming of domestic animals and the rise of cattle-breeding seems
everywhere to have put an end to the pure and rigorous totemism of
earliest times[202]. But such holiness as still clung to domestic
animals in what was now a ‘pastoral’ religion, is sufficiently distinct
for us to recognize its totemic character. Even in late classical times
the rite in several localities prescribed flight for the sacrificer
after the sacrifice, as if to escape revenge. In Greece the idea must
once have been general that the killing of an ox was really a crime. At
the Athenian festival of the Bouphonia a formal trial, to which all the
participants were summoned, was instituted after the sacrifice. Finally
it was agreed to put the blame for the murder upon the knife, which was
then cast into the sea.

In spite of the dread which protects the life of the animal as being of
kin, it became necessary to kill it from time to time in solemn
conclave, and to divide its flesh and blood among the members of the
clan. The motive which commands this act reveals the deepest meaning of
the essence of sacrifice. We have heard that in later times every eating
in common, the participation in the same substance which entered into
their bodies, established a holy bond between the communicants; in
oldest time this meaning seemed to be attached only to participation in
the substance of a holy sacrifice. _The holy mystery of the sacrificial
death was justified in that only in this way could the holy bond be
established which united the participants with each other and with their
god[203]._

This bond was nothing else than the life of the sacrificial animal which
lived on its flesh and blood and was shared by all the participants by
means of the sacrificial feast. Such an idea was the basis of all the
_blood bonds_ through which men in still later times became pledged to
each other. The thoroughly realistic conception of consanguinity as an
identity of substance makes comprehensible the necessity of renewing it
from time to time through the physical process of the sacrificial
repast.

We will now stop quoting from Robertson Smith’s train of thought in
order to give a condensed summary of what is essential in it. When the
idea of private property came into existence sacrifice was conceived as
a gift to the deity, as a transfer from the property of man to that of
the god. But this interpretation left all the peculiarities of the
sacrificial ritual unexplained. In oldest times the sacrificial animal
itself had been holy and its life inviolate; it could be taken only in
the presence of the god, with the whole tribe taking part and sharing
the guilt in order to furnish the holy substance through the eating of
which the members of the clan assured themselves of their material
identity with each other and with the deity. The sacrifice was a
sacrament, and the sacrificial animal itself was one of the kin. In
reality it was the old totem animal, the primitive god himself through
the slaying and eating of whom the members of the clan revived and
assured their similarity with the god.

From this analysis of the nature of sacrifice Robertson Smith drew the
conclusion that the periodic killing and eating of the totem before the
period when the _anthropomorphic deities were venerated_ was an
important part of totem religion. The ceremonial of such a totem feast
was preserved for us, he thought, in the description of a sacrifice in
later times. Saint Nilus tells of a sacrificial custom of the Bedouins
in the desert of Sinai towards the end of the fourth century A.D. The
victim, a camel, was bound and laid upon a rough altar of stones; the
leader of the tribe made the participants walk three times around the
altar to the accompaniment of song, inflicted the first wound upon the
animal and greedily drank the spurting blood; then the whole community
threw itself upon the sacrifice, cut off pieces of the palpitating flesh
with their swords and ate them raw in such haste that in a short
interval between the rise of the morning star, for whom this sacrifice
was meant, and its fading before the rays of the sun, the whole
sacrificial animal, flesh, skin, bones, and entrails, were devoured.
According to every testimony this barbarous rite, which speaks of great
antiquity, was not a rare custom but the general original form of the
totem sacrifice, which in later times underwent the most varied
modifications.

Many authors have refused to grant any weight to this conception of the
totem feast because it could not be strengthened by direct observation
at the stage of totemism. Robertson Smith himself has referred to
examples in which the sacramental meaning of sacrifices seems certain,
such as the human sacrifices of the Aztecs and others which recall the
conditions of the totem feast, the bear sacrifices of the bear tribe of
the _Ouataouaks_ in America, and the bear festival of the Ainus in
Japan. Frazer has given a full account of these and similar cases in the
two divisions of his great work that have last appeared[204]. An Indian
tribe in California which reveres the buzzard, a large bird of prey,
kills it once a year with solemn ceremony, whereupon the bird is mourned
and its skin and feathers preserved. The Zuni Indians in New Mexico do
the same thing with their holy turtle.

In the _Intichiuma_ ceremonies of Central Australian tribes a trait has
been observed which fits in excellently with the assumptions of
Robertson Smith. Every tribe that practises magic for the increase of
its totem, which it cannot eat itself, is bound to eat a part of its
totem at the ceremony before it can be touched by the other tribes.
According to Frazer the best example of the sacramental consumption of
the otherwise forbidden totem is to be found among the Bini in West
Africa, in connexion with the burial ceremony of this tribe[205].

But we shall follow Robertson Smith in the assumption that the
sacramental killing and the common consumption of the otherwise
forbidden totem animal was an important trait of the totem
religion[206].


5

Let us now envisage the scene of such a totem meal and let us embellish
it further with a few probable features which could not be adequately
considered before. Thus we have the clan, which on a solemn occasion
kills its totem in a cruel manner and eats it raw, blood, flesh, and
bones. At the same time the members of the clan disguised in imitation
of the totem, mimic it in sound and movement as if they wanted to
emphasize their common identity. There is also the conscious realization
that an action is being carried out which is forbidden to each
individual and which can only be justified through the participation of
all, so that no one is allowed to exclude himself from the killing and
the feast. After the act is accomplished the murdered animal is bewailed
and lamented. The death lamentation is compulsive, being enforced by the
fear of a threatening retribution, and its main purpose is, as Robertson
Smith remarks on an analogous occasion, to exculpate oneself from
responsibility for the slaying[207].

But after this mourning there follows loud festival gaiety accompanied
by the unchaining of every impulse and the permission of every
gratification. Here we find an easy insight into the nature of the
_holiday_.

A holiday is permitted, or rather a prescribed excess, a solemn
violation of a prohibition. People do not commit the excesses which at
all times have characterized holidays, as a result of an order to be in
a holiday mood, but because in the very nature of a holiday there is
excess; the holiday mood is brought about by the release of what is
otherwise forbidden.

But what has mourning over the death of the totem animal to do with the
introduction of this holiday spirit? If men are happy over the slaying
of the totem, which is otherwise forbidden to them, why do they also
mourn it?

We have heard that members of a clan become holy through the consumption
of the totem and thereby also strengthen their identification with it
and with each other. The fact that they have absorbed the holy life with
which the substance of the totem is charged may explain the holiday mood
and everything that results from it.

Psychoanalysis has revealed to us that the totem animal is really a
substitute for the father, and this really explains the contradiction
that it is usually forbidden to kill the totem animal, that the killing
of it results in a holiday and that the animal is killed and yet
mourned. The ambivalent emotional attitude which to-day still marks the
father complex in our children and so often continues into adult life
also extended to the father substitute of the totem animal.

But if we associate the translation of the totem as given by
psychoanalysis, with the totem feast and the Darwinian hypothesis about
the primal state of human society, a deeper understanding becomes
possible and a hypothesis is offered which may seem fantastic but which
has the advantage of establishing an unexpected unity among a series of
hitherto separated phenomena.

The Darwinian conception of the primal horde does not, of course, allow
for the beginning of totemism. There is only a violent, jealous father
who keeps all the females for himself and drives away the growing sons.
This primal state of society has nowhere been observed. The most
primitive organization we know, which to-day is still in force with
certain tribes, is _associations of men_ consisting of members with
equal rights, subject to the restrictions of the totemic system, and
founded on matriarchy, or descent through the mother[208]. Can the one
have resulted from the other, and how was this possible?

By basing our argument upon the celebration of the totem we are in a
position to give an answer: One day[209] the expelled brothers joined
forces, slew and ate the father, and thus put an end to the father
horde. Together they dared and accomplished what would have remained
impossible for them singly. Perhaps some advance in culture, like the
use of a new weapon, had given them the feeling of superiority. Of
course these cannibalistic savages ate their victim. This violent primal
father had surely been the envied and feared model for each of the
brothers. Now they accomplished their identification with him by
devouring him and each acquired a part of his strength. The totem feast,
which is perhaps mankind’s first celebration, would be the repetition
and commemoration of this memorable, criminal act with which so many
things began, social organization, moral restrictions and
religion[210].

In order to find these results acceptable, quite aside from our
supposition, we need only assume that the group of brothers banded
together were dominated by the same contradictory feelings towards the
father which we can demonstrate as the content of ambivalence of the
father complex in all our children and in neurotics. They hated the
father who stood so powerfully in the way of their sexual demands and
their desire for power, but they also loved and admired him. After they
had satisfied their hate by his removal and had carried out their wish
for identification with him, the suppressed tender impulses had to
assert themselves[211]. This took place in the form of remorse, a sense
of guilt was formed which coincided here with the remorse generally
felt. The dead now became stronger than the living had been, even as we
observe it to-day in the destinies of men. What the fathers’ presence
had formerly prevented they themselves now prohibited in the psychic
situation of ‘subsequent obedience’, which we know so well from
psychoanalysis. They undid their deed by declaring that the killing of
the father substitute, the totem, was not allowed, and renounced the
fruits of their deed by denying themselves the liberated women. Thus
they created the two fundamental taboos of totemism out of the _sense of
guilt of the son_, and for this very reason these had to correspond with
the two repressed wishes of the Oedipus complex. Whoever disobeyed
became guilty of the two only crimes which troubled primitive
society[212].

The two taboos of totemism with which the morality of man begins are
psychologically not of equal value. One of them, the sparing of the
totem animal, rests entirely upon emotional motives; the father had been
removed and nothing in reality could make up for this. But the other,
the incest prohibition, had, besides, a strong practical foundation.
Sexual need does not unite men; it separates them. Though the brothers
had joined forces in order to overcome the father, each was the other’s
rival among the women. Each one wanted to have them all to himself like
the father, and in the fight of each against the other the new
organization would have perished. For there was no longer any one
stronger than all the rest who could have successfully assumed the rôle
of the father. Thus there was nothing left for the brothers, if they
wanted to live together, but to erect the incest prohibition--perhaps
after many difficult experiences--through which they all equally
renounced the women whom they desired, and on account of whom they had
removed the father in the first place. Thus they saved the organization
which had made them strong and which could be based upon the homo-sexual
feelings and activities which probably manifested themselves among them
during the time of their banishment. Perhaps this situation also formed
the germ of the institution of the mother right discovered by Bachofen,
which was then abrogated by the patriarchal family arrangement.

On the other hand the claim of totemism to be considered the first
attempt at a religion is connected with the other taboo which protects
the life of the totem animal. The feelings of the sons found a natural
and appropriate substitute for the father in the animal, but their
compulsory treatment of it expressed more than the need of showing
remorse. The surrogate for the father was perhaps used in the attempt
to assuage the burning sense of guilt, and to bring about a kind of
reconciliation with the father. The totemic system was a kind of
agreement with the father in which the latter granted everything that
the child’s phantasy could expect from him, protection, care, and
forbearance, in return for which the pledge was given to honour his
life, that is to say, not to repeat the act against the totem through
which the real father had perished. Totemism also contained an attempt
at justification, “If the father had treated us like the totem we should
never have been tempted to kill him.” Thus totemism helped to gloss over
the real state of affairs and to make one forget the event to which it
owed its origin.

In this connexion some features were formed which henceforth determined
the character of every religion. The totem religion had issued from the
sense of guilt of the sons as an attempt to palliate this feeling and to
conciliate the injured father through subsequent obedience. All later
religions prove to be attempts to solve the same problem, varying only
in accordance with the stage of culture in which they are attempted and
according to the paths which they take; they are all, however, reactions
aiming at the same great event with which culture began and which ever
since has not let mankind come to rest.

There is still another characteristic faithfully preserved in religion
which already appeared in totemism at this time. The ambivalent strain
was probably too great to be adjusted by any arrangement, or else the
psychological conditions are entirely unfavourable to any kind of
settlement of these contradictory feelings. It is certainly noticeable
that the ambivalence attached to the father complex also continues in
totemism and in religions in general. The religion of totemism included
not only manifestations of remorse and attempts at reconciliation, but
also serves to commemorate the triumph over the father. The
gratification obtained thereby creates the commemorative celebration of
the totem feast at which the restrictions of subsequent obedience are
suspended, and makes it a duty to repeat the crime of parricide through
the sacrifice of the totem animal as often as the benefits of this deed,
namely, the appropriation of the father’s properties, threaten to
disappear as a result of the changed influences of life. We shall not be
surprised to find that a part of the son’s defiance also reappears,
often in the most remarkable disguises and inversions, in the formation
of later religions.

If thus far we have followed, in religion and moral precepts--but little
differentiated in totemism--the consequences of the tender impulses
towards the father as they are changed into remorse, we must not
overlook the fact that for the most part the tendencies which have
impelled to parricide have retained the victory. The social and
fraternal feelings on which this great change is based, henceforth for
long periods exercises the greatest influence upon the development of
society. They find expression in the sanctification of the common blood
and in the emphasis upon the solidarity of life within the clan. In thus
ensuring each other’s lives the brothers express the fact that no one of
them is to be treated by the other as they all treated the father. They
preclude a repetition of the fate of the father. The socially
established prohibition against fratricide is now added to the
prohibition against killing the totem, which is based on religious
grounds. It will still be a long time before the commandment discards
the restriction to members of the tribe and assumes the simple
phraseology: Thou shalt not kill. At first the _brother clan_ has taken
the place of the _father horde_ and was guaranteed by the blood bond.
Society is now based on complicity in the common crime, religion on the
sense of guilt and the consequent remorse, while morality is based
partly on the necessities of society and partly on the expiation which
this sense of guilt demands.

Thus psychoanalysis, contrary to the newer conceptions of the totemic
system and more in accord with older conceptions, bids us argue for an
intimate connexion between totemism and exogamy as well as for their
simultaneous origin.


6

I am under the influence of many strong motives which restrain me from
the attempt to discuss the further development of religions from their
beginning in totemism up to their present state. I shall follow out only
two threads as I see them appearing in the weft with especial
distinctness: the motive of the totem sacrifice and the relation of the
son to the father[213].

Robertson Smith has shown us that the old totem feast returns in the
original form of sacrifice. The meaning of the rite is the same:
sanctification through participation in the common meal. The sense of
guilt, which can only be allayed through the solidarity of all the
participants, has also been retained. In addition to this there is the
tribal deity in whose supposed presence the sacrifice takes place, who
takes part in the meal like a member of the tribe, and with whom
identification is effected by the act of eating the sacrifice. How does
the god come into this situation which originally was foreign to him?

The answer might be that the idea of god had meanwhile appeared,--no one
knows whence--and had dominated the whole religious life, and that the
totem feast, like everything else that wished to survive, had been
forced to fit itself into the new system. However, psychoanalytic
investigation of the individual teaches with especial emphasis that god
is in every case modelled after the father and that our personal
relation to god is dependent upon our relation to our physical,
fluctuating and changing with him, and that god at bottom is nothing but
an exalted father. Here also, as in the case of totemism, psychoanalysis
advises us to believe the faithful, who call god father just as they
called the totem their ancestor. If psychoanalysis deserves any
consideration at all, then the share of the father in the idea of a god
must be very important, quite aside from all the other origins and
meanings of god upon which psychoanalysis can throw no light. But then
the father would be represented twice in primitive sacrifice, first as
god, and secondly as the totem-animalsacrifice, and we must ask, with
all due regard for the limited number of solutions which psychoanalysis
offers, whether this is possible and what the meaning of it may be.

We know that there are a number of relations of the god to the holy
animal (the totem and the sacrificial animal): 1. Usually one animal is
sacred to every god, sometimes even several animals. 2. In certain,
especially holy, sacrifices, the so-called ‘mystical’ sacrifices, the
very animal which had been sanctified through the god was sacrificed to
him[214]. 3. The god was often revered in the form of an animal, or from
another point of view, animals enjoyed a godlike reverence long after
the period of totemism. 4. In myths the god is frequently transformed
into an animal, often into the animal that is sacred to him. From this
the assumption was obvious that the god himself was the animal, and that
he had evolved from the totem animal at a later stage of religious
feeling. But the reflection that the totem itself is nothing but a
substitute for the father relieves us of all further discussion. Thus
the totem may have been the first form of the father substitute and the
god a later one in which the father regained his human form. Such a new
creation from the root of all religious evolution, namely, the longing
for the father, might become possible if in the course of time an
essential change had taken place in the relation to the father and
perhaps also to the animal.

Such changes are easily divined even if we disregard the beginning of a
psychic estrangement from the animal as well as the disintegration of
totemism through animal domestication[215]. The situation created by the
removal of the father contained an element which in the course of time
must have brought about an extraordinary increase of longing for the
father. For the brothers who had joined forces to kill the father had
each been animated by the wish to become like the father and had given
expression to this wish by incorporating parts of the substitute for him
in the totem feast. In consequence of the pressure which the bonds of
the brother clan exercised upon each member, this wish had to remain
unfulfilled. No one could or was allowed to attain the father’s
perfection of power, which was the thing they had all sought. Thus the
bitter feeling against the father which had incited to the deed could
subside in the course of time, while the longing for him grew, and an
ideal could arise having as a content the fullness of power and the
freedom from restriction of the conquered primal father, as well as the
willingness to subject themselves to him. The original democratic
equality of each member of the tribe could no longer be retained on
account of the interference of cultural changes; in consequence of which
there arose a tendency to revive the old father ideal in the creation of
gods through the veneration of those individuals who had distinguished
themselves above the rest. That a man should become a god and that a god
should die, which to-day seems to us an outrageous presumption, was
still by no means offensive to the conceptions of classical
antiquity[216]. But the deification of the murdered father from whom the
tribe now derived its origin, was a much more serious attempt at
expiation than the former covenant with the totem.

In this evolution I am at a loss to indicate the place of the great
maternal deities who perhaps everywhere preceded the paternal deities.
But it seems certain that the change in the relation to the father was
not restricted to religion but logically extended to the other side of
human life influenced by the removal of the father, namely, the social
organization. With the institution of paternal deities the fatherless
society gradually changed into a patriarchal one. The family was a
reconstruction of the former primal horde and also restored a great part
of their former rights to the fathers. Now there were patriarchs again
but the social achievements of the brother clan had not been given up
and the actual difference between the new family patriarchs and the
unrestricted primal father was great enough to ensure the continuation
of the religious need, the preservation of the unsatisfied longing for
the father.

The father therefore really appears twice in the scene of sacrifice
before the tribal god, once as the god and again as the
totem-sacrificial-animal. But in attempting to understand this situation
we must beware of interpretations which superficially seek to translate
it as an allegory, and which forget the historical stages in the
process. The twofold presence of the father corresponds to the two
successive meanings of the scene. The ambivalent attitude towards the
father as well as the victory of the son’s tender emotional feelings
over his hostile ones, have here found plastic expression. The scene of
vanquishing the father, his greatest degradation, furnishes here the
material to represent his highest triumph. The meaning which sacrifice
has quite generally acquired is found in the fact that in the very same
action which continues the memory of this misdeed it offers satisfaction
to the father for the ignominy put upon him.

In the further development the animal loses its sacredness and the
sacrifice its relation to the celebration of the totem; the rite becomes
a simple offering to the deity, a self-deprivation in favour of the god.
God himself is now so exalted above man that he can be communicated with
only through a priest as intermediary. At the same time the social order
produces godlike kings who transfer the patriarchal system to the state.
It must be said that the revenge of the deposed and reinstated father
has been very cruel; it culminated in the dominance of authority. The
subjugated sons have used the new relation to disburden themselves still
more of their sense of guilt. Sacrifice, as it is now constituted, is
entirely beyond their responsibility. God himself has demanded and
ordained it. Myths in which the god himself kills the animal that is
sacred to him, which he himself really is, belong to this phase. This is
the greatest possible denial of the great misdeed with which society and
the sense of guilt began. There is an unmistakable second meaning in
this sacrificial demonstration. It expresses satisfaction at the fact
that the earlier father substitute has been abandoned in favour of the
higher conception of god. The superficial allegorical translation of the
scene here roughly corresponds with its psychoanalytic interpretation by
saying that god is represented as overcoming the animal part of his
nature[217].

But it would be erroneous to believe that in this period of renewed
patriarchal authority the hostile impulses which belong to the father
complex had entirely subsided. On the contrary, the first phases in the
domination of the two new substitutive formations for the father, those
of gods and kings, plainly show the most energetic expression of that
ambivalence which is characteristic of religion.

In his great work, _The Golden Bough_, Frazer has expressed the
conjecture that the first kings of the Latin tribes were strangers who
played the part of a deity and were solemnly sacrificed in this rôle on
specified holidays. The yearly sacrifice (self-sacrifice is a variant)
of a god seems to have been an important feature of Semitic religions.
The ceremony of human sacrifice in various parts of the inhabited world
makes it certain that these human beings ended their lives as
representatives of the deity. This sacrificial custom can still be
traced in later times in the substitution of an inanimate imitation
(doll) for the living person. The theanthropic god sacrifice into which
unfortunately I cannot enter with the same thoroughness with which the
animal sacrifice has been treated throws the clearest light upon the
meaning of the older forms of sacrifice. It acknowledges with
unsurpassable candour that the object of the sacrificial action has
always been the same, being identical with what is now revered as a god,
namely with the father. The question as to the relation of animal to
human sacrifice can now be easily solved. The original animal sacrifice
was already a substitute for a human sacrifice, for the solemn killing
of the father, and when the father substitute regained its human form,
the animal substitute could also be retransformed into a human
sacrifice.

Thus the memory of that first great act of sacrifice had proved to be
indestructible despite all attempts to forget it, and just at the
moment when men strove to get as far away as possible from its motives,
the undistorted repetition of it had to appear in the form of the god
sacrifice. I need not fully indicate here the developments of religious
thought which made this return possible in the form of rationalizations.
Robertson Smith who is, of course, far removed from the idea of tracing
sacrifice back to this great event of man’s primal history, says that
the ceremony of the festivals in which the old Semites celebrated the
death of a deity were interpreted as “a commemoration of a mythical
tragedy” and that the attendant lament was not characterized by
spontaneous sympathy, but displayed a compulsive character, something
that was imposed by the fear of a divine wrath[218]. We are in a
position to acknowledge that this interpretation was correct, the
feelings of the celebrants being well explained by the basic situation.

We may now accept it as a fact that in the further development of
religions these two inciting factors, the son’s sense of guilt and his
defiance, were never again extinguished. Every attempted solution of the
religious problem and every kind of reconciliation of the two opposing
psychic forces gradually falls to the ground, probably under the
combined influence of cultural changes, historical events, and inner
psychic transformations.

The endeavour of the son to put himself in place of the father god,
appeared with greater and greater distinctness. With the introduction of
agriculture the importance of the son in the patriarchal family
increased. He was emboldened to give new expression to his incestuous
libido which found symbolic satisfaction in labouring over mother earth.
There came into existence figures of gods like Attis, Adonis, Tammuz,
and others, spirits of vegetation as well as youthful divinities who
enjoyed the favours of maternal deities and committed incest with the
mother in defiance of the father. But the sense of guilt which was not
allayed through these creations, was expressed in myths which visited
these youthful lovers of the maternal goddesses with short life and
punishment through castration or through the wrath of the father god
appearing in animal form. Adonis was killed by the boar, the sacred
animal of Aphrodite; Attis, the lover of Kybele, died of
castration[219]. The lamentation for these gods and the joy at their
resurrection have gone over into the ritual of another son which
divinity was destined to survive long.

When Christianity began its entry into the ancient world it met with the
competition of the religion of Mithras and for a long time it was
doubtful which deity was to be the victor.

The bright figure of the youthful Persian god has eluded our
understanding. Perhaps we may conclude from the illustrations of Mithras
slaying the steers that he represented the son who carried out the
sacrifice of the father by himself and thus released the brothers from
their oppressing complicity in the deed. There was another way of
allaying this sense of guilt and this is the one that Christ took. He
sacrificed his own life and thereby redeemed the brothers from primal
sin.

The theory of primal sin is of Orphic origin; it was preserved in the
mysteries and thence penetrated into the philosophic schools of Greek
antiquity[220]. Men were the descendants of Titans, who had killed and
dismembered the young Dionysos-Zagreus; the weight of this crime
oppressed them. A fragment of Anaximander says that the unity of the
world was destroyed by a primordial crime and everything that issued
from it must carry on the punishment for this crime[221]. Although the
features of banding together, killing, and dismembering as expressed in
the deed of the Titans very clearly recall the totem sacrifice described
by St Nilus--as also many other myths of antiquity, for example, the
death of Orpheus himself--we are nevertheless disturbed here by the
variation according to which a youthful god was murdered.

In the Christian myth man’s original sin is undoubtedly an offence
against God the Father, and if Christ redeems mankind from the weight of
original sin by sacrificing his own life, he forces us to the conclusion
that this sin was murder. According to the law of retaliation which is
deeply rooted in human feeling, a murder can be atoned only by the
sacrifice of another life; the self-sacrifice points to a
blood-guilt[222]. And if this sacrifice of one’s own life brings about
a reconciliation with god, the father, then the crime which must be
expiated can only have been the murder of the father.

Thus in the Christian doctrine mankind most unreservedly acknowledges
the guilty deed of primordial times because it now has found the most
complete expiation for this deed in the sacrificial death of the son.
The reconciliation with the father is the more thorough because
simultaneously with this sacrifice there follows the complete
renunciation of woman, for whose sake mankind rebelled against the
father. But now also the psychological fatality of ambivalence demands
its rights. In the same deed which offers the greatest possible
expiation to the father, the son also attains the goal of his wishes
against the father. He becomes a god himself beside or rather in place
of his father. The religion of the son succeeds the religion of the
father. As a sign of this substitution the old totem feast is revived
again in the form of communion in which the band of brothers now eats
the flesh and blood of the son and no longer that of the father, the
sons thereby identifying themselves with him and becoming holy
themselves. Thus through the ages we see the identity of the totem
feast with the animal sacrifice, the theanthropic human sacrifice, and
the Christian eucharist, and in all these solemn occasions we recognize
the after-effects of that crime which so oppressed men but of which they
must have been so proud. At bottom, however, the Christian communion is
a new setting aside of the father, a repetition of the crime that must
be expiated. We see how well justified is Frazer’s dictum that “the
Christian communion has absorbed within itself a sacrament which is
doubtless far older than Christianity”[223].


7

A process like the removal of the primal father by the band of brothers
must have left ineradicable traces in the history of mankind and must
have expressed itself the more frequently in numerous substitutive
formations the less it itself was to be remembered.[224] I am avoiding
the temptation of pointing out these traces in mythology, where they are
not hard to find, and am turning to another field in following a hint of
S. Reinach in his suggestive treatment of the death of Orpheus[225].

There is a situation in the history of Greek art which is strikingly
familiar even if profoundly divergent, to the scene of a totem feast
discovered by Robertson Smith. It is the situation of the oldest Greek
tragedy. A group of persons, all of the same name and dressed in the
same way, surround a single figure upon whose words and actions they are
dependent, to represent the chorus and the original single impersonator
of the hero. Later developments created a second and a third actor in
order to represent opponents in playing, and off-shoots of the hero, but
the character of the hero as well as his relation to the chorus remains
unchanged. The hero of the tragedy had to suffer; this is to-day still
the essential content of a tragedy. He had taken upon himself the
so-called ‘tragic guilt’, which is not always easy to explain; it is
often not a guilt in the ordinary sense. Almost always it consisted of a
rebellion against a divine or human authority and the chorus accompanied
the hero with their sympathies, trying to restrain and warn him, and
lamented his fate after he had met with what was considered fitting
punishment for his daring attempt.

But why did the hero of the tragedy have to suffer, and what was the
meaning of his ‘tragic’ guilt? We will cut short the discussion by a
prompt answer. He had to suffer because he was the primal father, the
hero of that primordial tragedy the repetition of which here serves a
certain tendency, and the tragic guilt is the guilt which he had to take
upon himself in order to free the chorus of theirs. The scene upon the
stage came into being through purposive distortion of the historical
scene or, one is tempted to say, it was the result of refined hypocrisy.
Actually, in the old situation, it was the members of the chorus
themselves who had caused the suffering of the hero; here, on the other
hand, they exhaust themselves in sympathy and regret, and the hero
himself is to blame for his suffering. The crime foisted upon him,
namely, presumption and rebellion against a great authority, is the same
as that which in the past oppressed the colleagues of the chorus,
namely, the band of brothers. Thus the tragic hero, though still against
his will, is made the redeemer of the chorus.

When one bears in mind the suffering of the divine goat Dionysos in the
performance of the Greek tragedy and the lament of the retinue of goats
who identified themselves with him, one can easily understand how the
almost extinct drama was reviewed in the Middle Ages in the Passion of
Christ.

In closing this study, which has been carried out in extremely condensed
form, I want to state the conclusion that the beginnings of religion,
ethics, society, and art meet in the Oedipus complex. This is in entire
accord with the findings of psychoanalysis, namely, that the nucleus of
all neuroses as far as our present knowledge of them goes is the Oedipus
complex. It comes as a great surprise to me that these problems of
racial psychology can also be solved through a single concrete instance,
such as the relation to the father. Perhaps another psychological
problem must be included here. We have so frequently had occasion to
show the ambivalence of emotions in its real sense, that is to say the
coincidence of love and hate towards the same object, at the root of
important cultural formations. We know nothing about the origin of this
ambivalence. It may be assumed to be a fundamental phenomenon of our
emotional life. But the other possibility seems to me also worthy of
consideration: that ambivalence, originally foreign to our emotional
life was acquired by mankind from the father complex[226], where
psychoanalytic investigation of the individual to-day still reveals the
strongest expression of it[227].

Before closing we must take into account that the remarkable convergence
reached in these illustrations, pointing to a single inclusive relation,
ought not to blind us to the uncertainties of our assumptions and to the
difficulties of our conclusions. Of these difficulties I will point out
only two which must have forced themselves upon many readers.

In the first place it can hardly have escaped any one that we base
everything upon the assumption of a psyche of the mass in which psychic
processes occur as in the psychic life of the individual. Moreover, we
let the sense of guilt for a deed survive for thousands of years,
remaining effective in generations which could not have known anything
of this deed. We allow an emotional process such as might have arisen
among generations of sons that had been ill-treated by their fathers, to
continue to new generations which had escaped such treatment by the very
removal of the father. These seem indeed to be weighty objections and
any other explanation which can avoid such assumptions would seem to
merit preference.

But further consideration shows that we ourselves do not have to carry
the whole responsibility for such daring. Without the assumption of a
mass psyche, or a continuity in the emotional life of mankind which
permits us to disregard the interruptions of psychic acts through the
transgression of individuals, social psychology could not exist at all.
If psychic processes of one generation did not continue in the next, if
each had to acquire its attitude towards life afresh, there would be no
progress in this field and almost no development. We are now confronted
by two new questions: how much can be attributed to this psychic
continuity within the series of generations, and what ways and means
does a generation use to transfer its psychic states to the next
generation? I do not claim that these problems have been sufficiently
explained or that direct communication and tradition, of which one
immediately thinks, are adequate for the task. Social psychology is in
general little concerned with the manner in which the required
continuity in the psychic life of succeeding generations is established.
A part of the task seems to be performed by the inheritance of psychic
dispositions which, however, need certain incentives in the individual
life in order to become effective. This may be the meaning of the poet’s
words: “Strive to possess yourself of what you have inherited from your
ancestors.” The problem would appear more difficult if we could admit
that there are psychic impulses which can be so completely suppressed
that they leave no traces whatsoever behind them. But that does not
exist. The greatest suppression must leave room for distorted
substitutions and their resulting reactions. But in that case we may
assume that no generation is capable of concealing its more important
psychic processes from the next. For psychoanalysis has taught us that
in his unconscious psychic activity every person possesses an apparatus
which enables him to interpret the reactions of others, that is to say,
to straighten out the distortions which the other person has affected in
the expression of his feelings. By this method of unconscious
understanding of all customs, ceremonies, and laws which the original
relation to the primal father had left behind, later generations may
also have succeeded in taking over this legacy of feelings.

There is another objection which the analytic method of thought itself
might raise.

We have interpreted the first rules of morality and moral restrictions
of primitive society as reactions to a deed which gave the authors of it
the conception of crime. They regretted this deed and decided that it
should not be repeated and that its execution must bring no gain. This
creative sense of guilt has not become extinct with us. We find its
asocial effects in neurotics producing new rules of morality and
continued restrictions, in expiation for misdeeds committed, or as
precautions against misdeeds to be committed[228]. But when we examine
these neurotics for the deeds which have called forth such reactions, we
are disappointed. We do not find deeds, but only impulses and feelings
which sought evil but which were restrained from carrying it out. Only
psychic realities and not actual ones are at the basis of the neurotics’
sense of guilt. It is characteristic of the neurosis to put a psychic
reality above an actual one and to react as seriously to thoughts as the
normal person reacts only towards realities.

May it not be true that the case was somewhat the same with primitive
men? We are justified in ascribing to them an extraordinary
over-valuation of their psychic acts as a partial manifestation of their
narcistic organization[229]. According to this the mere impulses of
hostility towards the father and the existence of the wish phantasy to
kill and devour him may have sufficed to bring about the moral reaction
which has created totemism and taboo. We should thus escape the
necessity of tracing back the beginning of our cultural possession, of
which we rightly are so proud, to a horrible crime which wounds all our
feelings. The causal connexion, which stretches from that beginning to
the present time, would not be impaired, for the psychic reality would
be of sufficient importance to account for all those consequences. It
may be agreed that a change has really taken place in the form of
society from the father horde to the brother clan. This is a strong
argument, but it is not conclusive. The change might have been
accomplished in a less violent manner and still have conditioned the
appearance of the moral reaction. As long as the pressure of the primal
father was felt the hostile feelings against him were justified and
repentance at these feelings had to wait for another opportunity. Of as
little validity is the second objection, that everything derived from
the ambivalent relation to the father, namely taboos, and rules of
sacrifice, is characterized by the highest seriousness and by complete
reality. The ceremonials and inhibitions of compulsion neurotics exhibit
this characteristic too and yet they go back to a merely psychic
reality, to resolution and not to execution. We must beware of
introducing the contempt for what is merely thought or wished which
characterizes our sober world where there are only material values, into
the world of primitive man and the neurotic, which is full of inner
riches only.

We face a decision here which is really not easy. But let us begin by
acknowledging that the difference which may seem fundamental to others
does not, in our judgment, touch the most important part of the subject.
If wishes and impulses have the full value of fact for primitive man, it
is for us to follow such a conception intelligently instead of
correcting it according to our standard. But in that case we must
scrutinize more closely the prototype of the neurosis itself which is
responsible for having raised this doubt. It is not true that compulsion
neurotics, who to-day are under the pressure of over-morality, defend
themselves only against the psychic reality of temptations and punish
themselves for impulses which they have only felt. A piece of historic
reality is also involved; in their childhood these persons had nothing
but evil impulses and as far as their childish impotence permitted they
put them into action. Each of these over-good persons had a period of
badness in his childhood, and a perverse phase as a fore-runner and a
premise of the latter over morality. The analogy between primitive men
and neurotics is therefore much more fundamentally established if we
assume that with the former, too, the psychic reality, concerning whose
structure there is no doubt, originally coincided with the actual
reality, and that primitive men really did what according to all
testimony they intended to do.

But we must not let our judgment about primitive men be influenced too
far by the analogy with neurotics. Differences must also be taken into
account. Of course the sharp division between thinking and doing as we
draw it does not exist either with savages or with neurotics. But the
neurotic is above all inhibited in his actions; with him the thought is
a complete substitute for the deed. Primitive man is not inhibited, the
thought is directly converted into the deed, the deed is for him so to
speak rather a substitute for the thought, and for that reason I think
we may well assume in the case we are discussing, though without
vouching for the absolute certainty of the decision, that “In the
beginning was the deed”.

THE END

_Printed in Great Britain by_ Butler & Tanner, _Frome and London_


FOOTNOTES:

[1] Jung: _Wandlungen and Symbole der Libido_ (Transformations and
Symbols of the Libido) translated by Dr. Beatrice Hinkle under the title
_The Psychology of the Unconscious_, and _Principles of Psychoanalysis,
Nervous and Mental Diseases_.

[2] _The History of the Psychoanalytic Movement_, translated by A. A.
Brill.

[3] _Selected Papers on Hysteria and other Psychoneuroses_, translated
by A. A. Brill.

[4] _The Psychopathology of Everyday Life_, translated by A. A. Brill.

[5] Translated by A. A. Brill.

[6] _Wit and Its Relations to the Unconscious_, translated by A. A.
Brill.

[7] Freud: _Leonardo Da Vinci_, translated by A. A. Brill.

[8] Cf. the works of Abraham, Spielrein, Jung, and Rank.

[9] Frazer, _Totemism and Exogamy_, Vol. I, p. 53. “The totem bond is
stronger than the bond of blood or family in the modern sense.”

[10] This very brief extract of the totemic system cannot be left
without some elucidation and without discussing its limitations. The
name Totem or Totam was first learned from the North American Indians by
the Englishman, J. Long, in 1791. The subject has gradually acquired
great scientific interest and has called forth a copious literature. I
refer especially to _Totemism and Exogamy_ by J. G. Frazer, 4 vols.,
1910, and the books and articles of Andrew Lang (_The Secret of Totem_,
1905). The credit for having recognized the significance of totemism for
the ancient history of man belongs to the Scotchman, J. Ferguson
MacLennan (_Fortnightly Review_, 1869-70). Exterior to Australia,
totemic institutions were found and are still observed among North
American Indians, as well as among the races of the Polynesian Islands
group, in East India, and in a large part of Africa. Many traces and
survivals otherwise hard to interpret lead to the conclusion that
totemism also once existed among the aboriginal Aryan and Semitic races
of Europe, so that many investigators are inclined to recognize in
totemism a necessary phase of human development through which every race
has passed.

How then did prehistoric man come to acquire a totem; that is, how did
he come to make his descent from this or that animal foundation of his
social duties and, as we shall hear, of his sexual restrictions as well?
Many different theories have been advanced to explain this, a review of
which the reader may find in Wundt’s _Voelkerpsychologie_ (Vol. II:
_Mythus und Religion_).

I promise soon to make the problem of totemism a subject of special
study in which an effort will be made to solve it by applying the
psychoanalytic method. (Cf. The fourth chapter of this work.)

Not only is the theory of totemism controversial, but the very facts
concerning it are hardly to be expressed in such general statements as
were attempted above. There is hardly an assertion to which one would
not have to add exceptions and contradictions. But it must not be
forgotten that even the most primitive and conservative races are, in a
certain sense, old, and have a long period behind them during which
whatsoever was aboriginal with them has undergone much development and
distortion. Thus among those races who still evince it, we find totemism
to-day in the most manifold states of decay and disintegration; we
observe that fragments of it have passed over to other social and
religious institutions; or it may exist in fixed forms but far removed
from its original nature. The difficulty then consists in the fact that
it is not altogether easy to decide what in the actual conditions is to
be taken as a faithful copy of the significant past and what is to be
considered as a secondary distortion of it.

[11] Frazer, _l.c._, p. 54.

[12] But the father, who is a Kangaroo, is free--at least under this
prohibition--to commit incest with his daughters, who are Emu. In the
case of paternal inheritance of the totem the father would be Kangaroo
as well as the children; then incest with the daughters would be
forbidden to the father and incest with the mother would be left open to
the son. These consequences of the totem prohibition seem to indicate
that the maternal inheritance is older than the paternal one, for there
are grounds for assuming that the totem prohibitions are directed first
of all against the incestuous desires of the son.

[13] Second edition, 1902.

[14] _The Native Tribes of Central Australia_ (London, 1899).

[15] The number of totems is arbitrarily chosen.

[16] Article _Totemism_ in _Encyclopedia Britannica_, eleventh edition,
1911 (A. Lang).

[17] Storfer has recently drawn special attention to this point in his
monograph: _Parricide as a Special Case._ _Papers on Applied Psychic
Investigation_, No. 12 (Vienna, 1911).

[18] R. H. Codrington, _The Melanesians_, also Frazer _Totemism and
Exogamy_, Vol. I, p. 77.

[19] Frazer, _l.c._, II, p. 124, according to Kleintischen: _The
Inhabitants of the Coast of the Gazelle Peninsula_.

[20] Frazer, _l.c._, II, p. 131, according to P. G. Peckel in
_Anthropes_, 1908.

[21] Frazer, _l.c._, II, p. 147, according to the Rev. L. Fison.

[22] Frazer, _l.c._, II. p. 189.

[23] Frazer, _l.c._, II, p. 388, according to Junod.

[24] Frazer, _l.c._, II, p. 424.

[25] Frazer, _l.c._, II, p. 76.

[26] Frazer, _l.c._, II, p. 113, according to C. Ribbe: _Two Years among
the Cannibals of the Solomon Islands_, 1905.

[27] Frazer, _l.c._, II, p. 385.

[28] Frazer, _l.c._, II, p. 461.

[29] _v._ Crawley: _The Mystic Rose_ (London, 1902), p. 405.

[30] Crawley, _l.c._, p. 407.

[31] Crawley, _l.c._, p. 401, according to Leslie: _Among the Zulus and
Amatongas_, 1875.

[32] _Voelkerpsychologie_, II. Band: _Mythus und Religion_, 1906, II, p.
308.

[33] Eleventh Edition; this article also gives the most important
references.

[34] This application of the taboo can be omitted as not originally
belonging in this connection.

[35] _Voelkerpsychologie_, Vol. II: _Religion und Mythus_, p. 300.

[36] _l.c._, p. 237.

[37] Comp. Chapter I.

[38] _l.c._, p. 307.

[39] _l.c._, p. 313.

[40] Frazer, _The Golden Bough_, II: _Taboo and the Perils of the Soul_,
1911, p. 136.

[41] Both the pleasure and the prohibition referred to touching one’s
own genitals.

[42] The relation to beloved persons who impose the prohibition.

[43] To use an excellent term coined by Bleuler.

[44] See Chapter IV; _Totemism, etc._

[45] Third Edition, Part II: _Taboo and the Perils of the Soul_, 1911.

[46] Frazer, _l.c._, p. 166.

[47] Paulitschke, _Ethnography of North-east Africa_.

[48] Frazer, _Adonis, Attis, Osiris_, p. 248, 1907. According to Hugh
Low, _Sarawak_ (London, 1848).

[49] J. O. Dorsay, see Frazer, _Taboo_, etc., p. 181.

[50] Frazer, _Taboo_, pp. 166-174. These ceremonies consist of hitting
shields, shouting, bellowing and making noises with various instruments,
etc.

[51] Frazer, _Taboo_, p. 166, according to S. Mueller, _Reisen en
Onderzoekingen in den Indischen Archipel_. (Amsterdam, 1857).

[52] For these examples see Frazer, _Taboo_, p. 165-170, “Manslayers
Tabooed.”

[53] Frazer, _Taboo_, p. 132. “He must not only be guarded, he must also
be guarded against.”

[54] Frazer, _The Magic Art_, I, p. 368.

[55] _Old New Zealand_, by a Pakeha Maori (London, 1884), see Frazer,
_Taboo_, p. 135.

[56] W. Brown, _New Zealand and Its Aborigines_ (London, 1845) _Frazer_,
_l.c._

[57] _Frazer_, _l.c._

[58] Frazer, _Taboo_. _The Burden of Royalty_, p. 7.

[59] _l.c._, p. 7.

[60] Kaempfer, _History of Japan_, see in Frazer, _l.c._, p. 3.

[61] Bastian, _The German Expedition to the Coast of Loango_ (Jena
1874), cited by Frazer, _l.c._, p. 5.

[62] Frazer, _l.c._, p. 13.

[63] Frazer, _l.c._, p. 11.

[64] A. Bastian, _The German Expedition on the Coast of Lonago_, cited
by Frazer, _l.c._, p. 18.

[65] _l.c._, p. 18. According to Zwefel et Monstier, _Voyage aux Sources
du Niger_, 1880.

[66] Frazer, _The Magic Art and the Evolution of Kings_, 2 vols., 1911
(_The Golden Bough_).

[67] Frazer, _Taboo_, p. 148, etc.

[68] W. Mariner, _The Natives of the Tonga Islands_, 1818; see _Frazer_,
_l.c._, p. 140.

[69] The same patient whose ‘impossibilities’ I have correlated with
taboo (see above, p. 47) acknowledged that she always became indignant
when she met anybody on the street who was dressed in mourning. “Such
people should be forbidden to go out!” she said.

[70] Frazer, _l.c._, p. 353.

[71] Frazer, _l.c._, p. 352, etc.

[72] Frazer, _l.c._, p. 357, according to an old Spanish observer 1732.

[73] Frazer, _l.c._, p. 360.

[74] Stekel, _Abraham_.

[75] Frazer, _l.c._, p. 353, cites the Tuaregs of the Sahara as an
example of such an acknowledgment.

[76] Perhaps this condition is to be added: as long as any part of his
physical remains exist. Frazer, _l.c._, p. 372.

[77] _On the Nikobar Islands_, Frazer, _l.c._, p. 382.

[78] Wundt, _Religion and Myth_, Vol. II, p. 49.

[79] _The Origin and Development of Moral Conceptions_, see section
entitled “Attitude Towards the Dead,” Vol. II, p. 424. Both the notes
and the text show an abundance of corroborating, and often very
characteristic testimony, e.g., the Maori believed that “the nearest and
most beloved relatives changed their nature after death and bore
ill-will even to their former favourites.” The Austral negroes believe
that every dead person is for a long time malevolent; the closer the
relationship the greater the fear. The Central Eskimos are dominated by
the idea that the dead come to rest very late and that at first they are
to be feared as mischievous spirits who frequently hover about the
village to spread illness, death and other evils. (Boas.)

[80] R. Kleinpaul: _The Living and the Dead in Folklore, Religion and
Myth_, 1898.

[81] _l.c._, p. 426.

[82] Cf. Chap. III.

[83] Freud, _The Interpretation of Dreams_.

[84] Freud, _The Interpretation of Dreams_.

[85] The projection creations of primitive man resemble the
personifications through which the poet projects his warring impulses
out of himself, as separated individuals.

[86] _Myth and Religion_, p. 129.

[87] In the psychoanalysis of neurotic persons who suffer, or have
suffered, in their childhood from the fear of ghosts, it is often not
difficult to expose these ghosts as the parents. Compare also in this
connection the communication of P. Haeberlin, _Sexual Ghosts_ (_Sexual
Problems_, Feb. 1912), where it is a question of another erotically
accentuated person, but where the father was dead.

[88] Compare my article on Abel’s _Gegensinn der Urworte_ in the
_Jahrbuch für Psychoanalytische und Psychopathologische Forschungen_,
Bd. II, 1910.

[89] It is an interesting parallel that the sense of guilt resulting
from the violation of a taboo is in no way diminished if the violation
took place unwittingly (see examples above), and that even in the Greek
myth the guilt of Oedipus is not cancelled by the fact that it was
incurred without his knowledge and will and even against them.

[90] The necessary crowding of the material also compels us to dispense
with a thorough bibliography. Instead of this the reader is referred to
the well-known works of Herbert Spencer, J. G. Frazer, A. Lang, E. B.
Tylor and W. Wundt, from which all the statements concerning animism and
magic are taken. The independence of the author can manifest itself only
in the choice of the material and of opinions.

[91] E. B. Tylor, _Primitive Culture_, Vol. I, p. 425, fourth ed., 1903.
W. Wundt, _Myth and Religion_, Vol. II, p. 173, 1906.

[92] Wundt _l.c._, Chapter IV: _Die Seelenvorstellungen_.

[93] Compare, besides Wundt and H. Spencer and the instructive article
in the _Encyclopedia Britannica_, 1911 (_Animism, Mythology_, and so
forth).

[94] _l.c._, p. 154.

[95] See Tylor, _Primitive Culture_, Vol. I, p. 477.

[96] _Cultes, Mythes et Religions_, T. II: _Introduction_, p. XV, 1909.

[97] _Année Sociologique_, Seventh Vol, 1904.

[98] To frighten away a ghost with noise and cries is a form of pure
sorcery; to force him to do something by taking his name is to employ
magic against him.

[99] _The Magic Art_, II. p. 67.

[100] The Biblical prohibition against making an image of anything
living hardly sprang from any fundamental rejection of plastic art, but
was probably meant to deprive magic, which the Hebraic religion
proscribed, of one of its instruments. Frazer, _l.c._, p. 87, note.

[101] _The Magic Art_, II, p. 98.

[102] An echo of this is to be found in the _Oedipus Rex_ of Sophocles.

[103] _The Magic Art_, p. 120.

[104] _l.c._, p. 122.

[105] See preceding chapter, p. 92.

[106] Frazer, _The Magic Art_, pp. 201-3.

[107] _The Magic Art_, p. 420.

[108] Compare the article _Magic_ (N. T. W.), in the _Encyclopedia
Britannica_, 11th Ed.

[109] _l.c._, p. 54.

[110] Formulation of two principles of psychic activity, _Jahrb. für
Psychoanalyt. Forschungen_, Vol. III, 1912, p. 2.

[111] The King in _Hamlet_ (Act III, Scene 4):

    “My words fly up, my thoughts remain below,
     Words without thoughts never to heaven go.”


[112] Compare Chapter II.

[113] Remarks upon a case of Compulsion Neurosis, _Jahrb. für
Psychoanalyt. und Psychopath. Forschungen_, Vol. I, 1909.

[114] We seem to attribute the character of the ‘uncanny’ to all such
impressions which seek to confirm the omnipotence of thought and the
animistic method of thought in general, though our judgment has long
rejected it.

[115] The following discussions will yield a further motive for this
displacement upon a trivial action.

[116] _Monograph Series_, 1916.

[117] It is almost an axiom with writers on this subject that a sort of
‘Solipsism or Berkleianism’ (as Professor Sully terms it as he finds it
in the child) operates in the savage to make him refuse to recognize
death as a fact.--Marett, _Pre-animistic Religion, Folklore_, Vol. XI,
1900, p. 178.

[118] We merely wish to indicate here that the original narcism of the
child is decisive for the interpretation of its character development
and that it precludes the assumption of a primitive feeling of
inferiority for the child.

[119] S. Reinach, _L’Art et la Magie_, in the collection _Cultes, Mythes
et Religions_, Vol. I, pp. 125-136. Reinach thinks that the primitive
artists who have left us the scratched or painted animal pictures in the
caves of France did not want to ‘arouse’ pleasure, but to ‘conjure
things’. He explains this by showing that these drawings are in the
darkest and most inaccessible part of the caves and that representations
of feared beasts of prey are absent. “Les modernes parlent souvent, par
hyperbole, de la magie du pinceau ou du ciseau d’un grand artiste et, en
général, de la magie de l’art. Entendu en sense propre, qui est celui
d’une constrainte mystique exercée par la volonté de l’homme sur
d’autres volontés ou sur les choses, cette expression n’est plus
admissible; mais nous avons vu qu’elle était autrefois rigouresement,
vraie, du moins dans l’opinion des artistes” (p. 136).

[120] Recognized through so-called endopsychic perceptions.

[121] R. R. Marett, _Pre-animistic Religion, Folklore_, Vol. XI, No. 2,
1900.--Comp. Wundt, _Myth and Religion_, Vol. II, p. 171.

[122] We assume that in this early narcistic stage feelings from
libidinous and other sources of excitement are perhaps still
indistinguishably combined with each other.

[123] Schreber, _Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken_, 1903.--Freud,
Psychoanalytic Observations concerning an autobiographically described
case of Paranoia, _Jahrbuch für Psychoanalyt. Forsch._ Vol. III, 1911.

[124] Compare the latest communication about the Schreber case, p. 59.

[125] _Principles of Sociology_, Vol. I.

[126] _l.c._, p. 179.

[127] Compare my short paper: _A Note on the Unconscious in
Psychoanalysis_, in the _Proceedings of the Society for Psychical
Research_, Part LXVI, Vol. XXVI, 1912.

[128] p. 26.

[129] Frazer, _Taboo and the Perils of the Soul_, p. 158

[130] Frazer, _l.c._, p. 200.

[131] Frazer, _l.c._, p. 237.

[132] Freud, _Psychopathology of Everyday Life_, p. 215, trans. by A. A.
Brill.

[133] p. 139.

[134] _Revue Scientifique_, October, 1900, reprinted in the four volume
work of the author, _Cultes, Mythes et Religions_, 1908, Tome I, p. 17.

[135] 1910.

[136] But it may be well to show the reader beforehand how difficult it
is to establish the facts in this field.

In the first place those who collect the observations are not identical
with those who digest and discuss them; the first are travellers and
missionaries, while the others are scientific men who perhaps have never
seen the objects of their research.--It is not easy to establish an
understanding with savages. Not all the observers were familiar with the
languages but had to use the assistance of interpreters or else had to
communicate with the people they questioned in the auxiliary language of
pidgin-English. Savages are not communicative about the most intimate
affairs of their culture and unburden themselves only to those
foreigners who have passed many years in their midst. From various
motives they often give wrong or misleading information, (Compare
Frazer, _The Beginnings of Religion and Totemism Among the Australian
Aborigines_; _Fortnightly Review_, 1905; _Totemism and Exogamy_, Vol. I,
p. 150).--It must not be forgotten that primitive races are not young
races but really are as old as the most civilized, and that we have no
right to expect that they have preserved their original ideas and
institutions for our information without any evolution or distortion. It
is certain, on the contrary, that far-reaching changes in all directions
have taken place among primitive races, so that we can never
unhesitatingly decide which of their present conditions and opinions
have preserved the original past, having remained petrified, as it were,
and which represent a distortion and change of the original. It is due
to this that one meets the many disputes among authors as to what
proportion of the peculiarities of a primitive culture is to be taken as
a primary, and what as a later and secondary manifestation. To establish
the original conditions, therefore, always remains a matter of
construction. Finally, it is not easy to adapt oneself to the ways of
thinking of primitive races. For like children, we easily misunderstand
them, and are always inclined to interpret their acts and feelings
according to our own psychic constellations.

[137] _Totemism_ (Edinburgh, 1887), reprinted in the first volume of his
great study, _Totemism and Exogamy_.

[138] Compare the chapter on Taboo.

[139] Just as to-day we still have the wolves in a cage at the steps of
the Capitol in Rome and the bears in the pit at Berne.

[140] Like the legend of the white woman in many noble families.

[141] _l.c._, p. 35.--See the discussion of sacrifice further on.

[142] See Chapter I.

[143] p. 116.

[144] The conclusion which Frazer draws about totemism in his second
work on the subject (_The Origin of Totemism; Fortnightly Review_, 1899)
agrees with this text: “Thus, totemism has commonly been treated as a
primitive system both of religion and of society. As a system of
religion it embraces the mystic union of the savage with his totem; as a
system of society it comprises the relations in which men and women of
the same totem stand to each other and to the members of other totemic
groups. And corresponding to these two sides of the system are two
rough-and-ready tests or canons of totemism: first, the rule that a man
may not kill or eat his totem animal or plant, and second, the rule that
he may not marry or cohabit with a woman of the same totem” (p. 101).
Frazer then adds something which takes us into the midst of the
discussion about totemism: “Whether the two sides--the religious and the
social--have always coexisted or are essentially independent, is a
question which has been variously answered.”

[145] In connexion with such a change of opinion Frazer made this
excellent statement: “That my conclusions on these difficult questions
are final, I am not so foolish as to pretend. I have changed my views
repeatedly, and I am resolved to change them again with every change of
the evidence, for like a chameleon the inquirer should shift his colours
with the shifting colours of the ground he treads.” Preface to Vol. I,
_Totemism and Exogamy_, 1910.

[146] “By the nature of the case, as the origin of totemism lies far
beyond our powers of historical examination or of experiment, we must
have recourse as regards this matter, to conjecture,” Andrew Lang,
_Secret of the Totem_, p. 27.--“Nowhere do we see absolutely primitive
man, and a totemic system in the making,” p. 29.

[147] At first probably only animals.

[148] _The Worship of Animals and Plants_ (_Fortnightly Review_,
1869-1870). _Primitive Marriage_, 1865; both works reprinted in _Studies
in Ancient History_, 1876; second edition, 1886.

[149] _The Secret of the Totem_, 1905, p. 34.

[150] _Ibid._

[151] _Ibid._

[152] According to Andrew Lang.

[153] Pikler and Somló, _The Origin of Totemism_, 1901. The authors
rightly call their attempt at explanation a “Contribution to the
materialistic theory of History.”

[154] _The Origin of Animal Worship_ (_Fortnightly Review_, 1870).
_Principles of Psychology_, Vol. I, §§ 169 to 176.

[155] _Kamilaroi and Kurmai_, p. 165, 1880 (Lang, _Secret of the Totem_,
etc.).

[156] See the chapter on Taboo, p. 96.

[157] _l.c._, Vol. I, p. 41.

[158] _Address to the Anthropological Section, British Association_,
Belfast, 1902. According to Frazer, _l.c._, Vol. IV, p. 50.

[159] _The Native Tribes of Central Australia_, by Baldwin Spencer and
H. J. Gillen, London, 1891.

[160] There is nothing vague or mystical about it, nothing of that
metaphysical haze which some writers love to conjure up over the
humblest beginnings of human speculation but which is utterly foreign to
the simple, sensuous, and concrete modes of the savage. (_Totemism and
Exogamy_, I., p. 117.)

[161] _l.c._, p. 120.

[162] _L’année Sociologique_, Vol. I, V, VIII, and elsewhere. See
especially the chapter, _Sur le Totémisme_, Vol. V, 1901.

[163] _Social Origins and the Secret of the Totem._

[164] _The Golden Bough_, II, p. 332.

[165] “It is unlikely that a community of savages should deliberately
parcel out the realm of nature into provinces, assign each province to a
particular band of magicians, and bid all the bands to work their magic
and weave their spells for the common good.” _Totemism and Exogamy_,
Vol. IV, p. 57.

[166] _Totemism and Exogamy_, Vol. II, p. 89, and IV, p. 59.

[167] _Totemism and Exogamy_, Vol. IV, p. 63.

[168] “That belief is a philosophy far from primitive”, Andrew Lang,
_Secret of the Totem_, p. 192.

[169] Frazer, _Totemism and Exogamy_, Vol. IV, p. 45.

[170] Frazer, _l.c._, p. 48.

[171] Wundt, _Elemente der Völker-Psychologie_, p. 190.

[172] _L’année Sociologique_, 1898-1904.

[173] See Frazer’s _Criticism of Durkheim, Totemism and Exogamy_, p.
101.

[174] _Secret_, etc., p. 125.

[175] See Frazer, _l.c._, Vol. IV, p. 75: “The totemic clan is a totally
different social organism from the exogamous class, and we have good
grounds for thinking that it is far older.”

[176] _Primitive Marriage_, 1865.

[177] Frazer, _l.c._, p. 73 to 92.

[178] Compare Chapter I.

[179] Morgan, _Ancient Society_, 1877.--Frazer, _Totemism and Exogamy_,
Vol. IV, p. 105.

[180] Frazer, _l.c._, p. 106.

[181] _Origin and Development of Moral Conceptions_, Vol. II: Marriage
(1909). See also there the author’s defence against familiar objections.

[182] _l.c._, p. 97.

[183] Compare Durkheim, _La Prohibition de l’Inceste_ (_L’année
Sociologique_, I, 1896-7).

[184] Charles Darwin says about savages: “They are not likely to reflect
on distant evils to their progeny.”

[185] See Chapter I.

[186] “Thus the ultimate origin of exogamy and with it the law of
incest--since exogamy was devised to prevent incest--remains a problem
nearly as dark as ever.”--_Totemism and Exogamy_, I, p. 165.

[187] _The Origin of Man_, Vol. II, Chap. 20, pp. 603-4.

[188] _Primal Law_, London, 1903 (with Andrew Lang, _Social Origins_).

[189] _Secret of the Totem_, pp. 114, 143.

[190] “If it be granted that exogamy existed in practice, on the lines
of Mr. Darwin’s theory, before the totem beliefs lent to the practice a
_sacred_ sanction, our task is relatively easy. The first practical rule
would be that of the jealous sire: ‘No males to touch the females in my
camp,’ with expulsion of adolescent sons. _In efflux of time that rule,
becoming habitual_, would be, ‘No marriages within the local group.’
Next let the local groups receive names such as Emus, Crows, Opossums,
Snipes, and the rule becomes, ‘No marriage within the local group of
animal name; no Snipe to marry a Snipe.’ But, if the primal groups were
not exogamous they would become so as soon as totemic myths and taboos
were developed out of the animal, vegetable, and other names of small
local groups.”--‘_Secret of the Totem_’, p. 143. (The italics above are
mine).--In his last expression on the subject (_Folklore_, December,
1911), Andrew Lang states, however, that he has given up the derivation
of exogamy out of the “general totemic” taboo.

[A] M. Wulff, _Contributions to Infantile Sexuality_, _Zentralbl. f.
Psychoanalyze_, 1912, II, No. I, p. 15.

[191] _Little Hans_, trans. by A. A. Brill (Moffat, Yard & Co., N.Y.).

[192] _l.c._, p. 41.

[193] ‘The Phantasy of the Giraffe,’ _l.c._, p. 30.

[194] S. Ferenczi, _Contributions to Psychoanalysis_, p. 204, translated
by Ernest Jones (Badger, Boston, 1916).

[195] Compare the communications of Reitler, Ferenczi, Rank, and Eder
about the substitution of blindness in the Oedipus myth for castration.
_Intern. Zeitschrift f. ärtzl. Psychoanalyze_, 1913, I, No. 2.

[196] Ferenczi, _l.c._, p. 209.

[197] Ferenczi, _l.c._, p. 212.

[198] Frazer finds that the essence of totemism is in this
identification: “Totemism is an identification of a man with his totem.”
_Totemism and Exogamy_, IV, p. 5.

[199] I am indebted to Otto Rank for the report of a case of dog phobia
in an intelligent young man whose explanation of how he acquired his
ailment sounds remarkably like the totem theory of the Aruntas mentioned
above. He had heard from his father that his mother at one time during
her pregnancy had been frightened by a dog.

[200] _The Religion of the Semites_, Second Edition, London, 1907.

[201] _The Religion of the Semites_, Second Edition, London, 1907.

[202] “The inference is that the domestication to which totemism leads
(when there are any animals capable of domestication) is fatal to
totemism.” Jevons, _Introduction to the History of Religion_, 1911,
fifth edition, p. 120.

[203] _l.c._, p. 313.

[204] _The Golden Bough_, Part V; _Spirits of the Corn and of the Wild_,
1912, in the chapters: “Eating the God and Killing the Divine Animal.”

[205] Frazer, _Totem and Exogamy_, Vol. II, p. 590.

[206] I am not ignorant of the objections to this theory of sacrifice as
expressed by Marillier, Hubert, Mauss and others, but they have not
essentially impaired the theories of Robertson Smith.

[207] _Religion of the Semites_, 2nd Edition, 1907, p. 412.

[208] For a recent contribution compare _The Whole House of the
Chilkat_, by G. T. Emmons (_American Museum Journal_, Vol. XVI, No. 7.)
[Translator].

[209] The reader will avoid the erroneous impression which this
exposition may call forth by taking into consideration the concluding
sentence of the subsequent chapter.

[210] The seemingly monstrous assumption that the tyrannical father was
overcome and slain by a combination of the expelled sons has also been
accepted by Atkinson as a direct result of the conditions of the
Darwinian primal horde. “A youthful band of brothers living together in
forced celibacy, or at most in polyandrous relation with some single
female captive. A horde as yet weak in their impubescence they are, but
they would, when strength was gained with time, inevitably wrench by
combined attacks, renewed again and again, both wife and life from the
paternal tyrant” (_Primal Law_, pp. 220-1). Atkinson, who spent his life
in New Caledonia and had unusual opportunities to study the natives,
also refers to the fact that the conditions of the primal horde which
Darwin assumes can easily be observed among herds of wild cattle and
horses and regularly lead to the killing of the father animal. He then
assumes further that a disintegration of the horde took place after the
removal of the father through embittered fighting among the victorious
sons, which thus precluded the origin of a new organization of society;
“An ever recurring violent succession to the solitary paternal tyrant by
sons, whose parricidal hands were so soon again clenched in fratricidal
strife” (p. 228). Atkinson, who did not have the suggestions of
psychoanalysis at his command and did not know the studies of Robertson
Smith, finds a less violent transition from the primal horde to the next
social stage in which many men live together in peaceful accord. He
attributes it to maternal love that at first only the youngest sons and
later others too remain in the horde, who in return for this toleration
acknowledge the sexual prerogative of the father by the restraint which
they practise towards the mother and towards their sisters.

So much for the very remarkable theory of Atkinson, its essential
correspondence with the theory here expounded, and its point of
departure which makes it necessary to relinquish so much else.

I must ascribe the indefiniteness, the disregard of time interval, and
the crowding of the material in the above exposition to a restraint
which the nature of the subject demands. It would be just as meaningless
to strive for exactness in this material as it would be unfair to demand
certainty here.

[211] This new emotional attitude must also have been responsible for
the fact that the deed could not bring full satisfaction to any of the
perpetrators. In a certain sense it had been in vain. For none of the
sons could carry out his original wish of taking the place of the
father. But failure is, as we know, much more favourable to moral
reaction than success.

[212] “Murder and incest, or offences of like kind against the sacred
law of blood are in primitive society the only crimes of which the
community as such takes cognizance ...” _Religion of the Semites_, p.
419.

[213] Compare _Transformations and Symbols of the Libido_, by C. G.
Jung, in which some dissenting points of view are represented.

[214] Robertson Smith, _Religion of the Semites_, Second Edition, 1907.

[215] See above, p. 128.

[216] “To us moderns, for whom the breach which divides the human and
divine has deepened into an impassable gulf, such mimicry may appear
impious, but it was otherwise with the ancients. To their thinking gods
and men were akin, for many families traced their descent from a
divinity, and the deification of a man probably seemed as little
extraordinary to them as the canonization of a saint seems to a modern
Catholic.” Frazer, _The Golden Bough_, I; _The Magic Art and the
Evolution of Kings_, II, p. 177.

[217] It is known that the overcoming of one generation of gods by
another in mythology represents the historical process of the
substitution of one religious system by another, either as the result of
conquest by a strange race or by means of a psychological development.
In the latter case the myth approaches the “functional phenomena” in H.
Silberer’s sense. That the god who kills the animal is a symbol of the
libido, as asserted by C. G. Jung (_l.c._), presupposes a different
conception of the libido from that hitherto held, and at any rate seems
to me questionable.

[218] _Religion of the Semites_, pp. 412-413. “The mourning is not a
spontaneous expression of sympathy with the divine tragedy, but
obligatory and enforced by fear of supernatural anger. And a chief
object of the mourners is _to disclaim responsibility for the god’s
death_--a point which has already come before us in connexion with
theanthropic sacrifices, such as the ‘ox-murder at Athens.’”

[219] The fear of castration plays an extraordinarily big rôle in
disturbing the relations to the father in the case of our youthful
neurotics. In Ferenczi’s excellent study we have seen how the boy
recognized his totem in the animal which snaps at his little penis. When
children learn about ritual circumcision they identify it with
castration. To my knowledge the parallel in the psychology of races to
this attitude of our children has not yet been drawn. The circumcision
which was so frequent in primordial times among primitive races belongs
to the period of initiation in which its meaning is to be found; it has
only secondarily been relegated to an earlier time of life. It is very
interesting that among primitive men circumcision is combined with or
replaced by the cutting off of the hair and the drawing of teeth, and
that our children, who cannot know anything about this, really treat
these two operations as equivalents to castration when they display
their fear of them.

[220] Reinach, _Cultes, Mythes, et Religions_, II, p. 75.

[221] “Une sorte de péché proethnique,” _l.c._, p. 76.

[222] The suicidal impulses of our neurotics regularly prove to be
self-punishments for death wishes directed against others.

[223] _Eating the God_, p. 51.... Nobody familiar with the literature on
this subject will assume that the tracing back of the Christian
communion to the totem feast is an idea of the author of this book.

[224] Ariel in _The Tempest_:

    Full fathom five thy father lies;
    Of his bones are coral made;
    Those are pearls that were his eyes;
    Nothing of him that doth fade
    But doth suffer a sea-change
    Into something rich and strange....


[225] La Mort d’Orphée, _Cultes, Mythes, et Religions_, Vol. II, p. 100.

[226] That is to say, the parent complex.

[227] I am used to being misunderstood and therefore do not think it
superfluous to state clearly that in giving these deductions I am by no
means oblivious of the complex nature of the phenomena which give rise
to them; the only claim made is that a new factor has been added to the
already known or still unrecognized origins of religion, morality, and
society, which was furnished through psychoanalytic experience. The
synthesis of the whole explanation must be left to another. But it is in
the nature of this new contribution that it could play none other than
the central rôle in such a synthesis, although it will be necessary to
overcome great affective resistances before such importance will be
conceded to it.

[228] Compare Chapter II.

[229] See Chapter III.

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Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:

new pyschological technique=> new psychological technique {pg vi}

the pyschoanalysts=> the psychoanalysts {pg vi}

subjetced to analysis=> subjected to analysis {pg x}

profound anaylsis=> profound analysis {pg x}

Similiar customs=> Similar customs {pg 17}

made us familar=> made us familiar {pg 48}

expiate and similiar=> expiate and similar {pg 51}

anxious excesss=> anxious excess {pg 84}

originally the world taboo=> originally the world taboo {pg 112}

susperstitious motivation=> susperstitious motivation {pg 162}

exercée par la volunté=> exercée par la volonté {pg 151}


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