Classic Audiobook Collection - Totem and Taboo by Sigmund Freud ~ Full Audiobook [science]

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Totem and Taboo by Sigmund Freud audiobook. Genre: science In Totem and Taboo, Sigmund Freud turns the tools of psychoanalysis outward, asking how the hidden forces that shape an individual mind might also shape entire societies. Across four connected essays, he explores the strange power of taboos, the emotional logic behind ritual prohibitions, and the recurring patterns he sees linking so-called primitive customs with modern neuroses. Freud examines topics such as fear of the dead, rules around purity and contamination, the avoidance of incest, and the anthropological puzzle of totemism - the symbolic animal or object that becomes a marker of group identity and a focus of reverence and restriction. Threading through the discussion is Freud's provocative attempt to connect family conflict, desire, guilt, and authority with the origins of religion, moral law, and social cohesion. Part cultural critique, part speculative anthropology, and part clinical thought experiment, Totem and Taboo challenges listeners to consider why certain thoughts feel forbidden, how communities enforce shared boundaries, and what we inherit psychologically from the deep past. It is influential, controversial, and designed to spark debate about the roots of belief and behavior. For ad-free listening try our premium subscription Chapters (Approximate) (00:00:00) Chapter 00 (00:09:56) Chapter 01 (00:50:50) Chapter 02 (01:34:56) Chapter 03 (02:14:28) Chapter 04 (03:06:29) Chapter 05 (04:03:29) Chapter 06 (04:48:44) Chapter 07 (05:37:01) Chapter 08 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

totemant taboo resemblances between the psychic lives of savages and neurotics by professor dr sigman freud authorized english translation with introduction by a a brille introductory notes 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 viewpoints and results of psychoanalysis to unexplained problems of racial psychology. In Method, this book contrasts with that of W. W. Wunt 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. 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 of 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 cooperation. 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 gave 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 today, 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.

Translator's Introduction When one reviews the history of psychoanalysis, one finds that it had its inception in the study of morbid mental states, Beginning with the observation of hysteria and the other neuroses, 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, 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, marked a new epoch in the history of mental science. One might use the same words in reference to his, profound analysis of wit. 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 state, 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 forever strives to express itself whenever the individual finds it is 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 fantasies, when applied to the production of racial fantasies, 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. Further study in this direction has shown 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 acknowledging my indebtedness to Mr. Alfred B. Cutner for the invaluable assistance he rendered in the translation of this work. a abril end of the introductory notes chapter i of totem and taboo this librivox recording is in the public domain totem and taboo by sigmund freud chapter one the savages 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 mediums 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 neighbors, 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 in the painful rigor 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 small sets 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. Most rarely, the totem is a plant or a force of nature, rain or 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 social obligations of an Australian.

It extends on the one hand beyond the tribal relationship, and on the other hand it supersedes, consanguineous relationships. The totem is not limited to district or locality. The members of a totem may live separated from one another and on friendly terms with adherence of other totems. Footnote. This very brief extract of the totemic system cannot be left without some elucidation and without discussing its limitations. The name totem or totem was first learned from the North American Indians by the Englishmen

J. Long in 1791. The subject has gradually acquired great scientific interest and is called forth a copious literature. I refer especially to totemism and exogamy by J. G. Fraser, four volumes 1910. And the books and articles of Andrew Lang, for example the secret of totem 1905. The credit for having recognized the significance of totemism for the ancient history of man, belongs to. to the Scotchman J. Ferguson MacLennan. Exterior to Australia, totemic institutions were found and are still observed among North American Indians, as well as among the races of the Polynesian Island 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 investors, 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 once vulgar Volume 2, Mythus and 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. 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 whatever was aboriginal with them has undergone much development and distortion. Thus among those races who still evince it, we find totemism today in the most manifold states of decay and disintegration. We observe that fragments of it have passed over to other social and religious institutions, where 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. And now finally we must consider that peculiarity of the Tietamic system which attracts the interest to 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 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, have 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 totem, for example, 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 Fraser's book will show how seriously such trespasses are treated by these savages, who, according to our standard, are otherwise very immoral. Quote, 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 Klansman, and so is the woman. Though in some cases, if they succeed in a looting capture for a certain time, the offense may be condoned. In the Tata Thai 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 unquote 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 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 sister who are emu like himself are therefore made impossible for a son of this marriage. Footnote. 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 a paternal inheritance of the totem, the father would be kangaroo as well as his children. Then incest with the daughter 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 sun. And footnote. 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 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 consanguously related to him by treating all these women black-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 role of the totem, the animal, as ancestor, is taken very seriously. Everybody descended from the same totem is.

is consanguous, 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 in 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, become so unlawful. 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 custom of these tribes as well as 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 relation 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 Reverend 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 D. Westermark in his history of human marriage, 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 in the native tribes of Central Australia, 1899, a certain form of group marriage can be established as still existing today among the tribes of the Urabuna and the Diary.

Group marriage therefore preceded individual marriage among these races and did not disappear without leaving distinct races in language and custom. But if we replace individual marriage, we can then grasp the or 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 that 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 fratries. Each of these marriage groups is exogamous and includes a majority of totem groups. Usually each marriage group is again divided into two subclasses, sub-fretries, and the whole tribe is therefore divided into four classes, the sub-classes thus standing between the freightries and the totem groups. The typical and often very intricate scheme of organization of an Australian tribe therefore looks as follows. This is a description of the

illustration that is within the text here. There are three levels to the illustration. The first level is labeled fratries and has two divisions, small letter A and small letter B. Stemming from A are two elements, small letter C and small letter D. From small B, extend two elements, letter E and letter F. C, D, and F are labeled sub-fratries. From each of C, D, E, and F, three further subcategories. From C, Alpha, Beta, and Gamma, from D, Delta, Epsilon, and Ada.

From E, 1, 2, and 3, from F, 4, 5, and 6. These last 12 are labeled Totem. There is a dotted arcing line running from C to E and another from D to F. description of the illustration. The 12 totem groups are brought under four subclasses and two main classes. All the divisions are exogamous. The subclass C forms an exogamous union 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 12 totem groups, assuming the same number of people in each group, every member of a group would

have 11 twelfths of all the women of the tribe to choose from. The existence of the two fratries reduces this number to 6 twelfths or one-half. A man of the totem alpha can only marry a woman from the groups 1 to 6. With the introduction of the two subclasses, the selection sinks to 312s or a ban of the totem alpha must limit his marriage choice to the women of the totems four, five, or six. 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 accustomed the complicated institutions of the marriage classes with their subdivisions 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 base of all other social obligations and moral restrictions of the tribe, the importance of the freightries 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 prohibition, always enforce for brothers and sisters to cousins and invented for them the grades of spiritual kinship. 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. We must say that 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 them.

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 behavior 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 Leper's Island, one of the New Hebrides, the boy leaves his maternal home at a fixed age and moves to the clubhouse, where he then 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 sisters 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 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 attain in new caledonia if brother and sister meet she flees into the bush and he passes by without turning his head toward her 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 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. 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.

Among the Bata's of Sumatra, these laws of avoidance affect all near relationships. For instance, it would be most offensive for a batan 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 their consanguous intercourse they do quite right to avoid all temptations by means of such prohibitions among the barangos 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. Among the Acamba, or Wakamba, in British East Africa, a law of avoidance is enforced 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 social intercourse with her father. 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 Vanne Lava or 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. 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 among the zulu kaffir's 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 a considerable distance if they have some barrier between them as for instance the enclosure of a crawl. Neither may utter the other's name. 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 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. 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. The same objection was also raised against the conception of Feizen, 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 behavior of the mother-in-law toward the son-in-law to the former marriage by capture. Quote, 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 thus custom continued after its origin had been forgotten, end quote. has found it easy to show how little this tentative explanation agrees with the details of actual

observation. E. B. Tyler 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. A Zulu woman, who was asked about basis for this prohibition,

showed great delicacy of feeling in her answer, quote, it is not right that he should see the breasts, which nursed his wife, end quote. It is known that also a woman. 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 quarreling and displeasure would often be avoided if they did exist and did not have to be re-established by individuals. Many a European would 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 the 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 relationship 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 distrust 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 overvaluation 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 psychosexual 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 of the wife's emotional life. The aging mother protects her 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 necessary resignation imposed upon the individual through marriage. This emotional identification with the daughter may easily go so far with the mother that she 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 for, 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 Fysen, who sees nothing in these regulations but of 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 fantasy temptation, brought about by unconscious intermediary lengths. 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 incestoret of savages has longbed 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.

Psychoanalysis 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 role 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 researchers of Otto Rank, which show an even larger scope, to what extent the incest theme stands in the center 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 dating. dangerous by savage races who consider them worthy of the most severe defensive measures. End of Chapter 1. Read by Mary Schneider. Chapter 2 Part 1 of Totum and Tabu. This Libravox recording is in the public domain. Totum N. Taboo by Sigmund Freud. Chapter 2. Taboo and the Ambivalence of Emotions, Part 1.

Section 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 Sakhir, was the same as the taboo of the Polynesians. The agos of the Greeks and the Kurdish of the Hebrews must also have signified the same thing, which the Polynesians expressed through their word taboo, and what many races in America, Africa, Madagascar, northern and Central Asia, expressed.

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 of taboo is designated in Polynesian by the word Noah. This 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 combinations 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. Wunt 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. Footnote. 11th edition. This article also gives the most important references. And footnote. Quote, 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 violation of the prohibition. The converse of taboo in Polynesia is Noah, and allied forms which mean general or common. Various classes of taboo in the wider sense may be distinguished. One, natural or direct, the result of manna, mysterious power, inherent in a person or thing. Two, communicated or indirect. Equally the result of manna, but A, acquired, or be imposed by a priest, chief, or other person. Three, 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, that is, to religious interdictions as distinguish 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 taboo are many. One, 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 manna, 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.

Footnote, this application of the taboo can be omitted as not originally belonging in this connection. in footnote. F. securing unborn infants and young children who stand in especially sympathetic relation with their parents from the consequences of certain actions and more especially from the communication of qualities supposed to be derived from certain foods. Two, taboos are imposed in order to secure against thieves

the property of an individual, his fields, tools, etc., end quote. 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 the 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. Quote, the violation of taboo makes the offender himself taboo, unquote. 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 object, is regarded as the source of the taboo.

This part of the article reads as follows, quote, 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 transmittable 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 taboo depends partly on the strength of the magical influence inherent in the taboo object or person, partly on the strength of the opposing manna 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 manna than common can approach them unharmed, and can in turn be approached by their inferiors without risk. So, two, indirect taboos depend for their strength on the manna of him who oppose them.

them. If it is a chief or 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 comprised 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 childbed 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 reader's 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 anyone 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 in 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 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 W1 gives his interpretation of taboo, especially as he promises to, quote, go back to the very roots of the taboo concepts, end quote. Woot 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. On another occasion, he says, quote, In accordance with the general sense of the word we understand by taboo, every prohibition laid down in customs or manners or an expressly formulated laws,

not to touch an object or to take it for one's own use, or to make use of certain prescribed words, end quote. Accordingly, there would not be a single race or stage of culture which had escaped the injurious effects of taboo. Wunt 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.

The taboo of the second class, which has human beings for its object, is of an essentially different nature. 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 diseased, 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 that his initiation into manhood becomes part of his own 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. One 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. The real sources of taboo lie deeper than in the interests of the privileged classes.

Quote, 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. End quote. 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. End quote. 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. Quote, but the commandment concealed behind taboo prohibitions which differ materially according to place and time have originally the meaning, beware of the wrath of the demons. End quote. Wunt therefore teaches that taboo is the expression and evolution. of the belief of primitive races in demonic powers, and that later taboo has disassociated itself from this origin, and has remained 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 one's explanation disappointing. One'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. Wunt 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, the two forms which it assumed at a more developed stage, namely awe and aversion. How did this separation come about? According to Wunt, this was done through the transference of taboo prohibition, 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 its aversion. Once further elucidations refer to the relation of taboo to lustration and sacrifice. Section 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 impulsive 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 learned 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 interrelationships 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 original 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 the 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 delir de touche 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 someone 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 the one of the other-and-and-in-turn make this new object impossible as one of the one of the original 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 neighboring things. We have already emphasized the same characteristics of contagion and transference in the description of taboo prohibitions. We also know that anyone 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 chief's breath conveyed through these intermediaries which surely die end quote from fraser the golden bough my patient demanded that a utensil which her husband had purchased and brought home should be removed lest it may 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 in 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, defense 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 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 expect. Presently, the carrying out of this very pleasurable act of touching was opposed by a prohibition from without. Footnote. Both the pleasure and the prohibition referred to touching, one's own genitals. End footnote. The prohibition was accepted because it was supported by strong inner forces.

Footnote. The relation to beloved persons who impose the prohibition. End footnote. 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.

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 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 is thus undergone fixation lies in what one might call the ambivalent behavior footnote to use an excellent term coined by bluer in footnote ambivalent behavior 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 role is played by the repression which appears at this age on account of the repression which is 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 connoissell

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 in 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 prescribed 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 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 a 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 concern actions for which there existed a strong desire. The prohibitions maintain 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 they are such innate ideas or whether these have brought about the fixation of the taboo by themselves or by cooperating 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 the taboo races. They therefore assume an ambivalent attitude toward their taboo prohibitions. If they are 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 Tetemic system is so wholly unknown to us. But the very wording of these taboos and the fact that they occur together, we remind anyone 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. 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 other. to follow his example. He arouses envy. Why should he be allowed to do what is prohibited to others? He is therefore really contagious, insofar 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, their conditions are taboo, for one must not yield to the temptations which they offer. Now, too, we understand why the forces inherent in the manna of various persons can neutralize one another so that the manna 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 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 role in taboo prohibition as in the delir de touche. 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 in here is 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 manna 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 is 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 ceremony, 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 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 the 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. Section 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 interpretation is evidently of no value unless it offers 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 defense 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, that is, the sway of contrary tendencies, exists also in the case of taboo regulations, or if we should find among the 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 lawgiving 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 ensure their property and privileges. But there still remains a large group of laws which we may undertake to investigate. Among these 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. Fraser in his great work, the Golden Bow. End of Chapter 2. Part 1. Read by Mary Schneider.

Totemant Taboo, Resemances between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Heretics by Professor Dr. Sigmund Freud, translated by A.A. Brill. This LibreVox recording is in the public domain. Totaman Taboo Chapter 2, Taboo and the Ambivalence of Emotion, Part 2. 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 one, reconciliation with, the slain enemy. Two, restrictions, three, acts of expiation and purifications of the manslayer, and four, certain ceremonial rights. 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 practiced 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. Quote, from Fraser, 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 be 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 similar customs are found among the palu in selibes the gala's sacrificed to the spirits of their dead enemies before they return to their home villages 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 sea day acts of sarawak bring home ahead 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 tidbits 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 observers had been struck by the mourning for the enemy after he has slain the scalp among several of the wild tribes of north america when a choktau 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

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 Fraser, 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 III. 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. Besides the savages themselves directly admit their fear of 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 behavior towards enemies we see in them manifestations of repentance a 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 into his soul. mouth. 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 Logia, an island near New Guinea, men who have killed an enemy or have taken part in the killing, locked themselves up in their houses for a week. They avoid every

intercourse with their wives and friends. They do not touch their vittles 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 Toa Riepe, or Motu tribes of 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 fraser 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 that he did so that he would not even his wife and children if he did so that he would not he do so they would be afflicted with boils. He finally becomes clean through washing and other ceremonies. Among the Natches 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 chocktaugh had killed and scalped an enemy, he began a period of mourning for, 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 anyone he lived a lowly

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 postponex 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 freeholder in medieval society really conveys a good idea of the taboo of savages. 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 every thing 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 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 toward their enemies b the taboo of rulers the behavior of primitive races toward their chiefs kings and priests is controlled by two principal which seem rather to supplement than to contradict each other. They must both be guarded and be guarded against. 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 anyone 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 bear 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 and 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 scrofila whence it was called the king's evil neither queen elizabeth nor any of her successors renounced this part of the royal prerogative charles first is said to have healed a hundred sufferers at one time in the year sixteen thirty three under his dissolute son charles second 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 third 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 the words may god give you better health and more sense 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 toward sunset of the following day a maury 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 the first of the chief whom she had the offended would surely kill her. This incident occurred in the afternoon, and on the next day at 12 o'clock, she was dead. The tinderbox 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 tinderbox was, they all died of fright. 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 exist today 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 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 wheel 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.

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 conscientiousnesses a strain of mistrust is mingled with the motivation of the taboo rules for the king the idea that early kingdoms are despotisms says fraser 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 behavior 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 his own 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 trampling 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 paralyzing 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 relates quote from kemfer history of japan 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 the body at that time has that time has that he has been taken from the body at that time has 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 tranquility in his empire. For if unfortunate, 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 Pedron, in Lower Guinea, 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 the 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 the more powerful a king of loango is says bastion 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 role 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 flamond 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-flower 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 pairings had to be buried under a lucky tree.

He could not touch the dead, go into the open with a bare head, and similar prohibitions. His wife, the Flamanica, 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. 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 the use, taboos is given in the book of rights of which the oldest manuscript copies bear the dates thirteen ninety and fourteen eighteen the prohibitions are very detailed and concerns certain activities 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 plain on which he cannot camp a full nine days, etc. 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 honor 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 Cambodia, where there is a fire and water king, it is often necessary to use force to compel the successor to accept the honor. On Neway, 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 to, 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 honor. 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.

Among the negroes of Sierra Leone, the resistance against accepting the kingly honor was so great that most of the tribes were compelled to make strangers their kings. Fraser 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, were willing to renounce the honors of royal dignity from these there grew up the secular rulers while the spiritual overlordship 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 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 others. As a result of this, contradictions arise at which the intellect of savages takes no more offense 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 subjective 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 where the typical case of an ambivalent effective 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 psychoanitalist 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 intent. tense 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 learned from Fraser that the savage Timis 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

tomb 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 trade in the attitude of primitive races toward 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 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 Servantes make San Jo 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 toward 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. Fraser 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 Fraser himself does not consider his facts altogether convincing. Christian myths are said to have been still influenced by the after effects of this evolution of kings. End of Chapter 2, Part 2, read by Mary Schneider. Totem and Tabu, resemblances between the psychic lives of savages and neurotics

by Professor Dr. Sigmund Freud, translated by A.A. Braille. This Librevox recording is in the public domain. Totem and Taboo, Chapter 2, Taboo and the Ambivalence of emotions. Part 3. 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 mourners for the dead. Among the Maori, anyone 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 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 fretched 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-custs, after bodily contact with the dead are the same all over Polynesia, in Melanesia and in 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, priest kings were subject to the same restrictions during the exercise of holy functions. 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 10 months. These savages are so certain that anyone 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. 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 shoe-swap 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 anyone 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 Agoutainos who live in 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 Macchio, British New Guinea, a widower forfeits all civil rights and lives like an outlaw. He may not tend to 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 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 to many modifications which is very widespread and has been subjected to many modifications to many modifications to which 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 Samogees in Siberia and the Todas in South India, the Mongolians of Tartari and the Tuaregs of Sahara, the Eno of Japan and the Acamba and Nandi in Central Africa, the Tinguines in the Philippines, and the inhabitants of the Nicarare Islands and of Madagascar in Borneo. 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. At first, it is not easy to guess why the mention of the name should be 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 austrian tribes in adelaide and in counter 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 seen among several tribes in victoria and in north america all the relatives of the deceased changed their names regardless of whether their names resemble the name of the deceased in sound

among the guicuru in paragu 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 furthermore if the deceased had the same name 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 Doppressover spent among the abopons in Paraguay, the name for Jaguar was changed three times, and the words for crocodile, thorns, and animal slaughter underwent a similar fate.

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 reawaken the names of the deceased after a long period of mourning they are bestowed upon children who are 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 to consistently conclude that

when two things have identical names, a deeper correspondence between them must exist. Numerous peculiarities of normal behavior 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 as was to be expected the compulsion neurotic behave just like savages in regard to names. They show the full complex sensitiveness toward 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 person. In her frenzied faithfulness which she needed to protect herself against the temptations of her fantasy, 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 handwriting, so that she finally gave up writing. Thus it no longer seemed 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 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 practice a host of ceremonies to keep him off and banish him. They look upon the mention of his name as a conjuration, which must result in his immediate presence. 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. 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 one's expression, from the fear of his soul now turned into a demon. With this understanding we approach one's conception, who, as we have heard, sees the nature of taboo and 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.

Wester Mark, 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 Jeevons 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 members of their clan, end quote. R. Klein Paul 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. 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. This 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 rancor 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. Klein Paul 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 Westermark, this question is easily answered. Quote, 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 them with diseases in order to be reunited 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 moment. more comprehensive explanation, which includes that of Westermark. 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 raise a 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 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 same. 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 emotion. 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 as scribes 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 defense against it is accomplished by displacement upon the object of hostility, namely, the dead. We call this defense 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 defense 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-defense. We have learned to understand part of the taboo regulations as temptation fears. A dead person is defenseless,

which must act as an incitement to satisfy hostile desires entertained against him. This temptation has to be opposed by the prohibition. But Westermark 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, in the unconscious mode of thinking, even a natural death is perceived as murder. The person was killed by evil wishes. anyone 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. A little while ago we challenged Wunt'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 text, 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, expose the demons by recognizing them as mere projection of hostile feelings which the survivor entertains towards the dead. The double feeling, tenderness and hostility against the deceased, which we consider well-founded, endeavors 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 someone 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 would explain the origin of demons by projection. The offenses 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 defense. 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 endocycic 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 Veltenscheng 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. 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. Woonh remarks that, quote, 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. 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 has accomplished the grief and with it the remorse and reproach lessons, 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 demortuous neonisi beaning only neurotics still blur the morning for the loss of the dear ones with the 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 one offered us about the double meaning of the word taboo, namely holy, and unclean 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 discussions readily show 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. 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 for 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 characteristic is evidenced 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 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 neuroses. 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 and 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,

desirable 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 apply this plausible theory to primitive races, we would have to conclude that among their strongest temptations, for 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 psychic 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 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 someone

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 violators 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 someone 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 offense. 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 pertain 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 over compensation 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 delir de tuchet. 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 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 understanding of the development of culture.

In one way, the neuroses show a striking and far-reaching course, 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 paranoiac 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

labor. In analyzing the impulse of the neuroses, one learns that motive powers of sexual origin exercised 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 fantasy. 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. This is the end of part three of chapter two and the end of chapter two as a whole read by Mary Schneider. Chapter 3 of Totem and Taboo by Sigmund Freud. This Liberbox's recording is in the public domain. Chapter 3 Animism, Magic, and the Omnipotence of Thought Section 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 role of incentives and make suggestions to the expert, which he should take into consideration in his work. This defect will make it felt most strongly in an essay such as this, which tries to treat of the enormous sphere called animism. Footnote. 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. Fraser, A. Lang, E. B. Tyler, and W. W. W. W. W. 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. End put-note. 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. Tyler. What led to the formulation of these names is the

inside 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 explained the processes of nature by the assumption 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 beings very similar to individuals. Only in the course of a long evolution did they lose their material character and attain a higher degree of spiritualization. Most authors inclined 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 conclusions.

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, once states that these, quote, 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,

insofar as this is at all accessible to our observation, end quote. Hume has already justified the animation of the inanimate in his natural history of religions, where he said, quote, 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. 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 today, 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 being. based upon animistic foundations, but the detailed relation of myths to animism seem unexplained in some essential points. Section 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 rhynick wants to call these directions which are known under the names of sorcery and magic the strategy of animism with moss and hubert i should prefer to compare them to a technique 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 favorably 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 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 tyler at its face value it can be most tersely expressed in his words quote mistaking an ideal connection for a real one end quote 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 Fraser, 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 Apepepe. 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 Thieves. A figure of his foe, a peppy, represented as a crocodile with the hideous face or a serpent with many coils, was made of wax, and on it the demon's name was written in green ink,

wrapped in a papyrus case on which another likeness of Apepe 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 Apepe himself had thus been effectively disposed of, waxen effigies of each of his principal demons, and of their father, 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 disc. 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. 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 role among primitive races, which have been partly preserved in myths and cults of higher stages of evolution.

The art of causing rain and fruitfulness by magic. 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 anos 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 special 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 with sexual intercourse when the rice was about to blossom in order to stimulate the rice to fruitfulness through example. At the same time, it was feared that prescribed incestuous relationships would stimulate the soil to grow weeds and render it unfruitful. Certain negative rules, that is to say, magic precautions,

must be put into this first group. If some of the inhabitants of the 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 hunter's fingers and would let the quarry slip through their hands. Or when a Gilliak 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.

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 difficulty 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. Fraser, therefore, calls this kind of magic imitative or homeopathic. 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 he has. 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. 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, twenty eight advises spitting on the hand which has caused the injury if one regrets having injured someone 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 sab 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 side 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 Matild 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 in consequence of postponed antisepsis. The examples from this last group illustrate Fraser'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 Tyler's quoted characteristic of magic, mistaking an ideal connection for a real one, proves to be.

The same may be said of Fraser's idea, who has expressed it in almost the same terms. quote, 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, end quote. It will at first seem strange that this illuminating explanation of magic could have been rejected by some authors as unsatisfactory. But on closer consideration, we must sustain the objection that the association that the association, the association, The association theory of magic merely explains the path 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 Fraser'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 Fraser, this may be practiced by itself, whereas contagious magic as a rule presupposes the imitative. 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. The adult primitive man knows another way. A motor impulse, the will, clings to his wish,

and this will, which later will will will change the face of the earth in the service of wish fulfillment, 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 a 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 overvaluation 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 its 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 spirit avails nothing unless accompanied by belief and that the magic effect of prayer fails if there is no piety behind it 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 overvaluation 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 overestimation of the latter objects as such are overshadowed 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 two 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. 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. Section 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 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 such as if he inquired such as if he inquired such as he had but he inquired such as if he had

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 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 for 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 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 fantasy, 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 toward his fellow beings in a most

considerate and scrupulous manner, a behavior 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 toward 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 overestimation of psychic processes, as opposed to reality, proves to be of unlimited effect in the neurotic's effective 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. The protective formulas of the compulsion neurosis also have a counterpart in the incantations of magic, but the evolution of compulsory. of 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 different. 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 beginning, beginnings in childhood, we at first found an important distinction which is stated in the three contributions to the theory of sex. 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 autoeroticism 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 autoeroticism 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 year. 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 narcissism, 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 separate. from each other. Although this narcissistic 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 narcissistic organization is never altogether given up again. To a certain extent man remains narcissistic even after he has found outer objects for his libido, and the objects upon 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 psychosis, 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 narcissism 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 has 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 narcissism and omnipotence of thought If we may take the now established omnipotence of thought among primitive races as a proof of their narcissism, we may venture to compare the various evolutionary stages of man's conceptions 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 narcissism. 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 state of maturity, where having renounced the pleasure principle and having adapted himself

to reality, he seeks his object in the outer world. 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 today have for the greater parts ceased to exist. Among these we may suspect various

magic intentions. Section 4. Enimism, 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, 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 role, 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 the theory of R.R. Merit, 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. 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. He personified the things he endowed with affects, 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. as on a former occasion 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 become stronger for 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 analyzed in detail in the situation of the mourner at the death of one dear to him such a case appeals to us is especially fitted to motivate the creation of projection for Here again we are in agreement with those authors who declare that evil spirits were the first born among spirits and who 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 favor of a simultaneous origin. If it really were the situation of the survivor confronted by the death which first caused primitive man to reflect, so that he was compelled to surrender some of his omnipotence to spirits, and to sacrifice apart with the free will of his actions,

these cultural creations would be a first recognition of the Anankei, which opposes man's narcissism. 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 a sense of, 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 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,

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. The thing which we, just like primitive man, project into 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 coexistence of perception and memory, or to generalize it, the existence of unconscious psychic processes next to conscious ones. It might be said that in the last analysis, the spirit of a person or a 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 content to another the dream succeeds more or less in this but hardly ever succeeds so completely than an absurdity or a gap in the structure does not be able to be able to succeed in this but hardly ever succeed so completely than 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 regrouping 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 favor 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 connection if as a result of special circumstances it cannot grasp the right one. We know such system formations 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 the delusional states, paranoia, and dominates the clinical. picture but it also must not be overlooked in other forms of neuropsychosis in every case we can show that a rearrangement 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 maury the neurosis of this woman was directed against her husband and culminated in the defense 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. Impaled by a peculiar unrest, she went to the shop herself, and on her return from this reconnoiter, 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 neighborhood 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 that 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 abysia or an agoraphobia, becomes perfected and detailed if the symptom once succeeds in representing an unconscious wish and of imposing a defense against

it. All the patients remaining unconscious fantasies 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 connection 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 gate. 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 today 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 underestimated 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 warpath, 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. Even if the basis of the 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 the whereabouts of the

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 aesthetic 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. Fraser cites 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 for which the sharp weapon might be used by unconscious evil impulses. End of Chapter 3. Read by Mary Schneider. Part 1 of Chapter 4 of totem and taboo by Sigmund Freud. This Libravox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 4.

The Infantile Recurrence of Totemism. Part 1 The reader need not fear that psychoanalysis, which first revealed the regular overdetermination 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. Section 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 McLennan 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. W. W. W. 1912, as the latest utterance in this question. Quote, 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. V.

who in the year 1900 sketched the following code de totemism in twelve articles like a catechism of the totemic religion one certain animals must not be killed or eaten but men bring up individual animals of these species and take care of them two an animal that dies accidentally is mourned and buried with the same honors as a member of the tribe three 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 are. 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 Rheinick has here also incorporated all the signs and clues 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 fraser the author of totemism and exogamy for the pleasure and information he affords even though psychoanalytic investigation may lead us to results which differ widely from his footnote 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 travelers and missionaries, while the others are scientific men, who perhaps have never seen the object 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 Pigeon 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 Fraser, the beginnings of religion and totemism among the Australian Aborigines, Fortnightly Review 1905, Totemism and Exogamy, Volume 1, Page 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 which 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 one 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 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. End footnote. A totem wrote Fraser in his first essay 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 and intimate and altogether special relation.

The connection between a person and his totem is music. 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 fetish, 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 these last 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 three, the individual totem which belongs to the individual and does not descend to his successors. the last two kinds of totem are of comparatively 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 or clan totem is the object of veneration of a group of men and women who take their name from the totem and consider themselves consanguous offspring of a common ancestor and two 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 the 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 has 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 part of our own. 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, Fraser 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. Specimens of the totem animals are sometimes raised by the clan and taken care of in captivity. 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. Fraser thinks that oaths were originally ordeals, many tests as to dissent 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. 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 disguised 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. 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 and the demand

for expiation for the blood that has been shed. 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 with each other other. This is the famous and enigmatic exogamy connection 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. To this presentation of totemism by Fraser, 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. W. Woott says, quote, the totem animal is considered the ancestral animal. Totum 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 they, 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 the 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 a significant contradictory phenomenon found in this connection, namely, that under certain conditions there was a kind of ceremonial conception of the totemps 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. It may now seem strange to us that in the Code de Totemism, which Rheinick 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 rhynick is an author to whose work in this field we owe much and i have chosen his representation in order to prepare us for the differences of opinion among the authors which will now occupy our attention section two 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 do 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 opinion 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 Fraser in 1887, cannot escape the criticism that expresses an arbitrary preference of the author, and would be challenged today by Fraser himself, who has repeatedly changed his view on the subject. It is quite obvious that the nature of totemism and exhumans, could be most easily 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. 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 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-laquette.

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. C, for instance, B. Goldenweiser in the Journal of American Folklore 23, 1910, reviewed in the Britannicay Yearbook, 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?

The Scotchman McLennan, who discovered totemism and exogamy for science, refrained from publishing his views of the origin of totemism. According to a communication of Andrew Lang, he was for a time inclined to trace totemism back to the coasts, of tattooing. I shall divide the accepted theories of the derivation of totemism into three groups, alpha, nominalistic, beta, sociological, and gamma psychological. Alpha, the nominalistic theories. The information about these theories will justify their summation under the headings I have used. Garcelaso de la Vega, a descendant of the Peruvian

Incas, who wrote the history of his race in the 17th century, is already said to have traced back what was known to him about Teutemic phenomena, to the need of the tribes to differentiate themselves from each other by means of names. The same idea appears centuries later in the ethnology of A.K. Keene, where totems are said to be derived from heraldic badges, through which individuals, families, and tribes wanted to differentiate themselves. Max Mueller, expresses the same opinion about the meaning of the totem in his contributions to the science of mythology. A totem is said to be one, a mark of the clan, two, a clan name, three, the name of the ancestor of the clan, four, the name of the object which the clan reveres.

Jay Pickler wrote later in 1890 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 deduce the idea of relationship from this animal. Herbert Spencer 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 honor 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 Avivory, 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 fysen has advanced what seems an irrefutable objection to such a derivation of the totem name from the names of individuals 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 could 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 center 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 acquire 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 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 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 connection 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

including exogamy." End quote. Secret of the totem, page 126. Lange'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 Lange theory is not markedly different from the 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 born, the Giesz, Whigs, and Tories. The assumption that the origin of these names was forgotten in the course of time connects the second part of the Lang theory with the first one just mentioned. Beta, the sociological theories. S. Rynick, 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 an hypergraphy of l'instinct social. The same interpretation seems to permeate the new work of E. Durkheim, the form elementaire of the Riegelis, the System Totemic in Australia, 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 role 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. 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 preferred food

the first of the three theories about the origin of totemism which fraser stated was a psychological one we shall report it elsewhere fraser'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. Spencer and Gillen describe a series of peculiar institutions, customs, and opinions of a group of tribes, the so-called Arunta Nation, and Fraser 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. One, they have the division into

totem clans, but the totem is not hereditary but is individually determined, as will be shown later. Two, 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 Intichima. Four, the Arunas have a peculiar theory about conception and rebirth. They assume that the spirits of the dead who belonged to their totem wait for their rebirth 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 reborn are bound to peculiar stone amulets called churinga, which are found in these places. Two factors seem to have induced Fraser to believe that the oldest form of totemism had been found in the institution of the Arundas. In the first place, the existence of certain myths, which assert that the ancestors of the Arundas 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 had not yet realized that conception was the result of the sexual act might well be considered the most backward and primitive people living today. Fraser, in having recourse to the Intichuma 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. The system was simply an extraordinary piece of cooperative 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 Intichuuma ceremony, it appeared to Fraser 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. Fraser accepted the tradition of the Arunas 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 endeavor to make it being favorably disposed by sparing it. Fraser did not conceal the difficulties of this explanation from himself, nor did he dare to indicate in what way the habit of marrying within the totem,

which the myths of the Arunas proclaimed, was converted into exogamy. Fraser's theory, based on the Intichiyuma, stands and falls with a 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 and Lang. The Arunas 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 Fraser, because they emphasize, in contrast to prevailing institutions of today, that the Arunas are free to eat the totem and to marry within it, easily explain themselves to us as wish fantasies which are projected into the past,

like the myths of the golden age. Gamma The Psychological Theory Fraser's first psychological theories formed before his acquaintance with the observations of Spencer and Gillen were based upon the belief in an outward soul. 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. Fraser 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. The magic cooperative 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 Arunas. As already stated, the Arunas established no connection 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 rebirth 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 seem to prove men's direct identification with their totems on the basis of such a conception theory. 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 role 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 fancy, so natural and seemingly so universal, appeared to be the root of totemism. The main objection to this third theory of Fraser's is the same which has already been advanced against his second sociological theory. The Arunta seemed 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 honor the ancestral spirits. 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. Wilkin.

It establishes a connection between totemism and the migration of souls. Quote, the animal into which, according to general belief, the souls of the dead passed, became a blood relative and ancestor, and was revered as such, end quote. But the belief in the soul's migration to animals is more readily derived from totemism than inversely. Still another theory of

totemism is advanced by the excellent American ethnologists, Franz Boas, Hilltout, 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. Two facts have become decisive for the last of the psychological theories, as stated by Wunt. In the first place that the origin and most widely known totem object was an animal, and secondly that the earliest totem animals correspond to animals which had a soul.

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's soul. Thus with want, totemism is directly conducted. with the belief in souls or with animism. End Part 1 of Chapter 4, read by Mary Schneider. Part 2 of Chapter 4 of Totem and Taboo by Sigmund Freud.

This Liberbox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 4. Infantile Recurrence of Totemism. Part 2 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 guideposts 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 other of the totem theories. some of these explanations of totemism lack all connection 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 those two traits of the most ancient cultures

in his later work fraser has emphatically stood for this latter point of view quote 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 end quote totemism and exogamy one preface twelve 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 has shown in his writing 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 ban, in reference to defloration and menstruation, forbids sexual intercourse

with a woman of the same totem. 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. The general totem taboo, which, for instance, forbids anyone 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. Among the theories which seek to explain exogamy independently of totemism, only a few need be mentioned insofar as they illustrate

different attitudes of the authors toward the problem of incest. McLean 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 investigating whether actual conditions corroborate McLennan's assumptions. We are more interested in the argument that these premises still leave in,

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. 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. If we survey the gradually increasing complication of Australian marriage restrictions, we can hardly help agree with the opinion of Morgan, Fraser, Hewitt, and Baldwin Spencer, that these institutions bear the stamp of deliberate design, as Fraser puts it, and that they are meant to do what they have actually accomplished.

Quote, in no other way does it seem possible to explain in all its details a system at once so complex and so regular." 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 young 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. Westermark advanced the following to explain the dread of incest. Quote, 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 consanguinous, finds a natural expression in custom and law through the abhorrence of sexual intercourse between those closely related. Though Havelac Ellis disputed the instinctive character of this aversion in his 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 erythistic excitement required to produce sexual end quote it seems to me very remarkable that westermark 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 fraser opposes to wester mark's assertion fraser finds it incomprehensible that sexual sensibility to-day is not at all opposed 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 Fraser's go deeper, and I set them down here in unabreviated form because they are in essential agreement with the arguments developed in my chapter two on taboo. quote, 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 favor of it, and 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. of Fraser'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 role 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 attempt to, explanation crowd upon each other. 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 today, 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 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 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 a of biological forces. Still in the end, one is compelled to subscribe to Fraser'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. 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 a historic explanation. This attempt is associated with the 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. quote, 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 guerrilla, for all the natives, quote, 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, Volume 5, 1845 to 47.

The younger males being thus driven out and wandering about would also, when at last successful in finding a partner, prevent too close inbreeding within the limits of the same family." End quote. Atkinson 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 lyne declared himself in agreement with this explanation of exogamy but in the same book he advocates the other theory of dirkan 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 section three 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 an 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. Carl Abraham for the report of a case in which the child itself explained its fear of wasps by saying that the color 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 analyzing 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. Wolf 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-phobic, at the age of four. Quote, when he saw a dog running by on the street, he wept and cried, Dear dog, don't touch me, I will be good, end quote. By being good, he meant not to play violin anymore, to practice onanism.

The same author later sums up as follows, quote, 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 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. Quote, 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 revealed themselves in the analysis

as a displacement of fear from one of the parents to animals. I am not prepared to assert that the widespread mouse and rat phobia has the same mechanism. End quote. I reported the analysis of the phobia of a five-year-old boy, 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 in the street. He expressed his apprehension that the horse would come into the room, and bite him. It proved that this was meant to be the punishment for his wish that the horse

should fall over, die. After assurances that 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 favor 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 learned 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 ambivalent. 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. In another stage of solution of the phobia, he did not scruple to identify his parents with other large animals. 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. Ferensi for a beautiful individual observation of what must be called a case of positive totemism in the child. It is true that with the little Arpad whom Ferensi reports, the totemic interests do not awaken in direct connection with the edifice complex, but on the basis of a narcissistic 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 edipus as well as in the castration complex, the father plays the same role of feared opponent to the infantile sexual interests. Castration and its substitute through blinding is the punishment he threatened.

When Little Arpad 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. in, 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 behavior towards his totem animal was subtly ambivalent, expressing itself in immoderate hating and loving.

He loved best to play killing chickens. Quote, the slaughtering of poultry was quite a festival for him. He could dance around the animal's body for hours at a time. in a state of intense excitement." But then he kissed and stroked the slaughtered animal and cleaned and caressed the chicken effigies, which he himself had ill-used. Arpad 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.

Quote, now I am small, now I am a chicken. When I get bigger, I will be a fat, fow when i am bigger still i will be a cock end quote 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 oninistic preoccupation with his penis according to ferensi there was no doubt as to the source of his interest in the activities of the children chicken-yard, quote, the continual sexual activity between cock and hen, the laying of eggs and the creeping out of the young brood, end quote, 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 neighbor, quote, 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, and the ambivalent, effective 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 noticed 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 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 reawakening 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 Arpad 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. Section 4.

W. Robertson Smith, who died in 1894, was a physicist, philologist, Bible critic, and archaeologist, and many cited as well as keen and freethinking man, expressed the assumption in his work on the religion of the Semites, 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 five hundred 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 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 important 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 right of old religions. It plays the same role 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, Catexocaine, Sacrificium, Hierorgia, 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 favorable. 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, quote, an act of social fellowship between the deity and his worshippers, end quote. Things to eat and drink were brought as sacrifice. Man offered.

to his God the same things on which he himself lived, flesh, cereals, fruits, wine, and oil. Only in regard to the sacrificial flesh did there exist restrictions and exceptions. The God partakes to 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 corresponded 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 yewerex, 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 share 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 someone was at the same time a symbol and a confirmation of,

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 today 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 I 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 the same substance as he. No meal was therefore partaken with anyone 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 family is known to us regularly comprised persons who belong 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 today 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, 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 the 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, emphasize 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 in the rise of cattle breeding seems everywhere to have put an end to the pure and rigorous totemism of earlier times. 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 right 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 bophonia 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 times, 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. 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 instill 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. St. Nylis 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 to beaum. the bare sacrifices of the bear tribe of the owata-uaks in america and the bear festival of the anews in japan fraser has given a full account of these and similar cases in the two divisions of his great work that have last appeared 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 preserve The Zuni Indians in New Mexico do the same thing with their holy turtle. In the Intichuma ceremonies of Central Australian tribes, a trait has been observed which fits it excellently with the assumptions of Robertson Smith. Every tribe that practices 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 Fraser, the best example of the sacramental consumption of the otherwise forbidden totem is to be found among the Beanie in West Africa in connection with the burial ceremony of this tribe. But we also 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. End of Part 2 of Chapter 4 Read by Mary Schneider Part 3 of Chapter 4 of Totem and Taboo by Sigmund Freud

This Librevox recording is in the public domain Chapter 4 Infantile Recurrence of Totemism Part 3 Section 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. But after the morning, 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 a permitted or rather a prescribed excess, a solemn violation of a prohibition. People do not commit the excesses, which at all time, 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 usual to be a substitute for the father and this really explains the contradiction that it is usual to a

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 today still marks the father complex in our children, and so often continues into adult life, also extended to the father's 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 hoard does not, of course, allow for the beginnings 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 today 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. Can the one have resulted from the other, and how is this possible? By basing our argument upon the celebration of the totem, we are in a position to give an answer. One day the expelled brothers joined forces, slew and ate the father, and thus put an end to the father hoard.

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 commemoration of this memorable criminal act with which so many things began, social organization, moral restrictions, and religion. 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 toward 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. 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 father's 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's substitute the totem was not allowed and renounced the free 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 sun, 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. 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 anyone stronger than all the rest, who could have successfully assumed the role 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 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 homosexual 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 Bachhoven, 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 a 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 fantasy could expect from him, protection, care, and forbearance, in return for which the pledge was given to honor 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 connection some features were formed which henceforth determined the character of ever religion the totem religion had issued from the sense of guilt of the sons as an attempt to paliate this feeling and to conciliate the injured father through subsequent obedience all later religions proved 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 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 unfavorable 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, on which the restrictions of subsequent obedience are suspended, and makes it a duty to repeat the crime of parasite through the sacrifice of the totem animal, as often as the benefits

of this deed, namely the appropriation of the father's properties, threatened 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 fratricist, 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 hoard 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. Morse, 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 accordance with older conceptions, bids us argue for an intimate connection between totemism and exogamy, as well as for their simultaneous origin. section six 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 a special distinctness the motive of the totem sacrifice and the relation of the son to the father robertson smith has shown us that the old totem feet

returns in the original form of sacrifice. The meaning of the right 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 affected, is affected 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 the same. a special emphasis that God is in every case modeled after the Father and that our personal relation to God is dependent upon our relation to our physical father, fluctuating and changing

with Him, and that God at bottom is nothing but an exalted father. Here also is 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 and 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 animal sacrifice. 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. One, usually one animal is sacred to every God, sometimes even several animals. Two, in certain especially holy sacrifices, the so-called mystical sacrifices, the very animal which had been sanctified through the God, was sacrificed to him. 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's 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. 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 today seems to us an outrageous presumption,

was still by no means offensive to the conceptions of classical antiquity. 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 reconstructive, 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 this 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's 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 two-fold presence of the father corresponds to the two-successes. 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 favor 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's substitute has been abandoned in favor of the higher conception of God. The superficial allegorical translation of the scene here roughly corresponds with its psychoanalytic interpretation by saying that the God is represented as overcoming the animal part of his nature. But it would be erroneous to believe that in this, period of renewed patriarchal authority the hostile impulses which belonged 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 fraser 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 role on specified holidays the yearly sacrifice self-sacrifice is a variant of a god seems to have been an important feature of the 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's 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 form of sacrifice. It acknowledges with unsurpassable candor 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 re-transformed 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's sacrifice. 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. 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 endeavor 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 sun and the patriarchal family increased he was emboldened to give new expression to his incestuous libido which found symbolic satisfaction in laboring over mother earth there came into existence figures of gods like attis adonis tamuz and others spirits of vegetation as well as youthful divinities who enjoyed the favors 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 Kaibiel, died of castration. The lamentation for these gods and the joy of 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 religions 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 to the father by him 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. men were the descendants of Titans who had killed and dismembered the young Dionysus Zagraeus. The weight of this crime oppressed them. A fragment of an axamander 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. 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. Nylos,

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 offense 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.

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 anthropic 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 Fraser's dictum that the Christian Communion has absorbed within itself a sacrament which is doubtless far older than Christian. Christianity. Section 7. A process like the removal of the primal father by the band of brothers must have left in eradicable traces in the history of mankind, and must have expressed itself the more frequently in numerous substituted formations the less it itself was to be remembered. 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. Reineck in his suggestive treatment of the death of Orpheus.

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 offshoots 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 today 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 dionysus 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 an 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 where psychoanalytic investigation of the individual today still reveals the strongest expression of it 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 anyone 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 of 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, needs 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. 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 neurotic's 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 overvaluation of their psychic acts as a partial manifestation of their narcissistic organization. According to this, the mere impulses of hostility towards the father and the existence of the wish fantasy 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 connection, 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 these 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 the compulsion neurotics, who today 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 forerunner and a premise of the later 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 end of part three of chapter four end of chapter four end of totem and taboo by sigman freud