TOTEM AND TABOO: RESEMBLANCES BETWEEN THE PSYCHIC LIVES OF

What is the mind? What is the mind of a human? What is the mind of the one who investigates the human? Can the human mind understand itself? Can a human mind understand the mind of an other? This is psychology.

Re: TOTEM AND TABOO: RESEMBLANCES BETWEEN THE PSYCHIC LIVES

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NOTES:

[1] Jung: Wandlungen and Symbole der Libido (Transformations and Symbols of the Libido) translated by Dr. Beatrice Hinkle under the title The Psychology of the Unconscious, andPrinciples of Psychoanalysis, Nervous and Mental Diseases.

[2] The History of the Psychoanalytic Movement, translated by A. A. Brill.

[3] Selected Papers on Hysteria and other Psychoneuroses, translated by A. A. Brill.

[4] The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, translated by A. A. Brill.

[5] Translated by A. A. Brill.

[6] Wit and Its Relations to the Unconscious, translated by A. A. Brill.

[7] Freud: Leonardo Da Vinci, translated by A. A. Brill.

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

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

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

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

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

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

[11] Frazer, l.c., p. 54.

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

[13] Second edition, 1902.

[14] The Native Tribes of Central Australia (London, 1899).

[15] The number of totems is arbitrarily chosen.

[16] Article Totemism in Encyclopedia Britannica, eleventh edition, 1911 (A. Lang).

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

[18] R. H. Codrington, The Melanesians, also Frazer Totemism and Exogamy, Vol. I, p. 77.

[19] Frazer, l.c., II, p. 124, according to Kleintischen: The Inhabitants of the Coast of the Gazelle Peninsula.

[20] Frazer, l.c., II, p. 131, according to P. G. Peckel in Anthropes, 1908.

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

[22] Frazer, l.c., II. p. 189.

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

[24] Frazer, l.c., II, p. 424.

[25] Frazer, l.c., II, p. 76.

[26] Frazer, l.c., II, p. 113, according to C. Ribbe: Two Years among the Cannibals of the Solomon Islands, 1905.

[27] Frazer, l.c., II, p. 385.

[28] Frazer, l.c., II, p. 461.

[29] v. Crawley: The Mystic Rose (London, 1902), p. 405.

[30] Crawley, l.c., p. 407.

[31] Crawley, l.c., p. 401, according to Leslie: Among the Zulus and Amatongas, 1875.

[32] Voelkerpsychologie, II. Band: Mythus und Religion, 1906, II, p. 308.

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

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

[35] Voelkerpsychologie, Vol. II: Religion und Mythus, p. 300.

[36] l.c., p. 237.

[37] Comp. Chapter I.

[38] l.c., p. 307.

[39] l.c., p. 313.

[40] Frazer, The Golden Bough, II: Taboo and the Perils of the Soul, 1911, p. 136.

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

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

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

[44] See Chapter IV; Totemism, etc.

[45] Third Edition, Part II: Taboo and the Perils of the Soul, 1911.

[46] Frazer, l.c., p. 166.

[47] Paulitschke, Ethnography of North-east Africa.

[48] Frazer, Adonis, Attis, Osiris, p. 248, 1907. According to Hugh Low, Sarawak (London, 1848).

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

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

[51] Frazer, Taboo, p. 166, according to S. Mueller, Reisen en Onderzoekingen in den Indischen Archipel. (Amsterdam, 1857).

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

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

[54] Frazer, The Magic Art, I, p. 368.

[55] Old New Zealand, by a Pakeha Maori (London, 1884), see Frazer, Taboo, p. 135.

[56] W. Brown, New Zealand and Its Aborigines (London, 1845) Frazer, l.c.

[57] Frazer, l.c.

[58] Frazer, Taboo. The Burden of Royalty, p. 7.

[59] l.c., p. 7.

[60] Kaempfer, History of Japan, see in Frazer, l.c., p. 3.

[61] Bastian, The German Expedition to the Coast of Loango (Jena 1874), cited by Frazer, l.c., p. 5.

[62] Frazer, l.c., p. 13.

[63] Frazer, l.c., p. 11.

[64] A. Bastian, The German Expedition on the Coast of Lonago, cited by Frazer, l.c., p. 18.

[65] l.c., p. 18. According to Zwefel et Monstier, Voyage aux Sources du Niger, 1880.

[66] Frazer, The Magic Art and the Evolution of Kings, 2 vols., 1911 (The Golden Bough).

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

[68] W. Mariner, The Natives of the Tonga Islands, 1818; see Frazer, l.c., p. 140.

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

[70] Frazer, l.c., p. 353.

[71] Frazer, l.c., p. 352, etc.

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

[73] Frazer, l.c., p. 360.

[74] Stekel, Abraham.

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

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

[77] On the Nikobar Islands, Frazer, l.c., p. 382.

[78] Wundt, Religion and Myth, Vol. II, p. 49.

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

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

[81] l.c., p. 426.

[82] Cf. Chap. III.

[83] Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams.

[84] Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams.

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

[86] Myth and Religion, p. 129.

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

[88] Compare my article on Abel’s Gegensinn der Urworte in the Jahrbuch für Psychoanalytische und Psychopathologische Forschungen, Bd. II, 1910.

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

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

[91] E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture, Vol. I, p. 425, fourth ed., 1903. W. Wundt, Myth and Religion, Vol. II, p. 173, 1906.

[92] Wundt l.c., Chapter IV: Die Seelenvorstellungen.

[93] Compare, besides Wundt and H. Spencer and the instructive article in the Encyclopedia Britannica, 1911 (Animism, Mythology, and so forth).

[94] l.c., p. 154.

[95] See Tylor, Primitive Culture, Vol. I, p. 477.

[96] Cultes, Mythes et Religions, T. II: Introduction, p. XV, 1909.

[97] Année Sociologique, Seventh Vol, 1904.

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

[99] The Magic Art, II. p. 67.

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

[101] The Magic Art, II, p. 98.

[102] An echo of this is to be found in the Oedipus Rex of Sophocles.

[103] The Magic Art, p. 120.

[104] l.c., p. 122.

[105] See preceding chapter, p. 92.

[106] Frazer, The Magic Art, pp. 201-3.

[107] The Magic Art, p. 420.

[108] Compare the article Magic (N. T. W.), in the Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th Ed.

[109] l.c., p. 54.

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

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

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

[112] Compare Chapter II.

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

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

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

[116] Monograph Series, 1916.

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

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

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

[120] Recognized through so-called endopsychic perceptions.

[121] R. R. Marett, Pre-animistic Religion, Folklore, Vol. XI, No. 2, 1900.—Comp. Wundt, Myth and Religion, Vol. II, p. 171.

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

[123] Schreber, Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken, 1903.—Freud, Psychoanalytic Observations concerning an autobiographically described case of Paranoia, Jahrbuch für Psychoanalyt. Forsch. Vol. III, 1911.

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

[125] Principles of Sociology, Vol. I.

[126] l.c., p. 179.

[127] Compare my short paper: A Note on the Unconscious in Psychoanalysis, in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, Part LXVI, Vol. XXVI, 1912.

[128] p. 26.

[129] Frazer, Taboo and the Perils of the Soul, p. 158

[130] Frazer, l.c., p. 200.

[131] Frazer, l.c., p. 237.

[132] Freud, Psychopathology of Everyday Life, p. 215, trans. by A. A. Brill.

[133] p. 139.

[134] Revue Scientifique, October, 1900, reprinted in the four volume work of the author, Cultes, Mythes et Religions, 1908, Tome I, p. 17.

[135] 1910.

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

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

[137] Totemism (Edinburgh, 1887), reprinted in the first volume of his great study, Totemism and Exogamy.

[138] Compare the chapter on Taboo.

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

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

[141] l.c., p. 35.—See the discussion of sacrifice further on.

[142] See Chapter I.

[143] p. 116.

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

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

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

[147] At first probably only animals.

[148] The Worship of Animals and Plants (Fortnightly Review, 1869-1870). Primitive Marriage, 1865; both works reprinted in Studies in Ancient History, 1876; second edition, 1886.

[149] The Secret of the Totem, 1905, p. 34.

[150] Ibid.

[151] Ibid.

[152] According to Andrew Lang.

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

[154] The Origin of Animal Worship (Fortnightly Review, 1870). Principles of Psychology, Vol. I, §§ 169 to 176.

[155] Kamilaroi and Kurmai, p. 165, 1880 (Lang, Secret of the Totem, etc.).

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

[157] l.c., Vol. I, p. 41.

[158] Address to the Anthropological Section, British Association, Belfast, 1902. According to Frazer, l.c., Vol. IV, p. 50.

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

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

[161] l.c., p. 120.

[162] L’année Sociologique, Vol. I, V, VIII, and elsewhere. See especially the chapter, Sur le Totémisme, Vol. V, 1901.

[163] Social Origins and the Secret of the Totem.

[164] The Golden Bough, II, p. 332.

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

[166] Totemism and Exogamy, Vol. II, p. 89, and IV, p. 59.

[167] Totemism and Exogamy, Vol. IV, p. 63.

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

[169] Frazer, Totemism and Exogamy, Vol. IV, p. 45.

[170] Frazer, l.c., p. 48.

[171] Wundt, Elemente der Völker-Psychologie, p. 190.

[172] L’année Sociologique, 1898-1904.

[173] See Frazer’s Criticism of Durkheim, Totemism and Exogamy, p. 101.

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

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

[176] Primitive Marriage, 1865.

[177] Frazer, l.c., p. 73 to 92.

[178] Compare Chapter I.

[179] Morgan, Ancient Society, 1877.—Frazer, Totemism and Exogamy, Vol. IV, p. 105.

[180] Frazer, l.c., p. 106.

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

[182] l.c., p. 97.

[183] Compare Durkheim, La Prohibition de l’Inceste (L’année Sociologique, I, 1896-7).

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

[185] See Chapter I.

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

[187] The Origin of Man, Vol. II, Chap. 20, pp. 603-4.

[188] Primal Law, London, 1903 (with Andrew Lang, Social Origins).

[189] Secret of the Totem, pp. 114, 143.

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

[A] M. Wulff, Contributions to Infantile Sexuality, Zentralbl. f. Psychoanalyze, 1912, II, No. I, p. 15.

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

[192] l.c., p. 41.

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

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

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

[196] Ferenczi, l.c., p. 209.

[197] Ferenczi, l.c., p. 212.

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

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

[200] The Religion of the Semites, Second Edition, London, 1907.

[201] The Religion of the Semites, Second Edition, London, 1907.

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

[203] l.c., p. 313.

[204] The Golden Bough, Part V; Spirits of the Corn and of the Wild, 1912, in the chapters: “Eating the God and Killing the Divine Animal.”

[205] Frazer, Totem and Exogamy, Vol. II, p. 590.

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

[207] Religion of the Semites, 2nd Edition, 1907, p. 412.

[208] For a recent contribution compare The Whole House of the Chilkat, by G. T. Emmons (American Museum Journal, Vol. XVI, No. 7.) [Translator].

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[214] Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, Second Edition, 1907.

[215] See above, p. 128.

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

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

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

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

[220] Reinach, Cultes, Mythes, et Religions, II, p. 75.

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

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

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

[224] Ariel in The Tempest:

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

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

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

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

[228] Compare Chapter II.

[229] See Chapter III.

Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:

new pyschological technique=> new psychological technique {pg vi}
the pyschoanalysts=> the psychoanalysts {pg vi}
subjetced to analysis=> subjected to analysis {pg x}
profound anaylsis=> profound analysis {pg x}
Similiar customs=> Similar customs {pg 17}
made us familar=> made us familiar {pg 48}
expiate and similiar=> expiate and similar {pg 51}
anxious excesss=> anxious excess {pg 84}
originally the world taboo=> originally the world taboo {pg 112}
susperstitious motivation=> susperstitious motivation {pg 162}
exercée par la volunté=> exercée par la volonté {pg 151}
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