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TOTEM AND TABOO

RESEMBLANCES BETWEEN THE PSYCHIC LIVES OF SAVAGES AND NEUROTICS

BY PROFESSOR DR. SIGMUND FREUD, LL.D.

Authorized English Translation with Introduction by

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

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

NEW YORK

MOFFAT, YARD AND COMPANY

1918

Copyright, 1918, by MOFFAT. YARD AND COMPANY

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 repre- sent my first efforts to apj)ly view-points and re- sults of psychoanalysis to unexplained problems of racial psychology. In method this book con- trasts with that of W. Wundt and the works of the Zurich Psychoanalytic School. The former tries to accomplish the same object through as- sumptions 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 tlie shortcomings in these essays. I shall not touch upon those which are characteristic of first efforts at investigation. The others, however, demand a word of explana-

iJung: Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (Transformations and Symbols of the Libido) translated by Dr. Beatrice Hinkle under the title "The Psychology of the Unconscious," Moffat, Yard & Co., and "Principles of Psychoanalysis, Nervous and Men- tal Diseases," Monograph Series.

iii

iv PREFACE

tion. The four essays which are here collected will be of interest to a wide circle of educated peo- ple, 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, how- ever, 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 psycho- analysts acquire through them an adequate com- mand over the material to be elaborated. Both groups will have to content themselves with what- ever attention they can stimulate here and there and with the hope that frequent meetings be- tween them will not remain unproductive for sci- ence.

The two principle themes, totem and taboo, which gave the name to this small book are not treated alike here. The problem of taboo is pre- sented more exhaustively, and the effort to solve it is approached with perfect confidence. The investigation of totemism may be modestly ex- pressed 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

PREFACE V

that taboo still exists in our midst. To be sure, it is negatively conceived and directed to different contents, but according to its psychological na- ture, it is still nothing else than Kant's "Cate- gorical Imperative," which tends to act compul- sively and rejects all conscious motivations. On the other hand, totemism is a religio-social insti- tution 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 infan- tile 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 con- clusions, there is no reason for rejecting the pos- sibility 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 psycho- analysis ^ one finds that it had its inception in the study of morbid mental states. Beginning with the observation of hysteria and the other neu- roses ^ 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 mal- adjustments 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 cer- tain 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 psy-

i"The History of the Psychoanalytic Movement," translated by A. A. Brill. Nervous and Mental Disease Monograph Series.

2 "Selected Papers on Hysteria and Other Psychoneuroses," translated by A. A. Brill. Monograph Series,

viii TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION

chic structures which one constantly encounters in normal persons in the form of mistakes in talk- ing, reading, writing, forgetting,^ dreams and wit. The dream, always highly valued by the populace, and as much despised by the edu- cated classes, has a definite structure and mean- ing 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 repre- sent efforts at adjustment to one's environment. The slip of the tongue shows that on account of unconscious inhibitions the individual concerned is unable to express his true thoughts ; the dream is a distorted or plain expression of those wishes which are prohibited in the waking states, and the witticism, owing to its veiled or indirect way of expression, enables the individual to obtain pleasure from forbidden sources. But whereas

3 "The Psychopathology of Everyday Life," translated by A. A. Brill. T. Fisher Unwin, London, and the Macmillan Co., N. Y.

4 Translated by A. A. Brill, George AUen, and Unwin, London, and the Macmillan Co., N. Y.

6 "Wit and Its Relations to the Unconscious," translated by A. A. BriU. Moffat, Yard and Co., N. Y.

TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION ix

dreams, witticisms, and faulty actions give evi- dences 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 ad- just one's primitive feelings to the demands of civilization. In spite of all later development the individual retains all his infantile psychic struc- tures. 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 mor- bid productions. The unconscious mental activ- ity which is made up of repressed infantile mate- rial forever strives to express itself. Whenever the individual finds it impossible to dominate the difficulties of the world of reality there is a re- gression 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 im- pressions; psychoanalysis thus confirms the old saying: The child is father to the man.

X TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION

It is at this point in the development of psycho- analysis that the paths gradually broadened until they finally culminated in this work. There were many indications that the childhood of the individual showed a marked resemblance to the primitive history or the childhood of races. The knowledge gained from dream analysis and phantasies,^ when applied to the productions of racial phantasies, like myths and fairy tales, seemed to indicate that the fii'st impulse to form myths was due to the same emotional strivings which produced dreams, fancies and symptoms.^ Further study in this direction has thrown much light on our gi-eat 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 j)leasure in acknowledging my indebtedness to Mr. Alfred B. Kuttner for the invaluable assistance he rendered in the transla- tion of this work.

A. A. Brill.

6 Freud : "Leonardo Da Vinci," translated by A. A. Brill. Moffat, Yard and Co., X. Y.

7 Cf. the works of Abraham, Spielrein, Jung, and Rank.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I The Savage's Dread of Incest .... 1

II Taboo and the x\mbivai.ence of Emotions '30

III Animism, Magic and the Omnipotence of

Thought 124

IV The Infantile Recurrence of Totemism . 165

TOTEM AND TABOO

CHAPTER I

THE savage's dread OF INCEST

Primitive man is known to us by the stages of development through which he has passed: that is, through the inanimate monuments and imple- ments which he has left behind for us, through our knowledge of his art, his religion and his at- titude towards life, which we have received either directly or through the medium of legends, myths and f aiiy-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 representa- tives of earlier man. We can thus judge the so-called savage and semi-savage races; their psychic hfe assumes a peculiar interest for us, for we can recognize in their psychic life a well-pre- served, early stage of our own development.

2 TOTEM AND TABOO

If this assumption is correct, a comparison of the "Psychology of Primitive Races" as taught by folklore, with the psycholog}^ 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 neigh- bors, the INIelanesian, Polynesian and IMalayan races. The}^ 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 exclu- sively 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

THE SAVAGE'S DREAD OF INCEST S

living in the interior who have to contend with the greatest vicissitudes of Hf e owing to a scarcity of water, seem in every way more primitive than those who Hve 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 rigor in guarding against incestuous sexual relations. In fact their whole social organization seems to serve this object or to have been brought into re- lation with its attainment.

Among the Austrahans the system of Totem- ism takes the place of all religious and social in- stitutions. Australian tribes are divided into smaller sejyts 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 danger- ous and feared; more rarely the totem is a plant or a force of nature (rain, water), which stands in a peculiar relation to the whole clan. The totem is first of all the tribal ancestor of the clan, as well as its tutelary spirit and protector; it sends oracles and, though otherwise dangerous, the totem knows and spares its children. The members of a totem are therefore under a sacred

4 TOTEM AND TABOO

obligation not to kill (destroy) their totem, to abstain from eating its meat or from any other enjoyment of it. Any violation of these prohibi- tions is automatically pmiished. 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 ma- ternal or the paternal line; (maternal transmis- sion probably always preceded and was only later supplanted by the paternal) . The attachment to a totem is the foundation of all the social obliga- tions of an Australian : it extends on the one hand beyond the tribal relationship, and on the other hand it supersedes consanguinous relationship.^

The totem is not limited to district or to lo- cality; the members of a totem may live sepa- rated from one another and on friendly terms with adherents of other totems.^

1 Frazer, "Totemism and Exogamy," Vol. I, p. 53. "The totem bond is stronger than the bond of blood or family in the modern sense."

2 This very brief extract of the totemic system cannot be left without some elucidation and without discussing its limitations. The name Totem or Totam was first learned from the North American Indians by the Englishman, J. Long, in 1791. The subject has gradually acquired great scientific interest and has called forth a copious literature. I refer especially to "Totemism and Exogamy" by J. G. Frazer, 4 vols., 1910, and the books

THE SAVAGE'S DREAD OF INCEST 5

And now, finally, we must consider that pe- culiarity of the totemic system which attracts the interest of the psychoanalyst. Almost every- where the totem prevails there also exists the

and articles of Andrew Lang ("The Secret of Totem," 1905). The credit for having recognized the significance of totemisra for the ancient history of man belongs to the Scotchman, J. Ferguson MacLennan {Fortnightly Review, 1869-70). Exterior to Aus- tralia, 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 'lo interpret lead to the conclusion that totemisra also once existed among the aboriginal Aryan and Semitic races of Europe, so that many in- vestigators are inclined to recognize in totemisra 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 "Volkerpsychologie" (Vol. II, ]Mythus und Religion).

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

Not only is the theory of toteraism controversial, but the very facts concerning it are hardly to be expressed in such general statements as were attempted above. There is hardly an asser- tion to which one would not have to add exceptions and contra- dictions. But it must not be forgotten that even the most ])rim- itive and conservative races are, in a certain sense, old, and have a long period behind them during which whatsoever was aborig- inal with them has undergone much development and distortion. Thus among those races who still evince it, we find totemisra 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 raay exist in fixed forras but far re- moved 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 v/hat is to be considered as a secondary distortion of it.

6 TOTEM AND TABOO

law that the members of the same totem are not allowed to enter into sexual relations with each other; that is, that they cannot mari^y each other. This represents the exogamy which is associated with the totem.

This sternly maintained prohibition is very re- markable. 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 at- tributes; that is, we do not understand how it happened to enter the system of totemism. We are therefore not astonished if some investigators simply assume that at first exogamy — both as to its origin and to its meaning — had nothing to do with totemism, but that it was added to it at some time without any deeper association, when marriage restrictions proved necessary. How- ever that may be, the association of totemism and exogamy exists, and proves to be very strong.

Let us elucidate the meaning of this prohibi- tion 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 prohibi- tions of the totem (e.g., not to kill the totem animal), but is most energetically avenged by the whole tribe as if it were a question of warding off a danger that threatens the community as a whole or a guilt that weighs upon all. A few

THE SAVAGE'S DREAD OF INCEST 7

sentences from Frazer's book^ will show how seriously such trespasses are treated by these savages who, according to our standard, are otherwise very immoral.

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

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

3 Frazer, 1. c. p. 54.

8 TOTEM AND TABOO

c) As the totem is hereditary and is not changed by marriage, the results of the prohibi- tion, 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 chil- dren, both boys and girls, are all Emu. Accord- ing to the totem law incestuous relations with his mother and his sister, who are Emu like himself, are therefore made impossible for a son of this marriage.*

d) But we need only a reminder to realize that the exogamy connected with the totem ac- complishes more; that is, aims at more than the prevention of incest with the mother or the sisters. It also makes it impossible for the man to have sexual union with all the women of his own group, with a number of females, therefore, who are not consanguinousty related to him, by treating all these women like blood relations. The psycho- logical justification for this extraordinary restric- tion, which far exceeds anything comparable to

4 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 daugh- ters 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.

THE SAVAGE'S DREAD OF INCEST 9

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 seri- ously. Everybody descended from the same totem is consanguinous ; that is, of one family; and in this family the most distant grades of re- lationship 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 re- mains a riddle, the solution of which is perhaps bound up with the explanation of the totem it- self. Of course it must be remembered that with a certain freedom of sexual intercourse, extend- ing beyond the limitations of matrimony, the blood relationship, and with it also the prevention of incest, becomes so uncertain that we cannot dispense with some other basis for the prohibition. It is therefore not superfluous to note that the customs of Australians recognize social condi- tions and festive occasions at which the exclusive

10 TOTEM AND TABOO

conjugal right of a man to a woman is violated. The linguistic custom of these tribes, as well as of most totem races, reveals a peculiarity which undoubtedly is pertinent in this connection. For the designations of relationship of which they make use do not take into consideration the rela- tion between two individuals, but between an individual and his group ; they belong, according to the expression of L. H. Morgan, to the "class- ifying" 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 "sis- ters" 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 ap- proach 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

THE SAVAGE'S DREAD OF INCEST 11

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 mar- riage institutions which the Rev. L. Fison has called "group marriage," characterized by a num- ber of men exercising conjugal rights over a number of women. The children of this group marriage would then rightly look upon each other as brothers and sisters although not born of the same mother, and would take all the men of the group for their fathers.

Although a number of authors, as, for instance, B. Westermarck in his "History of Human Mar- riage," ^ 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 rela- tionship names must be considered as survivals from the period of group marriages. And, ac- cording to Spencer and Gillen,*'' a certain form of group marriage can be established as still exist- ing to-day among the tribes of the Urabunna and the Dieri. Group marriage therefore pre- ceded individual marriage among these races

5 Second edition, 1902.

6 "The Native Tribes of Central Australia," London, 1899.

12 TOTEM AND TABOO

and did not disappear without leaving distinct traces in language and custom.

But if we replace individual marriage, we can then grasp the apparent excess of cases of incest shunning which we have met among these same races. The totem exogamy, or prohibition of sexual intercourse between members of the same clan, seemed the most appropriate means for the prevention of group incest ; and this totem exog- amy 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 bewilder- ing complication. For there are only few tribes in Australia w^hich show no other prohibition be- sides the totem barrier. ]\Iost of them are so organized that they fall into two divisions which have been called marriage classes, or phratries. Each of these marriage groups is exogamous and includes a majority of totem groups. Usually each marriage group is again divided into two sub-classes (sub-phratries) , and the whole tribe is therefore divided into four classes; the sub- classes thus standing between the phratries and the totem gi^oups.

The typical and often very intricate scheme

THE SAVAGE'S DREAD OF INCEST

13

of organization of an Australian tribe therefore looks as follows :

SUBPHRATRIES

Totem

a6Y 6 t y] 123 4-56

The twelve totem groups are brought under four subclasses and two main classes. All the divisions are exogamous/ The subclass c forms an exogamous unit with e, and the subclass d with f . The success or the tendency of these ar- rangements is quite obvious ; they serve as a fur- ther restriction on the marriage choice and on sexual freedom. If there were only these twelve totem groups — assuming the same number of people in each group — every member of a group would have ■^/i2 of all the women of the tribe to choose from. The existence of the two phratries reduces this number to %2 or Vz; a man of the totem a can only marry a woman from the groups 1 to 6. With the introduction of the two sub- classes the selection sinks to /12 or /4; a man of

7 The number of totems is arbitrarily chosen.

14 TOTEM AND TABOO

the totem « must limit his marriage choice to the woman of the totems 4, 5, 6.

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

In the further development of the classifica- tion of the marriage system there seems to be a tendency to go beyond the prevention of natural and group incest, and to prohibit marriage be- tween more distant group relations, in a manner similar to the Catholic church, which extended

THE SAVAGE'S DREAD OF INCEST 15

the marriage prohibitions always in force for brother 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 dis- cussion 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 these savages are even more sensitive to incest than we, perhaps because they are more subject to temptations than we are, and hence require more extensive protection against it.

But the incest dread of these races does not content itself with the creation of the institutions described, which, in the main, seem to be directed against group incest. We must add a series of "customs" which watch over the individual be- havior 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

8 Article "Totemism" in Encyclopedia Britannica, eleventh edi- tion, 1911 (A. Lang).

9 Storfer has recently drawn special attention to this point in his monograph: "Parricide as a Special Case. Papers on Ap- plied Psychic Investigation," No. 12, Vienna, 1911.

16 TOTEM AND TABOO

the Australian totem races. But here again I must ask the reader to be content with a frag- mentary excerpt from the abundant material.

Such restrictive prohibitions are directed in ]\Ielanesia against the relations of boys with their mothers and sisters. Thus, for instance, on Lepers Island, one of the Xew Hebrides, the boy leaves his maternal home at a fixed age and moves to the "clubhouse," where he then regu- larly 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 b}^ chance in the open, she must run away or turn aside and conceal herself. If the boy recognizes certain footprints in the sand as his sister's he is not to follow them, nor is she to follow his. He will not even mention her name and will guard against using any current word if it forms part of her name. This avoidance, which begins with the ceremony of puberty, is strictly observed for life. The reserve between mother and son increases with age and generally is more obligatory on the mother's side. If she brings him something to eat she does not give it to him herself but puts it down before him, nor does she address him in the familiar manner of mother and son, but uses the formal address. Similar customs obtain in New

THE SAVAGE'S DREAD OF INCEST 17

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 Xew 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 cir- cumlocution/^

In Xew INIecklenburg 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 consanguinous sisters but group sisters as well. To hear that these savages hold sacred orgies in M^hich persons of just these forbidden degrees of kinship seek sexual union w^ould seem still more peculiar to us, if we did not prefer to make use of this contradiction to explain the prohibi- tion instead of being astonished at it.^^

10 R. H. Codrington, "The Melanesians," also Frazer: "Totemism and Exogamy," Vol. I, p. 77,

11 Frazer, 1. c. II, p. 124, according to Kleintischen : The In- habitants of the Coast of the Gazelle Peninsula.

12 Frazer, 1. c. II, p. 131, according to P. G. Peckel in An- thropes, 1908.

13 Fraser, 1. c. II, p. 147, according to the Rev. L. Fison.

18 TOTEM AND TABOO

Among the Battas of Sumatra these laws of avoidance affect all near relationships. For in- stance, it would be most offensive for a Battan to accompany his own sister to an evening party. A brother will feel most uncomfortable in the company of his sister even when other persons are also j^resent. 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 mis- sionary 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 ex- treme intimacy, and as they expect all kinds of punishments and evil consequences from consanguinous intercourse they do quite right to avoid all temptations by means of such pro- hibitions.^"^

Among the Barongos in Delagoa Bay, in Africa, the most rigorous precautions are di- rected, 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

.14 Frazer, 1. c. II, p. 189.

THE SAVAGE'S DREAD OF INCEST 19

her hut, and greets her only with a trembhng voice.^^

Among the Akamba (or Wakamba) in British East Africa, a law of avoidance is in force which one would have expected to encounter more fre- quently. 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 en- gagement. But after her marriage no further obstacle is put in the way of her 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 relationsr between a man and his mother-in-law. It is quite general in Australia, but it is also in force among the JNIelanesian, Polynesian and Negi^o races of Africa as far as the traces of totemism and group relationship reach, and prob- ably 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 ob- jects of avoidance.

15 Frazer, 1. c. II, p. 388, accbrding to Junod.

16 Frazer, 1. c. II, p. 424.

20 TOTEM AND TABOO

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

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

In Vanna Lava (Port Patterson) a man will not even walk behind his mother-in-law along the beach until the rising tide has washed away the trace of her foot-steps. 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 Kaffii^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

17 Frazer, 1. c. II, p. 76.

isFrazer, 1. c. II, p. 113, according to C. Ribbe: "Two Years among the Cannibals of the Solomon Islands," 1905.

THE SAVAGE'S DREAD OF INCEST 21

isj. 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 ceremon- ial requirements. Conmiunication between them must either be made through a third person or else they may shout at each other at a consider- able distance if they have some barrier between them as, for instance, the enclosure of a kraal. 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 house and is not visible to him. IMoreover, 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 in- cest, different interpretations have been given for those prohibitions which concern the relationship with the mother-in-law. It was quite incompre- hensible why all these races should manifest such great fear of temptation on the part of the man

19 Frazer, I. c. II, p. 385.

20 Frazer, 1. c. II, p. 461.

22 TOTEM AND TABOO

for an elderly woman, old enough to be his mother.^^

The same objection was also raised against the conception of Fison who called attention to the fact that certain marriage class systems show a gap in that they make marriage between a man and his mother-in-law theoretically not impossi- ble 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." "As long as the capture of women actually took place, the in- dignation of the parents was probably serious enough. When nothing but symbols of this form of marriage survived, the indignation of the parents was also symbolized and this custom continued after its origin had been forgotten." Crawley has found it easy to show how little this tentative explanation agrees with the details of actual observation.

E. B. Tylor thinks that the treatment of the son-in-law on the part of the mother-in-law is nothing more than a form of "cutting" on the part of the woman's family. The man counts as a stranger, and this continues until the first child is born. But even if no account is taken of cases

21 V. Crawley: "The Mystic Rose," London, 1903, p. 405.

THE SAVAGE'S DREAD OF INCEST 23

in which this last condition does not remove the prohibition, this explanation is subject to the ob- jection 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 sex- ual factor, and that it does not take into account the almost sacred loathing which finds expres- sion in the laws of avoidance.^^

A Zulu woman who was asked about the basis for this prohibition showed great delicacy of feel- ing in her answer : "It is not right that he should see the breasts which nursed his wife." ^^

It is known that also among civilized races the relation of son-in-law and mother-in-law belongs to one of the most difficult sides of family organ- ization. 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 reestablished by individuals. Many a European will see an act of high wis- dom 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

22 Crawley, 1. c. p. 407.

23 Crawley, I. c. p. 401, according to Leslie: "Among the Zulus and Amatongas," 1875.

24 TOTEM AND TABOO

mother-in-law and son-in-law which furthers hos- tilities between them and renders living together difficult. The fact that the witticisms of civil- ized races show such a preference for this very- mother-in-law theme seems to me to point to the fact that the emotional relations between mother-in-law and son-in-law are controlled by components which stand in sharp contrast to each other. I mean that the relation is really "ambi- valent," that is, it is comj^osed of conflicting feel- ings of tenderness and hostility.

A certain part of these feelings is evident. The mother-in-law is unwilling to give up the possession of her daughter; she distrusts the stranger to whom her daughter has been deliv- ered, and shows a tendency to maintain the dom- inating position, to which she became accustomed at home. On the part of the man, there is the determination not to subject himself any longer to any foreign will, his jealousy of all persons who preceded him in the possession of his wife's tenderness, and, last but not least, his aversion to being disturbed in his illusion of sexual over- valuation. As a rule such a disturbance eman- ates 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 spon- taneity which makes his wife precious to him.

THE SAVAGE'S DREAD OF INCEST 25

The knowledge of hidden psychic feelings which psychoanalytic investigation of individuals has given us, makes it possible to add other mo- tives 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 dis- satisfaction through the premature termination of the con j ugal relation, and the monotony in the wife's emotional life. The ageing mother pro- tects herself against this by living through the lives of her children by identifying herself with them and making their emotional experiences her own. Parents are said to remain young with their children, and this is, in fact, one of the most valuable psychic benefits which parents derive from their children. Childlessness thus elimin- ates one of the best means to endure the neces- sary resignation imposed upon the individual through marriage. This emotional identifica- tion with the daughter may easily go so far with the mother that she also falls in love with the man her daughter loves, which leads, in extreme cases, to severe forms of neurotic ailments on account of the violent psychic resistance against this emo- tional ^predisposition. At all events the tendency to such infatuation is very frequent with the mother-in-law, and either this infatuation itself or the tendency opposed to it joins the conflict of contending forces in the psyche of the mother-

26 TOTEM AND TABOO

in-law. Very often it is just this harsh and sad- istic component of the love emotion which is tm-ned 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 per- sons 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 primi- tive selection, against which everything in him re- sists. 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 hap- pens that a man falls in love with his subsequent

THE SAVAGE'S DREAD OF INCEST 27

mother-in-law before his inchnation is trans- ferred 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 ex- planations for the "avoidances" which these primitive races observe so strictl}^ we would therefore give preference to the opinion origin- ally expressed by Fison, who sees nothing in these regulations but a protection against possible in- cest. 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 con- scious; in the other case, which includes the mother-in-law relation, the incest would be a phantasy temptation brought about by unconsci- ous intermediary links.

We have had little opportunity in this exposi- tion 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 in- cest dread of savages has long been known as such, and is in need of no further interpreta- tion. What we can add to the further apprecia- tion of incest dread is the statement that it is a

28 TOTEM AND TABOO

subtle infantile trait and is in striking agreement with the psychic life of the neurotic. Psycho- analysis has taught us that the first object selec- tion 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 indi- vidual frees himself from these incestuous at- tractions. The neurotic, however, regularty 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 nat- urally meets with the most general incredulity on the part of the grown-up, normal man; a similar rejection will also meet the researches of Otto Rank, which show in even larger scope to what extent the incest theme stands in the 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

THE SAVAGE'S DREAD OF INCEST 29

to his former incest wishes which have since suc- cumbed to repression. It is therefore of im- portance to us to be able to show that man's in- cest wishes, which later are destined to become unconscious, are still felt to be dangerous by sav- age races who consider them worthy of the most severe defensive measures.

CHAPTER II

TABOO AND THE AMBIVALENCE OF EMOTIONS

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

For us the meaning of taboo branches off into two opposite directions. On the one hand it means to us sacred, consecrated : but on the other hand it means, uncanny, dangerous, forbidden, and unclean. The opposite for taboo is desig- nated in Polynesian by the word noa and sig- nifies something ordinary and generally accessi- ble. Thus something like the concept of re- serve inheres in taboo; taboo expresses itself es- sentially in prohibitions and restrictions. Our

30

THE AMBIVALENCE OF EMOTIONS 31

combination of "holy dread" would often ex- press the meaning of taboo.

The taboo restrictions are different from re- ligious or moral prohibitions. They are not traced to a commandment of a god but really they themselves impose their own 2:)rohibitions ; 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 prohibi- tions lack all justification and are of unknown origin. Though incomprehensible to us they are taken as a matter of course by those who are un- der their dominance.

Wundt ^ 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 En- cyclopedia Britannica written by the anthro- pologist Northcote W. Thomas,^

"Properly speaking taboo includes only a) the sacred (or unclean) character of persons or

1 Volkerpsychologie, II Band, "Mythus und Religion," 1906, II p. 308.

2 Eleventh Edition, this article also gives the most important references.

32 TOTEM AND TABOO

things, b) the kind of prohibition which results from this character, and c) the sanctity (or un- cleanliness) which results from a violation of the prohibition. The converse of taboo in Polynesia is 'noa' and allied forms which mean ^general' or 'common' . . .

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

"The objects of taboo are many: 1. direct taboos aim at (a) protection of important per- sons— chiefs, priests, etc. — and things against harm; (b) safeguarding of the weak — women, children and common people generally — from the

THE AMBIVALENCE OF EMOTIONS 33

powerful mana (magical influence) of chiefs and priests; (c) providing against the dangers in- curred by handling or coming in contact with corpses, by eating certain food, etc.; (d) guard- ing the chief acts of life — births, initiation, mar- riage and sexual functions — against interference ; (e) securing human beings against the wrath or power of gods and spirits; ^ (f) securing unborn infants and young children, who stand in a spe- cially sympathetic relation with their parents, from the consequence of certain actions, and more especially from the communication of qualities supposed to be derived from certain foods. 2. Taboos are imposed in order to secure against thieves the property of an individual, his fields, tools, etc."

Other parts of the article may be summarized as follows. Originally the punishment for the violation of a taboo was probably left to an inner, automatic arrangement. The violated taboo avenged itself. Wherever the taboo was related to ideas of gods and demons an auto- matic punishment was expected from the power of the godhead. In other cases, probably as a result of a further development of the idea, so- ciety took over the punishment of the offender, whose action has endangered his companions.

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

34 . TOTEM AND TABOO

Thus man's first systems of punishment are also connected with taboo.

"The violation of a taboo makes the offender himself taboo." The author goes on to say that certain dangers resulting from the violation of a taboo may be exercised through acts of pen- ance and ceremonies of j^urification.

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

THE AMBIVALENCE OF EMOTIONS 35

them; if it is a chief or a priest, they are more powerful than those imposed by a common per- son."

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

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

If I judge my readers' impressions correctly I dare say that after hearing all that was said about taboo they are far from knowing what to understand by it and where to store it in their minds. This is surely due to the insufficient in- formation I have given and to the omission of all discussions concerning the relation of taboo to superstition, to belief in the soul, and to re- ligion. 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

36 TOTEM AND TABOO

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 re- ports that innocent transgressions of such pro- hibitions have actually been punished automatic- ally. For instance, the innocent offender who had eaten from a forbidden animal became deei)ty 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 incomprehen- sible, they seem to concern themselves with trifles and give the impression of ceremonials. Some- thing 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

THE AMBIVALENCE OF EMOTIONS 37

persons or things have more of it than others and the danger is precisely in accordance with the charge. The most pecuhar part of it is that any one who has violated such a prohibition assumes the nature of the forbidden object as if he had absorbed the whole dangerous charge. This power is inherent in all persons who are more or less prominent, such as kings, priests and the newly born, in all exceptional physical states such as menstruation, puberty and birth, in everything sinister like illness and death and in everything connected with these conditions by virtue of con- tagion or dissemination.

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

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

Now why should we take any interest at all in

38 TOTEM AND TABOO

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 essen- tial relation to this primitive taboo the explana- tion of which may in the end throw light upon the dark origin of our own "categorical impera- tive."

We are therefore inclined to listen with keen expectations when an investigator like W. Wundt gives his interpretation of taboo, espe- cially as he promises to "go back to the very roots of the taboo concepts." ^

Wundt states that the idea of taboo "includes all customs which express dread of particular ob- jects connected with cultic ideas or of actions hav- ing reference to them." ^

On another occasion he says: "In accordance with the general sense of the word we under- stand by taboo every prohibition laid down in customs or manners or in expressly formulated laws, not to touch an object or to take it for one's own use, or to make use of certain proscribed

4 Volkerpsychologie, Vol. II, Religion unci Mythus, p. 300. 5 1. c. p. 237.

THE AMBIVALENCE OF EMOTIONS 39

words. ..." Accordingly there would not be a single race or stage of culture which had es- caped the injui'ious effects of taboo.

Wundt then shows why he finds it more prac- tical to study the nature of taboo in the primi- tive states of Australian savages rather than in the higher culture of the Polynesian races. In the case of the Australians he divides taboo pro- hibitions into three classes according as they con- cern animals, persons or other objects. The ani- mal 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. 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 de- livery, newly born children, the diseased and es- pecially the dead, are all taboo. The constantly used property of any person, such as his clothes, tools and weapons, is permanently taboo for everybody else. In Australia the new name which a youth receives at his initiation into man- hood becomes part of his most personal property, it is taboo and must be kept secret. The taboos of the third class, which apply to trees, plants,

eComp. Chapter I.

40 TOTEM AND TABOO

houses and localities, are more variable and seem only to follow the rule that anything which for any reason arouses dread or is mysterious, be- comes subject to taboo.

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

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

The taboo then gi'adually became an autonom- ous power which has detached itself from demon- ism. It becomes the compulsion of custom and

7 1. c. p. 307.

THE AMBIVALENCE OF EMOTIONS 41

tradition and finally of the law. "But the com- mandment concealed behind taboo prohibitions which differ materially according to place and time, had originally the meaning: Beware of the wrath of the demons."

Wundt therefore teaches that taboo is the ex- pression and evolution of the belief of primi- tive races in demonic powers, and that later taboo has dissociated itself from this origin and has remained a power sinij^ly 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 read- ers if I call Wundt's explanation disappointing. Wundt's explanation is far from going back to the sources of taboo concepts or to their deepest roots. For neither fear nor demons can be ac- cepted in psychology as finalities defying any further deduction. It would be different if demons really existed; but we know that, like gods, they are only the product of the psychic powers of man ; they have been created from and out of something.

Wundt also expresses a number of important though not altogether clear opinions about the double meaning of taboo. According to him the division between sacred and unclean does not yet

42 TOTEM AND TABOO

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 ani- mal, 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 undifferen- tiated and intermediate meaning of the demonic, in the sense of something which may not be touched, since it emphasizes a characteristic which finally adlieres 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 exist- ence of an original agreement here between these two spheres which gave way to a differentia- tion only as the result of further conditions through which both finally developed into op- posites.

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

How did this separation come about? Ac-

THE AMBIVALENCE OF EMOTIONS 43

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

Wundt's further elucidations refer to the re- lation of taboo to lustration and sacrifice.

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 prohibi- tions for themselves, which they follow as strictly as savages observe the taboos common to their tribe or society. If he were not accustomed to

8 1. c. p. 313.

44 TOTEM AND TABOO

call these individuals "compulsion neurotics" he would find the term "taboo disease" quite ap- propriate for their malady. Psychoanalj^tic in- vestigation has taught him the clinical etiology and the essential part of the psychological mechanism of this compulsion disease, so that he cannot resist a]3plying what he has learnt there to explain corresponding manifestations in folk psychology.

There is one warning to which we shall have to give heed in making this attempt. The similar- ity 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 precipi- tates. It would certainly be both jDremature and unprofitable to base conclusions relating to in- ner relationships upon the correspondence of merely mechanical conditions. We shall bear this warning in mind without, however, giving up our intended comparison on account of the pos- sibility of such confusions.

The first and most striking correspondence be- tween the compulsion prohibitions of neurotics and taboo lies in the fact that the origin of these

THE AMBIVALENCE OF EMOTIONS 45

prohibitions is just as unmotivated and enigma- tic. They have appeared at some time or other and must now be retained on account of an un- conquerable anxiety. An external threat of punishment is superfluous, because an inner cer- tainty (a conscience) exists that violation will be followed by unbearable disaster. The very most that compulsion patients can tell us is the vague premonition that some person of their environment will suffer harm if they should vio- late the prohibition. Of what the harm is to consist is not known, and this inadequate in- formation 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 neu- rotic prohibition is the act of touching, whence we derive the name touching phobia, or delire de toucher. The prohibition extends not only to direct contact with the body but also to the fig- urative use of the phrase as "to come into con- tact," or "be in touch with some one or some- thing." 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

46 TOTEM AND TABOO

their purpose but others strike us as incompre- hensible, foolish and senseless. We designate such commands as "ceremonials" and we find that taboo customs show the same variations.

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

I shall put side by side two examples of trans- ference 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 com- pulsion 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

THE AMBIVALENCE OF EMOTIONS 47

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 con- veyed through these intermediaries, would surely die." ^

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

Compulsion prohibitions, like taboo prohibi- tions, entail the most extraordinary renuncia- tions 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 puri-

9 Frazer, "The Golden Bough," II, "Taboo and the Perils of the Soul," 1911, p. 136.

48 TOTEM AND TABOO

fications. The most common of these obsessive acts is washing with water (washing obsession). A part of the taboo prohibitions can also be re- placed 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 pre- ferred way.

Let us now summarize the points in which the correspondence between taboo customs and the symptoms of compulsion neurosis are most clearly manifested: 1. In the lack of motiva- tion of the commandments, 2. in their enforce- ment 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

THE AMBIVALENCE OF EMOTIONS 49

without. ^^ The prohibition was accepted be- cause it was supported by strong inner forces ; ^^ it proved to be stronger than the impulse which wanted to manifest itself through this act of touching. But due to the primitive psychic con- stitution of the child this prohibition did not suc- ceed in abolishing the impulse. Its only suc- cess lay in repressing the impulse ( the pleasure of touching) and banishing it into the unconscious. Both the prohibition and the impulse remained; the impulse because it had only been repressed and not abolished, the prohibition, because if it had ceased the impulse would have broken through into consciousness and would have been carried out. An unsolved situation, a psychic fixation, had thus been created and now every- thing else emanated from the continued conflict between prohibition and impulse.

The main characteristic of the psychic con- stellation which has thus undergone fixation lies in what one might call the ambivalent behavior ^^ of the individual to the object, or rather to an action regardi-ng it. The individual constantly wants to carry out this action (the act of touch- ing) , he sees in it the highest pleasure, but he

10 Both the pleasure and the prohibition referred to touching one's own genitals.

11 The relation to beloved persons who impose the prohibition.

12 To use an excellent term coined by Bleuler,

50 TOTEM AND TABOO

may not carry it out, and he even abominates it. The opposition between these two streams can- not be easily adjusted because — there is no other way to express it — they are so locahzed in the psychic hfe that they cannot meet. The pro- hibition becomes fully conscious, while the sur- viving pleasure of touching remains unconscious, the person knowing nothing about it. If this psychological factor did not exist the ambival- ence could neither maintain itself so long nor lead to such subsequent manifestations.

In the clinical history of the case we have em- phasized 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 has taken place, which is connected with forgetting (amnesia), the motivation of the prohibition that has become conscious remains unknown, and all attempts to unravel it intellectually must fail, as the point of attack cannot be found. The pro- hibition owes its strength — its compulsive char- acter— to its association with its unkno^vn coun- terpart, the hidden and unabated pleasure, that is to say, to an inner need into which conscious in- sight is lacking. The transferability and repro- ductive power of the prohibition reflect a process which harmonizes with the unconscious pleasure

THE AMBIVALENCE OF EMOTIONS 51

and is very much facilitated through the psy- chological determinants of the unconscious. The pleasure of the impulse constantly undergoes dis- placement 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 prohibi- tion also wanders and spreads to the new aims of the proscribed impulse. Every new advance of the repressed libido is answered by the prohibi- tion with a new severity. The mutual inhibi- tion 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 w^hat has been forbidden. It is a law of neurotic dis- eases 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 pro- hibitions which we shall study are already second-

62 TOTEM AND TABOO

ary, 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. Ac- cording to our assumption they must be incapable of telhng us anything about it since this motiva- tion is "unconscious" to them. But following the model of the compulsive prohibition we shall con- struct the history of taboo as follows: Taboos are very ancient prohibitions which at one time were forced upon a generation of primitive people from without, that is, they probably were forcibly impressed upon them by an earlier gen- eration. These prohibitions concerned actions for which there existed a strong desire. The pro- hibitions maintained themselves from generation to generation, perhaps only as the result of a tra- dition set up by paternal and social authority. But in later generations they have perhaps al- ready become "organized" as a piece of inherited psychic property. Whether there are such

THE AMBIVALENCE OF EMOTIONS 63

"innate ideas" or whether these have brought about the fixation of the taboo by themselves or by cooperating with education no one could de- cide in the particular case in question. The per- sistence of taboo teaches, however, one thing, namely, that the original pleasure to do the for- bidden still continues among taboo races. They therefore assume an ambivalent attitude toward their taboo prohibitions ; in their unconscious they would hke 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 prohi- bitions 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 can- not use these examples to test our assumptions as long as the meaning and the origin of the totemic system is so wholly unknown to us. But the very wording of these taboos and the fact that they occur together will remind any one who knows the results of the psychoanalytic investigation of in-

64 TOTEM AND TABOO

dividuals, of something quite definite which psy- choanalysts 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 for- bidden action for which there exists a strong incli- nation in the unconscious.

We know, without understanding it, that who- ever 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 re- mains the same under all these different con- ditions ? 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 prop- erty of tempting others to follow his example. He arouses envy ; why should he be allowed to do what is prohibited to others? He is therefore really contagious, in so far as every example in-

13 See Chapter IV Totemism, etc.

THE AMBIVALENCE OF EMOTIONS 55

cites to imitation, and therefore he himself must be avoided.

But a person may become permanently or tem- porarily taboo without having violated any taboos, for the simple reason that he is in a con- dition which has the property of inciting the for- bidden desires of others and of awakening the ambivalent conflict in them. JMost of the excep- tional positions and conditions have this character and possess this dangerous power. The king or chieftain rouses envy of his prerogatives; every- body would perhaps like to be king. The dead, the newly born, and women when they are in- capacitated, 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. There- fore all these persons and all these conditions are taboo, for one must not yield to the temptations which they offer.

Now, too, we understand why the forces inher- ent in the "mana" of various persons can neutral- ize one another so that the mana of one individual can partly cancel that of the other. The taboo of a king is too strong for his subject because the social difference between them is too great. But a minister, for example, can become the harmless mediator between them. Translated from the language of taboo into the language of normal

56 TOTEM AND TABOO

psychology this means: the subject who shrinks from the tremendous temptation which contact with the king creates for him can brook the inter- course 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 con- sideration the power that has been granted to him. Thus smaller differences in the magic power that lead to temptation are less to be feared than ex- ceptionally 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 prohi- bition cannot possibly be of so special a nature as in the case, of a neurosis, we must not be aston- ished to find that touching plays a similar role in taboo prohibition as in the delire de toucher. To touch is the beginning of every act of possession,

THE AMBIVALENCE OF EMOTIONS 67

of every attempt to make use of a person or thing.

We have interpreted the power of contagion which inheres in the taboo as the property of lead- ing into temptation, and of inciting to imitation. This does not seem to be in accord with the fact that the (Tontagiousness 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, namety, the constant tendency of the unconscious impulse to become displaced through associative channels upon new objects. Our attention is thus drawn to the fact that the dangerous magic power of the "mana" corresponds to two real faculties, the capacity of reminding man of his forbidden wishes, and the apparently more important one of tempting him to violate the prohibition in the service of these wishes. Both functions reunite into one, how- ever, if we assume it to be in accord with a primi- tive 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. ^lemory and temptation then again coincide. We must also admit that if the example of a person who has violated a prohi- bition leads another to the same action, the dis- obedience of the prohibition has been transmitted

58 TOTEM AND TABOO

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 hberty, we have the proof that the observance of a taboo regulation was itself a renunciation of something really wished for. The omission of one renuncia- tion is cancelled through a renunciation at some other point. This would lead us to conclude that, as far as taboo ceremonials are concerned, pen- ance is more primitive than purification.

Let us now summarize what understanding we have gained of taboo through its comparison with the compulsive prohibition of the neurotic. Taboo is a very primitive prohibition imposed from without (by an authority) and directed against the strongest desires of man. The desire to violate it continues in the unconscious; per- sons who obey the taboo have an ambivalent feel- ing toward what is affected by the taboo. The magic power attributed to taboo goes back to its ability to lead man into temptation; it behaves like a contagion, because the example is con- tagious, and because the prohibited desire be- comes displacing in the unconscious upon some- thing else. The expiation for the violation of a taboo through a renunciation proves that a renun-

THE AMBIVALENCE OF EMOTIONS 59

ciation is at the basis of the observance of the taboo.

3

We may ask what we have gained from the comparison of taboo with compulsion neurosis and what value can be claimed for the interpre- tation we have given on the basis of this compari- son? 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 un- derstanding 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 gene- sis 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 psycholog-

60 TOTEM AND TABOO

ical conditions for taboo with which we have become acquainted in the case of compulsion neu- rosis. 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 re- actions and the obsessive commands. These mechanisms gave every indication of having been derived from ambivalent impulses or tendencies, they either represented simultaneously the wish and counter-wish or they served preponderantly one of the two contrary tendencies. If we should now succeed in showing that ambivalence, i. e., the sway of contrary tendencies, exists also in the case of taboo regulations or if we should find among 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 fun- damental taboo prohibitions are inaccessible to our analysis because they belong to totemism ; an- other part of the taboo rules is of secondary origin and cannot be used for our purpose. For among these races taboo has become the general form of law giving and has helped to promote social ten-

THE AMBIVALENCE OF EMOTIONS 61

dencies which are certainly younger than taboo itself, as for instance, the taboos imposed by chiefs and priests to insure their property and privileges. But there still remains a large group of laws which we may undertake to investigate. Among these I lay stress on those taboos which are attached a) to enemies, b) to chiefs, and c) to the dead ; the material for our investigation is taken from the excellent collection of J. G. Frazer in his great work, "The Golden Bough." ^*

a) the treatment of enemies

Inclined as we may have been to ascribe to savage and semi-savage races uninhibited and re- morseless cruelty towards their enemies, it is of great interest to us to learn that with them, too, the killing of a person compels the observation of a series of rules which are associated with taboo customs. These rules are easily brought under four groups; they demand 1. reconciliation with the slain enemy, 2. restrictions, 3. acts of expia- tion, and purifications of the manslayer, and 4. certain ceremonial rites. The incomplete reports do not allow us to decide with certainty how gen- eral or how isolated such taboo customs may be

14 Third Edition, Part II, "Taboo and the Perils of the Soul," 1911.

62 TOTEM AND TABOO

among these races, but this is a matter of indiffer- ence 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 war- riors has returned with the severed heads of the vanquished enemy, are especially significant be- cause the leader of the expedition is subject to heavy additional restrictions. ''At the solemn entry of the victors, sacrifices are made to con- ciliate the souls of the enemy; otherwise one would have to expect harm to come to the vic- tors. A dance is given and a song is sung in which the slain enemy is mourned and his for- giveness is implored: *Be not angry,' they say, 'because your head is here with us; had we been less lucky, our heads might have been exposed in your village. We have offered the sacrifice ^to appease you. Your spirit may now rest and leave us at peace. Why were you our enemy? Would it not have been better that we should re- main 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 Celebes ; the Gallas sacrifice to the spirits of their

15 Frazer, 1. c. p. 166.

THE AMBIVALENCE OF EMOTIONS 63

dead enemies before they return to their home villages/^

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

Observers have been struck by the mourning for the enemy after he is slain and scalped, among several of the wild tribes of North America. When a Choctaw had killed an enemy he began a month's mourning during which he submitted himself to serious restrictions. The Dakota In- dians mourned in the same way. One authority

16 Paulitschke, "Ethnography of Northeast Africa."

17 Frazer, "Adonis, Attis, Osiris," p. 248, 1907. According to Hugh Low, Sarawak, London, 1848.

64. TOTEM AND TABOO

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 objec- tion. Both Frazer as well as other authorities may well be quoted against us to show that the motive for these rules of reconciliation is quite simple and has nothing to do with "ambivalence." These races are dominated by a superstitious fear of the spirits of the slain, a fear which was also familiar to classical antiquity, and which the great British dramatist brought upon the stage in the hallucinations of JNIacbeth and Richard the Third. From this superstition all the reconcilia- tion rules as well as the restrictions and expia- tions which we shall discuss later can be logically deduced; moreover, the ceremonies included in the fourth group also argue for this interpreta- tion, 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.

18 J. O. Dorsay, see Frazer, "Toboo, etc.," p. 181.

19 Frazer, "Taboo," p. 166 to 174. These ceremonies consist of hitting shields, shouting, bellowing and making noises with various instruments, etc.

THE AMBIVALENCE OF EMOTIONS 65

This objection is certainly pertinent and if it were adequate as well we would gladly spare our- selves 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 im- pulses besides those that are merely hostile find expression in the behavior towards enemies. We see in them manifestations of repentance, of re- gard for the enemy, and of a bad conscience for having slain him. It seems that the com- mandment. 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 vic- torious manslayer are unusually frequent and are mostly of a serious nature. In Timor (com- pare 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

66 TOTEM AND TABOO

put his food into his mouth.^^ Among some Dayak tribes warriors returning from a success- ful expedition must remain sequestered for sev- eral days and abstain from certain foods; they may not touch iron and must remain away from their wives. In Logea, an island near New Guinea, men who have killed an enemy or have taken part in the killing, lock themselves up in their houses for a week. They avoid every inter- course with their wives and friends, they do not touch their victuals with their hands and live on nothing but vegetable foods which are cooked for them in special dishes. As a reason for this last restriction it is alleged that they must smell the blood of the slain, otherwise they would sicken and die. Among the Toaripi- or JNIotumotu- tribes in New Guinea a manslayer must not ap- proach his wife and must not touch his food with his lingers. 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 men- tioned by Frazer, and emphasize only such cases in which the character of taboo is especially no- ticeable or where the restriction appears in con-

20 Frazer, "Taboo," p. 166, according to S. Mueller, "Reisen en Onderzoekingen in den Indischen Archipel," Amsterdam, 1857.

THE AMBIVALENCE OF EMOTIONS 67

nection with expiation, purification and cere- monial.

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

Among the Natchez in North America young warriors who had procured their first scalp were bound for six months to the observance of certain renunciations. They were not allowed to sleep with their wives or to eat meat, and received only fish and maize pudding as nourishment. When a Choctaw had killed and scalped an enemy he began a period of mourning for one month, dur- ing 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

68 TOTEM AND TABOO

purification and expiation. During a fasting period of sixteen days he was not allowed to touch meat or salt, to look at a fire or to speak to any one. He lived alone in the woods, where he was waited upon by an old woman who brought him a small allowance of food; he often bathed in the nearest river, and carried a lump of clay on his head as a sign of mourning. On the seventeenth day there took place a public ceremony through which he and his weapons were solemnly purified. As the Pima Indians took the manslayer taboo much more seriously than their enemies and, un- like them, did not postpone expiation and purifi- cation 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 Ameri- cans 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 fur- nish us with any new points of view. I might mention that the temporary or permanent isola- tion of the professional executioner, which was maintained up to our time, is a case in point. The position of the "free-holder" in mediaeval

THE AMBIVALENCE OF EMOTIONS 69

society really conveys a good idea of the "taboo" of savages. ^^

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

b) the taboo of rulers

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

Both objects are accomplished through in- numerable rules of taboo. Why one must guard

21 For these examples see Frazer, "Taboo," p. 165-170, "Man- slayers Tabooed."

22 Frazer, "Taboo," p. 132. "He must not only be guarded, he must also be guarded against."

70 TOTEM AND TABOO

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

Where the healing power of the royal touch is concerned we do not have to look for examples among savages. In comparatively recent times the kings of England exercised this power upon scrofula, whence it was called "The King's Evil." Neither Queen Elizabeth nor any of her sue-

THE AMBIVALENCE OF EMOTIONS 71

cessors renounced this part of the royal preroga- tive. Charles I is said to have healed a hundred sufferers at one time, in the year 1633. Under his dissolute son Charles II, after the great English revolution had passed, royal healings of scrofula attained their greatest vogue.

This king is said to have touched close to a hundred thousand victims of scrofula in the course of his reign. The crush of those seeking to be cured used to be so great that on one occa- sion six or seven patients suffered death by suffo- cation instead of being healed. The skeptical king of Orange, William III, who became king of England after the banishment of the Stuarts, refused to exercise the spell; on the one occasion when he consented to practice 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, health}^ fellow, who saw what was left over and started to eat it. Hardly had he finished when a horrified spectator informed

23 Frazer, The Magic Art I, p. 3G8.

72 TOTEM AND TABOO

him of his offense in eating the meal of the chief. The man had been a strong, brave, warrior, but as soon as he heard this he collapsed and was afflicted by terrible convulsions, from which he died towards sunset of the following day.^^ A JNIaori woman ate a certain fruit and then learned that it came from a place on which there was a taboo. She cried out that the spirit of the chief whom she had thus offended would surely kill her. This incident occurred in the afternoon and on the next day at twelve o'clock she was dead.^^ The tinder box of a ]Maori chief once cost several persons their lives. The chief had lost it and those who found it used it to light their pipes. When they learned whose property the tinder box was they all died of f right. ^^

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

But probably the greater part of this taboo of the rulers cannot be traced back to the need of

24 "Old New Zealand," by a Pakeha Maori (London, 1884), see Frazer, "Taboo," p. 135.

25 w. Brown, "New Zealand and Its Aborigines" (London, 1845), Frazer, ibid.

26 Frazer, 1. c.

THE AMBIVALENCE OF EMOTIONS 75

guarding against them. The other point of view in the treatment of privileged persons, the need of guarding them from dangers with which they are threatened, has had a distinct share in the creation of taboo and therefore of the origin of court etiquette.

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

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 per- sons of such perfection of power should them- selves 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

27 Frazer, "Taboo." "The Burden of Royalty," p. 7.

74, TOTEM AND TABOO

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 in- tentions or of their conscientiousness. A strain of mistrust is mingled with the motivation of the taboo rules for the king. "The idea that early kingdoms are despotisms," says Frazer,^^ "in which the peoj)le exist only for the sovereign, is wholly inapplicable to the monarchies we are con- sidering. On the contrary, the sovereign in them exists only for his subjects; his life is only valu- able 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 igno- miniously dismissed and may be thankful if he escapes with his life. Worshiped as a god one day, he is killed as a criminal the next. But in this changed behavior of the people there is noth- ing capricious or inconsistent. On the contrary, their conduct is quite consistent. If their king is their god he is, or should be, also their pre- server ; and if he will not preserve them he must make room for another who will. So long, how- ever, as he answers their expectations, there is no limit to the care which they take of him, and which

28 L c, p. 7.

THE AMBIVALENCE OF EMOTIONS 75

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 dig- nity, much less to his comfort, but to restrain him from conduct which, by disturbing the harmony of nature, might involve himself, his people, and the universe in one common catastrophe. Far from adding to his comfort, these observances, by trammeling his everj'- act, annihilate his free- dom 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 fet- tering 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: "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,

29 Kaempfer, "History of Japan," see in Frazer, 1. c, p. 3.

76 TOTEM AND TABOO

nor his beard, nor his nails. However, lest he should grow too dirty, they may clean him in the night when he is asleep; because they say that what is taken from his body at that time, hath been stolen from him, and that such a theft does not prejudice his holiness or dignity. In ancient times, he was obliged to sit on the throne for some hours every morning, with the imperial crown on his head; but to sit altogether like a statue with- out 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 un- fortunately, he turned himself on one side or other, or if he looked a good while towards any part of his dominion, it was apprehended that war, famine, fire or some other great misfortune was near at hand to desolate the country."

Some of the taboos to which barbarian kings are subject vividly recall the restrictions placed on murderers. On Shark Point at Cape Padron in Lower Guinea (West Africa), a priest-king called Kukulu lives alone in a woods. He is not allowed to touch a woman or to leave his house and cannot even rise out of his chair, in which he must sleep in a sitting position. If he should lie down the wind would cease and shipping would be disturbed. It is his function to keep storms in check and, in general, to see to an even, healthy

THE AMBIVALENCE OF EMOTIONS 77

condition of the atmosphere.^*^ The more pow- erful a king of Loango is, says Bastian, the more taboos he must observe. The heu^ 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 Flamen Dialis, the high-priest of Jupiter in Rome, had to observe an extraordinarily large number of taboo rules. He was not allowed to ride, to see a horse or an armed man, to wear a ring that was not broken, to have a knot in his garments, to touch wheat flour or leaven, or even to mention by name a goat, a dog, raw meat, beans and ivy ; his hair could only be cut by a free man and with a bronze knife, his hair combings and nail parings had to be buried under a lucky

30 Bastian, "The German Expedition to the Coast of Loango." Jena 1874, cited by Frazer, 1. c, p. 5.

78 TOTEM AND TABOO

tree; he could not touch the dead, go into the open with bare head, and similar prohibitions. His wife, the Flaminica, also had her own pro- hibitions: 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 these taboos is given in the Book of Rights, of which the oldest manuscript copies bear the dates 1390 and 1418. The prohibitions are very detailed and concern certain activities at specified places and times; in some cities, for instance, the king cannot stay on a certain day of the week, while at some specified hour this or that river may not be crossed, or again there is a plane on which he cannot camp a full nine days, etc.^^

Among many savage races the severity of the taboo restrictions for the priest-kings has had re- sults of historic importance which are especially

31 Frazer, 1. c, p. 13, 32 Frazer, I.e., p. 11,

THE AMBIVALENCE OF EMOTIONS 79

interesting from our point of view. The honor of being a priest-king ceased to be desirable; the person in hne for the succession often used every means to escape it. Thus in Combodscha, where there is a fire and water king, it is often necessary to use force to compel the successor to accept the honor. On Nine or Savage Island, a coral island in the Pacific Ocean, monarchy actually came to an end because nobody was willing to un- dertake the responsible and dangerous office. In some parts of West Africa a general council is held after the death of the king to determine upon the successor. The man on whom the choice falls is seized, tied and kept in custody in the fetich house until he has declared himself willing to accept the crown. Sometimes the presump- tive 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.

Frazer makes these conditions responsible for the fact that in the development of history a sep- aration of the original priest-kingship into a spir-

33 A. Bastian, "The German Expedition on the Coast of Lonago," cited by Frazer, 1. c, p. 18.

80 TOTEM AND TABOO

itual and a secular power finally took place. Kings, crushed by the burden of then' holiness, became incapable of exercising their power over real things and had to leave this to inferior but executive persons who were willing to renounce the honors of royal dignity. From these there grew up the secular rulers, while the spiritual over-lordship, which was now of no practical im- portance, 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

THE AMBIVALENCE OF EMOTIONS 81

with their person or their property is therefore feared, while on the other hand the most bene- ficial effect is expected from these contacts. This seems to be a second and an especially glar- ing contradiction; but we have already learned that it is only apparent. The king's touch, exer- cised 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 be- comes dangerous, and this is probably because the act may recall aggressive tendencies. An- other 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 espe- cial care against threatening dangers, as if his own power, which can do so much, were incapa- ble of accomplishing this. A further difficulty in the relation arises because there is no confi- dence that the ruler will use his tremendous power to the advantage of his subjects as well as for his own protection; he is therefore dis- trusted 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 hun against dangers, and of guarding his subjects against danger which he brings to them.

82 TOTEM AND TABOO

We are inclined to give the following explana- tion of the complicated and contradictory rela- tion 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 devel- oped 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 psycho- analytic technique may enable us to penetrate more deeply into the matter and to add some- thing about the nature of these various tenden- cies. If we subject the facts as stated to analy- sis, 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 occur- rence of such excessive tenderness is very com- mon in the neurosis and especially in the compulsion neurosis upon which we are draw- ing primarily for our comparison. We now thoroughly understand the origin of this tender- ness. It occurs wherever, besides the predomi- nant tenderness, there exists a contrary but un- conscious stream of hostility, that is to say, wher-

THE AMBIVALENCE OF EMOTIONS 83

ever the typical case of an ambivalent affective attitude is realized. The hostility is then cried down by an excessive increase of tenderness which is expressed as anxiety and becomes com- pulsive because otherwise it would not suffice for its task of keeping the unconscious opposition in a state of repression. Every psychoanalj^st knows how infallibly this anxious excess of ten- derness can be resolved even under the most im- probable 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 ven- eration, their very deification, is opposed in the unconscious by an intense hostile tendency, so that, as we had expected, the situation of an ambivalent feeling is here realized. The dis- trust which certainly seems to contribute to the motivation of the royal taboo, would be another direct manifestation of the same unconscious hos- tility. Indeed the ultimate issues of this con- flict show such a diversity among different races that we would not be at a loss for examples in which the proof of such hostility would be much easier. We learn from Frazer ^^ that the savage Timmes of Sierra Leona reserve the right to ad-

3*1. c. p. 18. According to Zwefel et Monstier, "Voyage aux Sources du Niger," 1880.

84 TOTEM AND TABOO

minister a beating to their elected king on the evening before his coronation, and that they make use of this constitutional right with such thoroughness that the unhappy ruler sometimes does not long survive his accession to the throne ; for this reason the leaders of the race have made it a rule to elect some man against whom they have a particular grudge. Nevertheless, even in such glaring cases the hostility is not acknowl- edged as such, but is expressed as if it were a ceremonial.

Another trait in the attitude of primitive races towards their rulers recalls a mechanism which is universally present in mental disturbances, and is openly revealed in the so-called delusions of persecution. Here the importance of a particu- lar person is extraordinarily heightened and his omnipotence is raised to the improbable in order to make it easier to attribute to him the responsi- bility for everything painful which happens to the patient. Savages really do not act differ- ently tow^ards 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 persecu- tion mania, is found in the relation of the child to its father. Such omnipotence is regularly at-

THE AMBIVALENCE OF EMOTIONS 85

tributed to the father in the imagination of the son, and distrust of the father has been shown to be intimately connected with the highest es- teem for him. When a paranoiac names a per- son 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 sav- age 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 sigTiificance of which for the status of kinship has already been the sub- ject 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 ac-

86 TOTEM AND TABOO

tion of the neurosis, in which the suppressed im- pulse and the impulse which suppreses 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 for- bidden. 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 venera- tion and a means of guarding them; actually it is the punishment for their elevation, the revenge which their subjects take upon them. The ex- periences which Cervantes makes Sancho Panza undergo as governor on his island have evidently made him recognize this interpretation of courtly ceremonial as the only correct one. It is very possible that this point would be corroborated if we could induce kings and rulers of to-day to express themselves on this point.

Why the emotional attitude towards rulers should contain such a strong unconscious share of hostility is a very interesting problem which, how- ever, 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 ex- planations. Frazer has an impressive discus-

THE AMBIVALENCE OF EMOTIONS 87

sion of the theory that the first kings were strangers who, after a short reign, were destined to be sacrificed at solemn festivals as representa- tives of the deity; but Frazer himself does not consider his facts altogether convincing.^^ Christian myths are said to have been still in- fluenced by the after-effects of this evolution of kings.

c) THE TABOO OF THE BEAD

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 it- self in the first place, in the consequences which result from contact with the dead, and in the treatment of the mourners for the dead. Among the jNIaori any one who had touched a corpse or who had taken part in its interment, became ex- tremely unclean and was almost cut off from in- tercourse 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

35 Frazer, "The Magic Act and the Evolution of Kings," 2 vols., 1911. (The Golden Bough.)

88 TOTEM AND TABOO

were now unclean and therefore quite useless to him. His food was put on the ground and he had no alternative except to seize it as best he could, with his lips and teeth, while he held his hands behind on his back. Occasionally he could be fed by another person who helped him to his food with outstretched arms so as not to touch the unfortunate one himself, but this assistant was then in turn subjected to almost equally oppres- sive restrictions. Almost every village con- tained some altogether disreputable individual, ostracised by society, whose wretched existence depended upon people's charity. This creature alone was allowed within arm's length of a per- son who had fulfilled the last duty towards the deceased. But as soon as the period of segrega- tion was over and the person rendered unclean through the corpse could again mingle with his fellow-beings, all the dishes which he had used during the dangerous period were broken and all his clothing was thrown away.

The taboo customs after bodily contact with the dead are the same all over Polynesia, in Melanesia, and in a part of Africa; their most constant feature is the prohibition against han- dling one's food and the consequent necessity of being fed by somebody else. It is noteworthy that in Polynesia, or perhaps only in Hawaii,^^

86 Frazer, "Taboo," p. 138, etc.

THE AMBIVALENCE OF EMOTIONS 89

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 abohtion of the prohibi- tions through the individual's own taboo power are clearly shown. A person who touched the cor2)se of a dead chieftain was unclean for ten months ; but if he was himself a chief, he was un- clean for only three, four, or five months, accord- ing to the rank of the deceased; if it was the corpse of the idolized head-chief even the greatest chiefs became taboo for ten months. These sav- ages are so certain that any one who violates these taboo rules must become seriously ill and die, that according to the opinion of an observer, they have never yet dared to convince themselves of the con- trary.^ ^

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 es- sentially the same as those mentioned above, but they are of greater interest for the point we are trying to make. In the rules hitherto men- tioned we see only the typ'ical expression of the virulence and power of diffusion of the taboo; in those about to be cited we catch a gleam of

37 W. Mariner, "The Natives of the Tonga Islands," 1818, see Frazer, 1. c, p. 140.

90 TOTEM AND TABOO

the motives, including both the ostensible ones and those which may be regarded as the underly- ing and genuine motives.

Among the Shuswap in British-Columbia wid- ows and widowers have to remain segregated dur- ing their period of mourning; they must not use their hands to touch the body or the head and all utensils used by them must not be used by any one else. No hunter will want to approach the hut in which such mourners live, for that would bring misfortune; if the shadow of one of the mourners should fall on him he would be- come ill. The mourners sleep on thorn bushes, with which they also surround their beds. This last precaution is meant to keep off the sj)irit 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 or- der to make herself inaccessible to the approach of the spirit. Thus it is quite obvious that touch- ing "in the transferred sense" is after all un- derstood only as bodily contact, since the spirit of the deceased does not leave his kin and does not desist from "hovering about them" during the period of mourning.

Among the Agutainos, who live on Palawan, one of the Philippine Islands, a widow may not leave her hut for the first seven or eight days

THE AMBIVALENCE OF EMOTIONS 91

after her husband's death, except at night, when she need not expect encounters. Whoever sees her is in danger of immediate death and there- fore 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 in- herent in a widow. In the district of JNIekeo, British Xew Guinea, a widower forfeits all civil rights and lives like an outlaw. He may not tend a garden, or show himself in public, or enter the village or go on the street. He slinks about like an animal, in the high grass or in the bushes, and must hide in a thicket if he sees anybody, espe- cially 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 tempta- tion. 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 rims contrary to the inten- tion of mourning and would cause the anger of the spirit to flare up.^^

38 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.

92 TOTEM AND TABOO

One of the most surprising, but at the same time one of the most instructive taboo customs of mourning among primitive races is the prohi- bition against pronouncing the name of the de- ceased. This is very widespread, and has been subjected to many modifications with important consequences.

Aside from the Austrahans and the Polynes- ians, who usually show us taboo customs in their best state of preservation, we also find this pro- hibition among races so far apart and unrelated to each other as the Samojedes in Siberia and the Todas in South India, the JNIongolians of Tartary and the Tuaregs of the Sahara, the Aino of Japan and the Akamba and Nandi in Central Africa, the Tinguanes in the Philippines and the inhabitants of the Nikobari Islands and of Mada- gascar and 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 pres-

39 Frazer, 1. c, p. 353.

THE AMBIVALENCE OF EMOTIONS 93

ence, 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 so abominated, but the dangers associated with it have called into being a whole series of inter- esting and important expedients to avoid this. Thus the Masai in Africa have hit upon the eva- sion of changing the name of the deceased imme- diately upon his death; he may now be men- tioned without dread by this new name, while all the prohibitions remain attached to the old name. It seems to be assumed that the ghost does not know his new name and will not find it out. The Australian tribes on Adelaide and Encounter Bay are so consistently cautious that when a death occurs almost every person who has the same name as the deceased or a very similar one, exchanges it for another. Sometimes by a fur- ther extension of the same idea as seen among several tribes in Victoria and in North America all the relatives of the deceased change their names regardless of whether their names resemble the name of the deceased in sound. Among the Guaycuru in Paraguay the chief used to give new names to all the members of the tribe, on such sad occasions, which they then remembered as if they had always had them.*^

40 Frazer, 1. c, p. 35^, etc.

41 Frazer, 1. c, p. 357, according to an old Spanish observer, 1732.

94 TOTEM AND TABOO

Furthermore, if the deceased had the same name as an animal or object, etc. some of the races just enumerated thought it necessary to give these animals and objects new names, in order not to be reminded of the deceased when they mentioned them. Through this there must have resulted a never ceasing change of vocabul- ary, which caused a good deal of difficulty for the missionaries, especially where the interdiction upon a name was permanent. In the seven years which the missionary Dobrizhofer spent among the Abipons in Paraguay, the name for jaguar was changed three times and the words for croco- dile, 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 histor- ical reminiscences, so that we encounter the great- est difficulties in investigating their past history. Among a number of these primitive races com- pensating customs have also been established in order to re-awaken the names of the deceased after a long period of mourning; they are be- stowed upon children, who were regarded as re- incarnations of the dead.

42 Frazer, 1. c, p. 360.

THE AMBIVALENCE OF EMOTIONS 95

The strangeness of this taboo on names dimin- ishes if we bear in mind that the savage looks upon his name as an essential part and an impor- tant possession of his personality, and that he ascribes the full significance of things to words. Our children do the same, as I have shown else- where, and therefore they are never satisfied with accepting a meaningless verbal similarity, but consistently conclude that when two things have identical names a deeper correspondence between them must exist. Numerous peculiarities of normal behavior may lead civilized man to con- clude 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 be- come peculiarly identified with his person. This is corroborated by psychoanalytic experiences, where there is much occasion to point out the im- portance of names in unconscious thought activ- ity.^ ^ As was to be expected, the compulsion neurotics behave just like savages in regard to names. They show the full "complex sensitive- ness" towards the utterance and hearing of spe- cial words (as do also other neurotics) and de- rive 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 wilting down her name for fear that

43 Stekel, Abraham.

96 TOTEM AND TABOO

it might get into somebody's hands who thus would come into possession of a piece of her per- sonahty. In her frenzied faithfulness, which she needed to protect herself against the tempta- tions of her phantasy, she had created for herself the commandment, "not to give away anything of her personality." To this belonged first of all her name, then by further application her hand- writing, so that she finally gave up writing.

Thus it no longer seems strange to us that sav- ages should consider a dead person's name as a part of his personality and that it should be sub- jected to the same taboo as the deceased. Call- ing a dead person by name can also be traced back to contact with him, so that we can turn our at- tention 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 sufiicient 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 AMBIVALENCE OF EMOTIONS 97

the longest possible time. Something besides mourning must be made responsible for the pecu- liarities of taboo customs, something which evi- dently serves a different purpose. It is this very taboo on names which reveals this still unknown motive, and if the customs did not tell us about it we would find it out from the statements of the mourning savages themselves.

For they do not conceal the fact that they fear the presence and the return of the spirit of a dead person; they 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, ac- cording to Wundt's expression, from the fear of "his soul now turned into a demon." '*^

4* Frazer, 1. c, p. 353, cites the Tuaregs of the Sahara as an example of such an acknowledgment.

*5 Perhaps this condition is to be added: as long as any part of his physical remains exist. Frazer, 1. c, p. 373.

46 "On the Nikobar Islands," Frazer, 1. c, p. 382.

47 Wundt, "Religion and Myth," Vol. II, p. 49.

98 TOTEM AND TABOO

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

The assumption which this theory makes, namely, that inmiediately after death the be- loved member of a family becomes a demon, from whom the survivors have nothmg 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 comj^etent authors agree as to this in- terpretation of primitive races. Westermarck,*^ who, in my opinion, gives altogether too little consideration to taboo, makes this statement: "On the whole facts lead me to conclude that the dead are more frequently regarded as enemies than as friends and that Jevons and Grant Allen are wrong in their assertion that it was formerly believed that the malevolence of the dead was as a rule directed only against strangers, while they were paternally concerned about the life and

4S ''The Origin and Development of Moral Conceptions," see sec- tion entitled ''Attitude Towards the Dead," Vol. II, p. 4^4. Botli 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 favorites." The Aus- tral 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 mis- chievous spirits who frequently hover about the village to spread illness, death and other evils. (Boas.)

THE AMBIVALENXE OF EMOTIONS 99

welfare of their descendants and the members of their clan."

R. Kleinpaul has written an impressive book in which he makes use of the remnants of the old belief in souls among civihzed races to show the relation between the living and the dead.^^ Ac- cording to him too, this relation cuhninates in the conviction that the dead, tliirsting for blood, draw the hving after them. The living did not feel themselves safe from the persecutions of the dead until a body of water had been put between tliem. That is why it was preferred to bury the dead on islands or to bring them to the other side of a river, the expressions "here" and "beyond" originated in this way. Later moderation has restricted the malevolence of tlie 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. Kleinpaul believes that originally, however, the dead were all vam- pires, 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 concex:)tion of an evil spirit.

The hypothesis that those whom we love best

49 R. Kleinpaul: "The Living and the Dead in Folklore, Re- ligion and Myth," 1898.

100 TOTEM AND TABOO

turn into demons after death obviously allows us to put a further question. What prompted primitive races to ascribe such a change of senti- ment to the beloved dead? Why did they make demons out of them? According to Wester- marck this question is easily answered.^^ "As death is usually considered the v^^orst 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 there- fore understand that the soul should seek to kill them with diseases in order to be re-united with them. . . .

". . . A further explanation of the malevo- lence ascribed to souls lies in the instinctive fear of them, which is itself the result of the fear of death."

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

When a wife loses her husband, or a daughter her mother, it not infrequently happens that the survivor is afflicted with tormenting scruples,

BO 1. c, p. 426.

THE AMBIVALENCE OF EMOTIONS 101

called "obsessive reproaches" which raise the question whether she herself has not been guilty through carelessness or neglect, of the death of the beloved person. No recalling of the care with which she nursed the invalid, or direct refu- tation 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 justi- fied and therefore are immune to refutation or objections. Not that the mourner has really been guilty of the death or that she has really been careless, as the obsessive reproach asserts; but still there was something in her, a wish of which she herself was unaware, which was not dis- pleased 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 al- most 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;

102 TOTEM AND TABOO

normally it is not strong enough to give rise to the obsessive reproaches we liave described. But where there is abundant predisposition for it, it manifests itself in the relation to those we love most, precisel}^ where you would least ex- pect 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 emo- tion.

We now know how to explain the supposed demonism of recently departed souls and the necessity of being protected against their hostil- ity through taboo rules. By assuming a similar high degree of ambivalence in the emotional life of primitive races such as psychoaimlysis ascribes to persons suffering from compulsion neurosis, it becomes comprehensible that the same kind of reaction against the hostility latent in the uncon- scious behind the obsessive reproaches of the neurotic should also be necessar}^ here after the painful loss has occurred. But this hostility, which is painfull}^ 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 displace- ment upon the object of hostility, namely the dead. We call this defense process, frequent both in normal and diseased psychic life, a pro-

THE AMBIVALENCE OF EMOTIONS 103

jection. The survivor will deny that he has ever entertained hostile impulses toward the beloved dead; but now the soul of the deceased enter- tains them and will try to give vent to them dur- ing the. entire period of mourning. In spite of the successful defense through projection, the punitive and remorseful character of this emo- tional reaction manifests itself in being afraid, in self-imposed renunciations and in subjection to restrictions which are partly disguised as pro- tective 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-evi- dent that just the nearest and formerly most be- loved 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 con- ceal, namely, the hostility towards the dead, which is now motivated as self-defense. We have learnt to understand part of the taboo regu- lations as temptation fears. A dead person is defenseless, which must act as an incitement to satisfy hostile desires entertained against him;

104 TOTEM AND TABOO

this temptation has to be opposed by the prohi- bition.

But Westermarck is right in not admitting any difference in the savage's conception between those who have died by violence and those who have died a natural death. As will be shown later,^^ in the unconscious mode of thinking even a natural death is perceived as murder; the per- son was killed by evil wishes. Any one inter- ested in the origin and meaning of dreams deal- ing with the death of dear relatives such as par- ents 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 Wundt's con- ception, who explains the nature of taboo through the fear of demons, and yet v/e have just agreed with the explanation which traces back the taboo of the dead to a fear of the soul of the dead after it has turned into a demon. This seems like a contradiction, but it will not be difficult for us to explain it. It is true that we have accepted the idea of demons, but we know that this assump- tion is not something final which psychology can- not resolve into further elements. We have, as it were, exposed the demons by recognizing them

51 Cf. Chap. III.

B2 Freud, "The Interpretation of Dreams."

THE AMBIVALENCE OF EMOTIONS 105

as mere projections of hostile feelings which the survivor entertains towards the dead.

The double feeling — tenderness and hostility — against the deceased, which we consider well founded, endeavors to assert itself at the time of bereavement as mourning and satisfaction. A conflict must ensue between these contrary feel- ings 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 in- stance, when we forgive an injury inflicted upon us by some one we love. The process usually ad- justs itself through a special psychic mechanism, which is designated in psychoanalysis as projec- tion. 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 de- ceased, 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.

106 TOTEM AND TABOO

It is not to be denied that this process of pro- jection, 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 dom- inate, injustice, and whatever else forms the back- ground of even the most tender relations between men. But the process cannot be so simple that this factor alone could explain the origin of demons by projection. The offenses of the dead certainly motivate in part the hostility of the sur- vivors, 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 suit- able 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 intol-

THE AMBIVALENCE OF EMOTIONS 107

erant 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 un- conscious hostility through projection, and the formation of the ceremonial in which fear of pun- ishment by demons finds expression. With the termination of the period of mourning, the con- flict 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 form- ation 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 cre- ated for the purpose of defense, it also comes into being where there are no conflicts. The projec- tion of inner perceptions to the outside is a primi-

108 TOTEM AND TABOO

tive mechanism which, for instance, also influ- ences our sense perceptions, so that it normally has the greatest share in shaping our outer world. Under conditions that have not yet been suf- ficiently 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 func- tion of attention was originally directed not towards the inner world, but to the stimuli streaming in from the outer world, and only re- ceived reports of pleasure and pain from the endopsychic processes. Only with the develop- ment 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 devel- oped a picture of the outer world through the out- ward projection of inner perceptions, which we, with our reenforced conscious perception, must now translate back into psychology.

The projection of their own evil impulses upon demons is only a part of what has become the world system ("Weltanschauung") of primitive man which we shall discuss later as "animism." We shall then have to ascertain the psychological

THE AMBIVALENCE OF EMOTIONS 109

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 proto- type of all these system formations.^^ And let us not forget that beginning at the stage of sys- tem formation there are two origins for every act judged by consciousness, namely the systematic, and the real but unconscious origin.^^

Wundt ^^ remarks that "among the influences which myth everywhere ascribes to demons the evil ones preponderate, so that according to the religions of races evil demons are evidently older than good demons." Now it is quite possible that the whole concej)tion of demons was derived from the extremely important relation to the dead. In the further course of human develop- ment 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.^^ Noth-

53 Freud, "The Interpretation of Dreams."

54 The projection creations of primitive man resemble the per- sonifications through which the poet projects his warring impulses out of himself, as separated individuals.

55 "Myth and Religion," p. 1~^9.

56 In the psychoanalysis of neurotic persons who suffer, or have suffered, in their childhood from the fear of ghosts, it is often not

110 TOTEM AND TABOO

ing 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 dis- tinct psychic task to perform, namely, to detach the memories and expectations of the sur\^ivors from the dead. When this work is accomplished the grief, and with it the remorse and reproach, lessens, and therefore also the fear of the demon. But the very spirits which at first were feared as demons now serve a friendlier purpose ; they are revered as ancestors and appealed to for help in times of distress.

If we survey the relation of survivors to the dead through the course of the ages, it is very evi- dent that the ambivalent feeling has extraordi- narily abated. We now find it easy to suppress whatever unconscious hostility towards the dead there may still exist without any special psychic effort on our part. Where formerly satisfied hate and painful tenderness struggled with each other, we now find piety, which appears like a cicatrice and demands : De mortuis nil nisi bene. Only neurotics still blur the mourning for the loss of their dear ones with attacks of compulsive re-

diflScult 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.

THE AMBIVALENCE OF EMOTIONS 111

preaches which psychoanalysis reveals as the old ambivalent emotional feeling. How this change was brought about, and to what extent constitu- tional 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 wipulses of primitive man possessed a higher degree of ambivalence than is found at present aviong 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 en- tails the most prodigious psychic efforts on their part.

At this point we may recall the confusing in- formation which Wundt offered us about the double meaning of the word taboo, namely, holy and unclean. (See above.) It was supjiosed that originally the word taboo did not yet mean holy and unclean but signified something de- monic, something which may not be touched, thus emphasizing a characteristic common to both ex- tremes of the later conception; this persistent

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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 in- vestigation, 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 lin- guistic expression for the two opposites originally united in one word.

57 Compare my article on Abel's "Gegensinn des Urworte" in the "Jahrbuch fiir Psyclioanalytische und Psychopathologische Forschungen," Bd. II, 1910,

THE AMBIVALENCE OF EMOTIONS 113

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 asso- ciated with definite human relations which were characterized by great emotional ambivalence from which it expanded to other analogous re- lations.

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

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

Conscience is the inner perception of objections to definite wish impulses that exist in us ; but the emphasis is put upon the fact that this rejection does not have to depend on anything else, that it is sure of itself. This becomes even plainer in the case of a guilty conscience, where we become

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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 justifica- tion of the condemnation, and the reproach for the accomplished action. But this same charac- ter is evinced by the attitude of savages towards taboo. Taboo is a command of conscience, the violation of which causes a terrible sense of guilt which is as self-evident as its origin is unknown.^^ 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 char- acter of compulsion neurotics shows a predomi- nant trait of painful conscientiousness which is a symptom of reaction against the temptation

58 It is an interesting parallel that the sense of guilt resulting from the violation of a taboo is in no way diminished if the viola- tion 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.

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which lurks in the unconscious, and which de- velops into the highest degrees of guilty con- science 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 suc- cessfully solved in the case of the individual neu- rotic, and we are confident of finding a similar so- lution 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 un- conscious sources; The psychology of the neu- roses 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 un- known and unconscious, namely the motivation for the rejection. The character of anxiety in the sense of guilt corresponds to this unknown quantity.

If taboo expresses itself mainly in prohibitions it may well be considered self-evident, without remote proof from the analogy with neurosis that it is based on a positive, desireful impulse. For what nobody desires to do does not have to be forbidden, and certainly whatever is expressly

116 TOTEM AND TABOO

forbidden must be an object of desire. If we applied this plausible theory to primitive races we would have to conclude that among their strongest temptations were desires to kill their kings and priests, to commit incest, to abuse their dead and the like. That is not very prob- able. 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 com- mandment : 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 — be- comes superfluous, while the existence of a con- science, in turn, remains unexplained and the con- nection 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 re- sults 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

THE AMBIVALENCE OF EMOTIONS 117

frequent than we had suspected and that it pro- duces 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 reenforced 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 pro- hibition are psychologically by no means super- fluous 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 iden- tical 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 ma}^ originally have referred to other persons and relations, but through the mechanism of displacement, it

118 TOTEM AND TABOO

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 con- ditions in which its manifestations must neces- sarily seem foreign. These are all only hints, but a careful elaboration of them would show how important they may become for the understand- ing 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 psycholog- ical difference must exist between them. A change in the relations of the fundamental am- bivalence can be the only reason why the prohi- bition no longer appears in the form of a taboo.

In the analytical consideration of taboo phe- nomena we have hitherto allowed ourselves to be guided by their demonstrable agreements with compulsion neurosis ; but as taboo is not a neuro- sis 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 start- ing point. Primitive races fear a punishment for

THE AMBIVALENCE OF EMOTIONS 119

the violation of a taboo, usually a serious disease or death. This punishment threatens only him who has been guilty of the violation. It is differ- ent 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 indefi- nite, but, by means of analysis, is easily recog- nized as some one very near and dear to the pa- tient. The neurotic therefore acts as if he were altruistic, while primitive man seems egotistical. Only if retribution fails to overtake the taboo vio- lator spontaneously does a collective feeling awaken among savages that they are all threat- ened through the sacrilege, and they hasten to in- flict the omitted punishment themselves. It is easy for us to explain the mechanism of this solidarity. It is a question of fear of the con- tagious example, the temptation to imitate, that is to say, of the capacity of the taboo to infect. If some one has succeeded in satisfying the repressed desire, the same desire must manifest itself in all his companions; hence, in order to keep down this temptation, this envied individual must be de- spoiled of the fruit of his daring. Not infre- quenth^ the punishment gives the executors them- selves an opportunity to commit the same sacri- legious act by justifying it as an expiation. This is reallv one of the fundamentals of the human

120 TOTEM AND TABOO

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 sin- ners. 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 no- bility is not primary. Originall}^ that is to say at the beginning of the disease, the threat of pun- ishment pertained to one's own person; in ever}^ 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 com- plicated 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 rei)ressed through a pro- hibition, and the prohibition is connected with a certain act which by displacement usually substi- tutes the hostile for the beloved person, and the execution of this act is threatened with the pen- alty 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 there- fore merely compensates for the opposite attitude of brutal egotism which is at the basis of it. If

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we designate as social those emotional impulses which are determined through regard for another person who is not taken as a sexual object, w^e 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 funda- mental impulses of man, we will bring out the sec- ond 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 Delire de toucher. As a matter of fact this neurosis is reg- ularly concerned with the prohibition of sexual touching and psychoanalysis has quite generally shown that the motive power w^hich 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 gen- eral 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 ex- presses itself in suspicious surveillance of the chief and even in physical ill-treatment of him before his coronation. (See above.) Thus the preponderance of sexual components of the im-

122 TOTEM AND TABOO

pulse over the social components is the detennin- ing factor of the neurosis. But the social im- pulses themselves came into being through the union of egotistical and erotic components into special entities.

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

In one way the neuroses show a striking and far-reaching correspondence with the great social productions of art, religion and philosophy, while again they seem like distortions of them. We may say that hysteria is a caricature of an artistic creation, a compulsion neurosis, a caricature of a religion, and a paranoic delusion a caricature of a philosophic system. In the last analysis this deviation goes back to the fact that the neuroses are asocial formations ; they seek to accomplish by private means what arose in society through col- lective labor. In analyzing the impulse of the neuroses one learns that motive powers of sexual origin exercise the determining influence in them, while the corresponding cultural creations rest upon social impulses and on such as have issued from the combination of egotistical and sexual

THE AMBIVALENCE OF EMOTIONS 123

comjDonents. 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 reahty to a more pleasurable world of phantasy. This real world which neurotics shun is dominated by the society of human beings and by the institutions created by them: the estrangement from reahty is at the same time a withdrawal from human companionship.

CHAPTER III

ANIMISM, MAGIC AND THE OMNIPOTENCE OF THOUGHT

It is a necessary defect of studies which seek to apj)ly the point of view of psychoanalysis to the mental sciences that they cannot do justice to either subject. They therefore confine them- selves to the role of incentives and make sugges- tions to the expert which he should take into con- sideration in his work. This defect will make itself felt most strongly in an essay such as this which tries to treat of the enormous sphere called animism.^

Animism in the narrower sense is the theory of psychic concepts and in the wider sense, of spir- itual beings in general. Animatism, the anima- tion theory of seemingly inanimate nature, is a further subdivision which also includes animatism

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

124

THE OMNIPOTENCE OF THOUGHT 125

and animism. The name animism, formerly ap- plied to a definite j^hilosophic system, seems to have acquired its present meaning through E. B. Tylor.^

What led to the formulation of these names is the insight into the very remarkable conce]3tions 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 impor- tant part of this primitive "nature philosophy" seems far less striking to us because we ourselves are not yet far enough removed from it, though we have greatly limited the existence of spirits and to-day explain the processes of natm^e 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

2E. B. Tvlor, ''Primitive Culture," Vol. I, p. i25, fourth ed., 1903. W. Wundt, "INIyth and Religion," Vol. IT, p. 173, 1906.

126 TOTEM AND TABOO

were thought of as being very similar to individ- uals; only in the course of a long evolution did they lose their material character and attain a high degree of "spiritualization." ^

Most authors incline to the assumption that these soul conceptions are the original nucleus of the animistic system, that spirits merely corre- spond 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 pecul- iarly dualistic fundamental conceptions on which this animistic system rests? Through the obser- vation, 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 inti- mately. Above all, the problem of death must have become the starting point of the formation of the theory. To primitive man the continua- tion 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 observa- tions and experiences in the formation of the fundamental animistic conceptions such as dream

8 Wundt 1. c, Chapter IV, "Die Seelenvorstellungen."

THE OMNIPOTENCE OF THOUGHT 127

imagery, shadows and reflections, but these have led to no conclusion.^

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 j udged to be quite natural and in no way mysterious. In view of the fact that animistic conceptions have been shown to be similar among the most varied races and in all periods, Wundt states that these "are the necessary psychological product of the myth forming consciousness, and primitive animism may be looked upon as the spiritual expression of man's natural state in so far as this is at all accessible to our observation." ^ Hume has already justified the animation of the inanimate in his "Natural History of Religions," where he said: "There is a universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like them- selves and to transfer to every object those qual- ities with which they are familiarly acquainted and of which they are intimately conscious." ^

Animism is a system of thought, it gives noi: only the explanation of a single phenomenon, but makes it possible to comprehend the totality of

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

5 1. c, p. 154.

<» See Tylor, "Primitive Culture," Vol. I, p. 477.

128 TOTEM AND TABOO

the world from one point, as a continuity. Writ- ers maintain that in the course of time three such systems of thought, three gTcat world systems came into being: the animistic (mythological), the religious, and the scientific. Of these ani- mism, the first system is perhaps the most con- sistent 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 psy- chological theory. It would go beyond our scope to show how much of it can still be demon- strated in the life of to-day, either as a worthless survival in the form of superstition, or in living form, as the foundation of our language, our belief, and our philosophy.

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

2

Our psychoanalytic work will begin at a differ- ent point. It must not be assumed that mankind came to create its first world system through a purely speculative thirst for knowledge. The

THE OMNIPOTENCE OF THOUGHT 129

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 mas- ter of men, animals and things, as well as of their spirits. S. Reinach^ wants to call these direc- tions, which are known under the names of "sorcery and magic," the strategy of animism; With jNIauss and Hubert, I should prefer to com- pare 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 treat- ing them like people under the same circum- stances, that is to say by appeasing them, recon- ciling them, making them more favorably dis- posed to one, by intimidating them, by depriving them of their power and by making them sub j ect 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

7"Cultes, Mythes et Religions," T. 11, Introduction, p. XV, 1909.

8 "Annee Sociologique," Seventh Vol., 1904.

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j)sychological 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 puri:)oses. 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 as- simiptions the magic activity is based, or rather the principle of magic, is so evident that it was recognized by all authors. If we may take the opinion of E. B. Tylor at its face value it can be most tersely expressed in his words: ^'mistaking an ideal connection for a real one." We shall explain this characteristic in the case of two groups of magic acts.

One of the most widespread magic procedures for injuring an enem}^ 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 subse- quently done to this image will also happen to

9 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.

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the hated prototype; thus if the effigy has been injured in any place he will be afflicted by a dis- ease in the corresponding part of the body. This same magic technique, instead of being used for private enmity can also be employed for pious purposes and can thus be used to aid the gods against evil demons. I quote Frazer: ^^ "Ev- eiy night when the sun-god Ra in ancient Egypt sank to his home in the glowing west he was assailed by hosts of demons under the leadership of the archfiend Apepi. All night long he fought them, and sometimes by day the powers of dark- ness 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 cere- mony was daily performed in his temple at Thebes. A figure of his foe Apepi, represented as a crocodile with a hideous face or a serpent w^ith many coils, was made of wax, and on it the demon's name was written in green ink. Wrapt in a papyrus case, on which another likeness of Apepi had been drawn in green ink, the figure was then tied up with black Iiair, spat upon, hacked with a stone knife and cast on the ground. There the priest trod on it with his left foot again and again, and then burned it in a fire made of a certain plant or grass. When Apepi himself had thus been effectively disposed of, waxen effigies

10 " The Magic Art," II, p. 67.

132 TOTEM AND TABOO

of each of his principal demons, and of their fathers, mothers, and children, were made and burnt in the same way. The service, accom- panied 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 steal- ing across the sky to hide the sun's bright disk. The fiends of darkness, clouds and rain, felt the injury inflicted on their images as if it had been done to themselves ; they passed away, at least for a time, and the beneficent sun-god shone out tri- umphant 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 and which have been partly preserved in the myths and cults of higher stages of evolution: the art of causing rain and fruitfulness by magic. Rain is produced by magic means, by imitating it, and perhaps also by imitating the clouds and storm which produce it. It looks as if they wanted to "play rain." The Ainos of Japan, for instance, make rain by

11 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, 1. c, p. 87, note.

THE OMNIPOTENCE OF THOUGHT 133

pouring out water through a big sieve, while others fit out a big bowl with sails and oars as if it were a ship, which is then dragged about the village and gardens. But the fruitfulness of the soil was assured by magic means by showing it the spectacle of human sexual intercourse. To cite one out of many examples; in some part of Java, the peasants used to go out into the fields at night for sexual intercourse when the rice was about to blossom in order to stimulate the rice to fruitfulness through their ex ample. ^^ At the same time it was feared that proscribed in- cestuous 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 a Dayak village had set out on a hunt for wild-boars, those remaining behind were in the meantime not permitted to touch either oil or water with their hands, as such acts would soften the hunters' fingers and would let the quarry slip through their hands. ^^ Or when a Gilyak hunter was pursuing game in the woods, his children were forbidden to make draw- ings on wood or in the sand, as the paths in the

12 " The Magic Art," II, p. 98.

13 An echo of this is to be found in the "Oedipus Rex" of Sophocles.

14 "The Magic Art," p. 120.

134 TOTEM AND TABOO

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 difficulties in grasping the pecul- iarity of magic.

There is no doubt about what is considered the effective force in all these examples. It is the similarity between the performed action and the expected happening. Frazer therefore calls this kind of magic imitative or hoineopatJiic, 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 ar- ranged 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 prin- ciple 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 exam- ples.

Another method may be used to injure an

15 1. c, p. 122.

THE OMNIPOTENCE OF THOUGHT 135

enemy. You possess yourself of his hair, his nails, anything that he has discarded, or even a part of his clothing, and do something hostile to these things. This is just as effective as if you had dominated the person himself, and any- thing 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 essen- tial part of a personality; if therefore you know the name of a person or a spirit you have ac- quired a certain power over its bearer. This explains the remarkable precautions and restric- tions 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 restric- tions as to diet under special circumstances. Thus a pregnant woman will avoid eating the meat of certain animals because their undesir- able 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

16 See preceding chapter, p. 92.

136 TOTEM AND TABOO

whether it had consisted of only one very im- portant contact. Thus, for instance, the belief in a magic bond which links the fate of a woun(ic^^ with the weapon which caused it can be followed unchanged tlirough 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 inflamma- tion 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. Plin,y, in his Natural History XXVIII, advises spitting on the hand which has caused the injury if one regrets having in- jured some one; the pain of the injured person will then immediately be eased. Francis Bacon, in his Natural History, mentions the generally accredited belief that putting a salve on the weapon which has made a wound will cause this wound to heal of itself. It is said that even to- day Enghsh peasants follow this prescription, and that if they have cut themselves with a scythe they will from that moment on carefully keep the instrument clean in order that the wound may not fester. In June, 1902, a local Enghsh weekly reported that a woman called Matilde Henry of Norwich accidentally ran an iron nail into the sole of her foot. Without having the

THE OMNIPOTENCE OF THOUGHT 137

wound examined or even taking off her stocking she bade her daughter to oil the nail thoroughly, in tlie expectation that then nothing could hap- pen to her. She died a few days later of tetanus ^" in consequence of postponed antisepsis.

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

It will at first seem strange that this illuminat-

17 Frazer, "The Magic Art," p. 201-203.

18 " The Magic Art," p. 420.

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ing explanation of magic could have been re- jected by some authors as unsatisfactory/^ But on closer consideration we must sustain the objection that the association theory of magic merely explains the paths that magic travels, and not its essential nature, that is, it does not ex- plain the misunderstanding which bids it put psychological laws in place of natural ones. We are apparently in need here of a dynamic factor ; but while the search for this leads the critics of Frazer's theory astray, it will be easy to give a satisfactory explanation of magic by carrying its association theory further and by entering more deeply into it.

First let us examine the simpler and more im- portant case of imitative magic. According to Frazer this may be practiced by itself, whereas contagious magic as a rule presupposes the imi- tative.^^ The motives which impel one to ex- ercise magic are easily recognized; they are the wishes of men. We need onl}^ 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.

19 Compare the article "Magic" (N. T. W.) "Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th Ed. 20 1. c, p. 54.

THE OMNIPOTENCE OF THOUGHT 139

In the case of the child which finds itself un- der analogous psychic conditions, without be- ing as yet capable of motor activity, we have elsewhere advocated the assumption that it at first really satisfies its wishes by means of hal- lucinations, in that it creates the satisfying sit- uation 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 change the face of the earth in the service of wish fulfillment is now used to represent the gratifica- tion so that one ma}^ experience it, as it were, through motor hallucination. Such a repixsen- tation of the gratified wish is altogether compar- able to the pZa?/ 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 modest}^ in our sense, or of resigna- tion 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

21 Formulation of two principles of psychic activity, "Jahrb. fUr Psychoanalyt. Forschungen," Vol. Ill, 1912, p. 2.

140 TOTEM AND TABOO

more correct to say that primitive man does not become aware of the over-valuation of his psychic acts until it becomes evident to him through the means employed. It would also seem as if it were the magic act itself which compels the ful- fillment 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 practiced, the psychic phenomenon of skepticism already manifests it- self as a tendency to repression. At that stage men will acknowledge that the conjuration of spirits avails nothing unless accompanied by be- lief, 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 over-valuation of all psychic processes, that is to say there is an atti- tude towards the world which according to our understanding of the relation of reality to

22 The King in "Hamlet" (Act III, Scene 4):

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

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thought must appear Hke an over-estimation of the latter. Objects as such are over-shadowed by the ideas representing them ; what takes place in the latter must also happen to the former and the relations which exist between ideas are also postulated as to things. As thought does not recognize distances and easily brings together in one act of consciousness things spatially and tem- porally 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 con- tiguity is contact in the direct sense, and associa- tion 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 prin- ciple which controls magic, and the technique of

23 Compare Chapter II.

142 TOTEM AND TABOO

the animistic method of thought, is "Omnipotence of Thought."

3

I have adopted the term "Omnipotence of Thought" from a highly inteUigent man, a former sufferer from compulsion neurosis, who, after being cured through psychoanalytic treat- ment, was able to demonstrate his efficiencj^ and good sense.^^ He had coined this phrase to designate all those peculiar and uncanny occur- rences 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 actu- ally confronted with this person as if he had con- jured him up; if he inquired suddenly about the state of health of an acquaintance whom he had long missed he was sure to hear that this ac- quaintance had just died, so that he could believe that the deceased had drawn his attention to him- self by telepathic means; if he uttered a half meant imprecation against a stranger, he could expect to have him die soon thereafter and bur- den 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

24 Remarks upon a case of Compulsion Neurosis, "Jahrb. fiir Psychoanalyt. und Psychopath. Forschungen," Vol. I, 1909.

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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, where the results of tliis primitive method of thought are most often found or met in consciousness. But we must guard against seeing in this a dis- tinguishing characteristic of this neurosis, for analytic investigation reveals the same mechan- ism in the other neuroses. In every one of the neuroses it is not the reality of the experience but the reality of the thought which forms the basis for the symptom formation. Neurotics live in a special world in which, as I have elsewhere ex- pressed it, only the "neurotic standard of cur- rency" counts, that is to say, only things inten- sively thought of or affectively conceived are ef- fective with them, regardless of whether these things are in harmony with outer reality. The hysteric repeats in his attacks and fixates through his sj^mptoms, occurrences which have taken place only in his phantasy, though in the last analysis they go back to real events or have been built up from them. The neurotic's guilty conscience is

25 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.

144. TOTEM AND TABOO

just as incomprehensible if traced to real mis- deeds. A compulsion neurotic may be oppressed by a sense of guilt which is appropriate to a wholesale murderer, while at the same time he acts towards his fellow beings in a most consider- ate 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 mani- fest themselves towards his fellow beings. It is motivated from the point of view of unconscious thoughts, but not of intentional acts. Thus the omnipotence of thought, the over-estimation of psychic processes as opposed to reality, proves to be of unhmited effect in the neurotic's affective life and in all that emanates from it. But if we subject him to psychoanalytic treatment, which makes his unconscious thoughts conscious to him, he refuses to believe that thoughts are free and is always afraid to express evil wishes lest they be fulfilled in consequence of his utterance. But through this attitude as well as through the superstition which plays an active part in his life he reveals to us how close he stands to the sav- age who believes he can change the outer world by a mere thought of his.

The primary obsessive actions of these neu- rotics are really altogether of a magical nature. If not magic they are at least anti-magic and are

THE OMNIPOTENCE OF THOUGHT 145

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 philoso- phy; we have heard that the formation of the soul conception and of the belief in demons which