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Title: Totem and taboo
Resemblances between the psychic lives of savages and neurotics

Author: Sigmund Freud

Translator: A. A. Brill

Release date: October 28, 2012 [eBook #41214]
Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

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TOTEM AND TABOO
BY DR. S. FREUD

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TOTEM AND TABOO

RESEMBLANCES BETWEEN THE PSYCHIC
LIVES OF SAVAGES AND NEUROTICS

BY

PROFESSOR SIGMUND FREUD, Ll.D.

Authorized English Translation,
with Introduction by

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

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

LONDON
GEORGE ROUTLEDGE & SONS, LIMITED

1919
Printed in Great Britain
by Butler & Tanner.
Frome and London

AUTHOR’S PREFACE
THE essays treated here appeared under the subtitle of this book in the first
numbers of the periodical Imago edited by me. They represent my first
efforts to apply view-points and results of psychoanalysis to unexplained
problems of racial psychology. In method this book contrasts with that of
W. Wundt and the works of the Zurich Psychoanalytic School. The former
tries to accomplish the same object through assumptions and procedures
from non-analytic psychology, while the latter follow the opposite course
and strive to settle problems of individual psychology by referring to
material of racial psychology[1]. I am pleased to say that the first stimulus
for my own works came from these two sources.
I am fully aware of the shortcomings in these essays. I shall not touch
upon those which are characteristic of first efforts at investigation. The
others, however, demand a word of explanation. The four essays which are
here collected will be of interest to a wide circle of educated people, but
they can only be thoroughly understood and judged by those who are really
acquainted with psychoanalysis as such. It is hoped that they may serve as a
bond between students of ethnology, philology, folklore and of the allied
sciences, and psychoanalysts; they cannot, however, supply both groups the
entire requisites for such co-operation. They will not furnish the former
with sufficient insight into the new psychological technique, nor will the
psychoanalysts acquire through them an adequate command over the
material to be elaborated. Both groups will have to content themselves with
whatever attention they can stimulate here and there and with the hope that
frequent meetings between them will not remain unproductive for science.
The two principal themes, totem and taboo, which give the name to this
small book are not treated alike here. The problem of taboo is presented
more exhaustively, and the effort to solve it is approached with perfect
confidence. The investigation of totemism may be modestly expressed as:
“This is all that psychoanalytic study can contribute at present to the
elucidation of the problem of totemism.” This difference in the treatment of
the two subjects is due to the fact that taboo still exists in our midst. To be
sure, it is negatively conceived and directed to different contents, but
according to its psychological nature, it is still nothing else than Kant’s

‘Categorical Imperative’, which tends to act compulsively and rejects all
conscious motivations. On the other hand, totemism is a religio-social
institution which is alien to our present feelings; it has long been abandoned
and replaced by new forms. In the religions, morals, and customs of the
civilized races of to-day it has left only slight traces, and even among those
races where it is still retained, it has had to undergo great changes. The
social and material progress of the history of mankind could obviously
change taboo much less than totemism.
In this book the attempt is ventured to find the original meaning of
totemism through its infantile traces, that is, through the indications in
which it reappears in the development of our own children. The close
connection between totem and taboo indicates the further paths to the
hypothesis maintained here. And although this hypothesis leads to
somewhat improbable conclusions, there is no reason for rejecting the
possibility that it comes more or less near to the reality which is so hard to
reconstruct.

CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE
I The Savage’s Dread of Incest 1
II Taboo and the Ambivalence of Emotions 30
III Animism, Magic and the Omnipotence of Thought 125
IV The Infantile Recurrence of Totemism 166

TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION
WHEN one reviews the history of psychoanalysis[2] one finds that it had its
inception in the study of morbid mental states. Beginning with the
observation of hysteria and the other neuroses[3] Professor Freud gradually
extended his investigations to normal psychology and evolved new
concepts and new methods of study. The neurotic symptoms were no longer
imaginary troubles the nature of which one could not grasp, but were
conceived as mental and emotional maladjustments to one’s environment.
The stamp of degeneracy impressed upon neurotics by other schools of
medicine was altogether eradicated. Deeper investigation showed
conclusively that a person might become neurotic if subjected to certain
environments, and that there was no definite dividing line between normal
and abnormal. The hysterical symptoms, obsessions, doubts, phobias, as
well as hallucinations of the insane, show the same mechanisms as those
similar psychic structures which one constantly encounters in normal
persons in the form of mistakes in talking, reading, writing, forgetting[4],
dreams and wit. The dream, always highly valued by the populace, and as
much despised by the educated classes, has a definite structure and meaning
when subjected to analysis. Professor Freud’s monumental work, The
Interpretation of Dreams[5], marked a new epoch in the history of mental
science. One might use the same words in reference to his profound
analysis of wit[6].
Faulty psychic actions, dreams and wit are products of the unconscious
mental activity, and like neurotic or psychotic manifestations represent
efforts at adjustment to one’s environment. The slip of the tongue shows
that on account of unconscious inhibitions the individual concerned is
unable to express his true thoughts; the dream is a distorted or plain
expression of those wishes which are prohibited in the waking states, and
the witticism, owing to its veiled or indirect way of expression, enables the
individual to obtain pleasure from forbidden sources. But whereas dreams,
witticisms, and faulty actions give evidences of inner conflicts which the
individual overcomes, the neurotic or psychotic symptom is the result of a
failure and represents a morbid adjustment.

The aforementioned psychic formations are therefore nothing but
manifestations of the struggle with reality, the constant effort to adjust one’s
primitive feelings to the demands of civilization. In spite of all later
development the individual retains all his infantile psychic structures.
Nothing is lost; the infantile wishes and primitive impulses can always be
demonstrated in the grown-up and on occasion can be brought back to the
surface. In his dreams the normal person is constantly reviving his
childhood, and the neurotic or psychotic individual merges back into a sort
of psychic infantilism through his morbid productions. The unconscious
mental activity which is made up of repressed infantile material for ever
tries to express itself. Whenever the individual finds it impossible to
dominate the difficulties of the world of reality there is a regression to the
infantile, and psychic disturbances ensue which are conceived as peculiar
thoughts and acts. Thus the civilized adult is the result of his childhood or
the sum total of his early impressions; psychoanalysis thus confirms the old
saying: The child is father to the man.
It is at this point in the development of psychoanalysis that the paths
gradually broadened until they finally culminated in this work. There were
many indications that the childhood of the individual showed a marked
resemblance to the primitive history or the childhood of races. The
knowledge gained from dream analysis and phantasies[7], when applied to
the productions of racial phantasies, like myths and fairy tales, seemed to
indicate that the first impulse to form myths was due to the same emotional
strivings which produced dreams, fancies and symptoms[8]. Further study in
this direction has thrown much light on our great cultural institutions, such
as religion, morality, law and philosophy, all of which Professor Freud has
modestly formulated in this volume and thus initiated a new epoch in the
study of racial psychology.
I take great pleasure in acknowledging my indebtedness to Mr Alfred B.
Kuttner for the invaluable assistance he rendered in the translation of this
work.
A. A. BRILL.

TOTEM AND TABOO

CHAPTER I

THE SAVAGE’S DREAD OF INCEST

PRIMITIVE man is known to us by the stages of development through which
he has passed: that is, through the inanimate monuments and implements
which he has left behind for us, through our knowledge of his art, his
religion and his attitude towards life, which we have received either directly
or through the medium of legends, myths and fairy tales; and through the
remnants of his ways of thinking that survive in our own manners and
customs. Moreover, in a certain sense he is still our contemporary: there are
people whom we still consider more closely related to primitive man than to
ourselves, in whom we therefore recognize the direct descendants and
representatives of earlier man. We can thus judge the so-called savage and
semi-savage races; their psychic life assumes a peculiar interest for us, for
we can recognize in their psychic life a well-preserved, early stage of our
own development.
If this assumption is correct, a comparison of the ‘Psychology of
Primitive Races’ as taught by folklore, with the psychology of the neurotic
as it has become known through psychoanalysis will reveal numerous
points of correspondence and throw new light on subjects that are more or
less familiar to us.
For outer as well as for inner reasons, I am choosing for this comparison
those tribes which have been described by ethnographists as being most
backward and wretched: the aborigines of the youngest continent, namely
Australia, whose fauna has also preserved for us so much that is archaic and
no longer to be found elsewhere.
The aborigines of Australia are looked upon as a peculiar race which
shows neither physical nor linguistic relationship with its nearest
neighbours, the Melanesian, Polynesian and Malayan races. They do not
build houses or permanent huts; they do not cultivate the soil or keep any
domestic animals except dogs; and they do not even know the art of pottery.
They live exclusively on the flesh of all sorts of animals which they kill in
the chase, and on the roots which they dig. Kings or chieftains are unknown

among them, and all communal affairs are decided by the elders in
assembly. It is quite doubtful whether they evince any traces of religion in
the form of worship of higher beings. The tribes living in the interior who
have to contend with the greatest vicissitudes of life owing to a scarcity of
water, seem in every way more primitive than those who live near the coast.
We surely would not expect that these poor naked cannibals should be
moral in their sex life according to our ideas, or that they should have
imposed a high degree of restriction upon their sexual impulses. And yet we
learn that they have considered it their duty to exercise the most searching
care and the most painful rigour in guarding against incestuous sexual
relations. In fact their whole social organization seems to serve this object
or to have been brought into relation with its attainment.
Among the Australians the system of Totemism takes the place of all
religious and social institutions. Australian tribes are divided into smaller
septs or clans, each taking the name of its totem. Now what is a totem? As a
rule it is an animal, either edible and harmless, or dangerous and feared;
more rarely the totem is a plant or a force of nature (rain, water), which
stands in a peculiar relation to the whole clan. The totem is first of all the
tribal ancestor of the clan, as well as its tutelary spirit and protector; it sends
oracles and, though otherwise dangerous, the totem knows and spares its
children. The members of a totem are therefore under a sacred obligation
not to kill (destroy) their totem, to abstain from eating its meat or from any
other enjoyment of it. Any violation of these prohibitions is automatically
punished. The character of a totem is inherent not only in a single animal or
a single being but in all the members of the species. From time to time
festivals are held at which the members of a totem represent or imitate, in
ceremonial dances, the movements and characteristics of their totems.
The totem is hereditary either through the maternal or the paternal line;
(maternal transmission probably always preceded and was only later
supplanted by the paternal). The attachment to a totem is the foundation of
all the social obligations of an Australian: it extends on the one hand
beyond the tribal relationship, and on the other hand it supersedes
consanguineous relationship[9].
The totem is not limited to district or to locality; the members of a totem
may live separated from one another and on friendly terms with adherents
of other totems[10].

And now, finally, we must consider that peculiarity of the totemic system
which attracts the interest of the psychoanalyst. Almost everywhere the
totem prevails there also exists the law that the members of the same totem
are not allowed to enter into sexual relations with each other; that is, that
they cannot marry each other. This represents the exogamy which is
associated with the totem.
This sternly maintained prohibition is very remarkable. There is nothing
to account for it in anything that we have hitherto learned from the
conception of the totem or from any of its attributes; that is, we do not
understand how it happened to enter the system of totemism. We are
therefore not astonished if some investigators simply assume that at first
exogamy—both as to its origin and to its meaning—had nothing to do with
totemism, but that it was added to it at some time without any deeper
association, when marriage restrictions proved necessary. However that
may be, the association of totemism and exogamy exists, and proves to be
very strong.
Let us elucidate the meaning of this prohibition through further
discussion.
(a) The violation of the prohibition is not left to what is, so to speak, an
automatic punishment, as is the case with other violations of the
prohibitions of the totem (e.g., not to kill the totem animal), but is most
energetically avenged by the whole tribe as if it were a question of warding
off a danger that threatens the community as a whole or a guilt that weighs
upon all. A few sentences from Frazer’s book[11] will show how seriously
such trespasses are treated by these savages who, according to our standard
are otherwise very immoral.
“In Australia the regular penalty for sexual intercourse with a person of a
forbidden clan is death. It matters not whether the woman is of the same
local group or has been captured in war from another tribe; a man of the
wrong clan who uses her as his wife is hunted down and killed by his
clansmen, and so is the woman; though in some cases, if they succeed in
eluding capture for a certain time, the offence may be condoned. In the Ta-
Ta-thi tribe, New South Wales, in the rare cases which occur, the man is
killed, but the woman is only beaten or speared, or both, till she is nearly
dead; the reason given for not actually killing her being that she was
probably coerced. Even in casual amours the clan prohibitions are strictly

observed; any violations of these prohibitions ‘are regarded with the utmost
abhorrence and are punished by death’ (Howitt).”
(b) As the same severe punishment is also meted out for temporary love
affairs which have not resulted in childbirth, the assumption of other
motives, perhaps of a practical nature, becomes improbable.
(c) As the totem is hereditary and is not changed by marriage, the results
of the prohibition, for instance in the case of maternal heredity, are easily
perceived. If, for example, the man belongs to a clan with the totem of the
Kangaroo and marries a woman of the Emu totem, the children, both boys
and girls, are all Emu. According to the totem law incestuous relations with
his mother and his sister, who are Emu like himself, are therefore made
impossible for a son of this marriage[12].
(d) But we need only a reminder to realize that the exogamy connected
with the totem accomplishes more; that is, aims at more than the prevention
of incest with the mother or the sisters. It also makes it impossible for the
man to have sexual union with all the women of his own group, with a
number of females, therefore, who are not consanguineously related to him,
by treating all these women like blood relations. The psychological
justification for this extraordinary restriction, which far exceeds anything
comparable to it among civilized races, is not, at first, evident. All we seem
to understand is that the rôle of the totem (the animal) as ancestor is taken
very seriously. Everybody descended from the same totem is
consanguineous; that is, of one family; and in this family the most distant
grades of relationship are recognized as an absolute obstacle to sexual
union.
Thus these savages reveal to us an unusually high grade of incest dread
or incest sensitiveness, combined with the peculiarity, which we do not very
well understand, of substituting the totem relationship for the real blood
relationship. But we must not exaggerate this contradiction too much, and
let us bear in mind that the totem prohibitions include real incest as a
special case.
In what manner the substitution of the totem group for the actual family
has come about remains a riddle, the solution of which is perhaps bound up
with the explanation of the totem itself. Of course it must be remembered
that with a certain freedom of sexual intercourse, extending beyond the
limitations of matrimony, the blood relationship, and with it also the

prevention of incest, becomes so uncertain that we cannot dispense with
some other basis for the prohibition. It is therefore not superfluous to note
that the customs of Australians recognize social conditions and festive
occasions at which the exclusive conjugal right of a man to a woman is
violated.
The linguistic customs of these tribes, as well as of most totem races,
reveals a peculiarity which undoubtedly is pertinent in this connection. For
the designations of relationship of which they make use do not take into
consideration the relationship between two individuals, but between an
individual and his group; they belong, according to the expression of L. H.
Morgan, to the ‘classifying’ system. That means that a man calls not only
his begetter ‘father’ but also every other man who, according to the tribal
regulations, might have married his mother and thus become his father; he
calls ‘mother’ not only the woman who bore him but also every other
woman who might have become his mother without violation of the tribal
laws; he calls ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’ not only the children of his real
parents, but also the children of all the persons named who stand in the
parental group relation with him, and so on. The kinship names which two
Australians give each other do not, therefore, necessarily point to a blood
relationship between them, as they would have to according to the custom
of our language; they signify much more the social than the physical
relations. An approach to this classifying system is perhaps to be found in
our nursery, when the child is induced to greet every male and female friend
of the parents as ‘uncle’ and ‘aunt’, or it may be found in a transferred sense
when we speak of ‘Brothers in Apollo’, or ‘Sisters in Christ’.
The explanation of this linguistic custom, which seems so strange to us,
is simple if looked upon as a remnant and indication of those marriage
institutions which the Rev. L. Fison has called ‘group marriage’,
characterized by a number of men exercising conjugal rights over a number
of women. The children of this group marriage would then rightly look
upon each other as brothers and sisters although not born of the same
mother, and would take all the men of the group for their fathers.
Although a number of authors, as, for instance, B. Westermarck in his
History of Human Marriage[13], oppose the conclusions which others have
drawn from the existence of group-relationship names, the best authorities
on the Australian savages are agreed that the classificatory relationship
names must be considered as survivals from the period of group marriages.

And, according to Spencer and Gillen[14], a certain form of group marriage
can be established as still existing to-day among the tribes of the Urabunna
and the Dieri. Group marriage therefore preceded individual marriage
among these races, and did not disappear without leaving distinct traces in
language and custom.
But if we replace individual marriage, we can then grasp the apparent
excess of cases of incest shunning which we have met among these same
races. The totem exogamy, or prohibition of sexual intercourse between
members of the same clan, seemed the most appropriate means for the
prevention of group incest; and this totem exogamy then became fixed and
long survived its original motivation.
Although we believe we understand the motives of the marriage
restrictions among the Australian savages, we have still to learn that the
actual conditions reveal a still more bewildering complication. For there are
only few tribes in Australia which show no other prohibition besides the
totem barrier. Most of them are so organized that they fall into two divisions
which have been called marriage classes, or phratries. Each of these
marriage groups is exogamous and includes a majority of totem groups.
Usually each marriage group is again divided into two subclasses
(subphratries), and the whole tribe is therefore divided into four classes; the
subclasses thus standing between the phratries and the totem groups.
The typical and very often intricate scheme of organization of an
Australian tribe therefore looks as follows:

The twelve totem groups are brought under four subclasses and two
main classes. All the divisions are exogamous[15]. The subclass c forms an

exogamous unit with e, and the subclass d with f. The success or the
tendency of these arrangements is quite obvious; they serve as a further
restriction on the marriage choice and on sexual freedom. If there were only
these twelve totem groups—assuming the same number of people in each
group—every member of a group would have 11/12 of all the women of the
tribe to choose from. The existence of the two phratries reduces this number
to 6/12 or ½; a man of the totem α can only marry a woman from the groups
1 to 6. With the introduction of the two subclassess the selection sinks to
3/12 or ¼; a man of the totem α must limit his marriage choice to a woman
of the totems 4, 5, 6.
The historical relations of the marriage classes—of which there are
found as many as eight in some tribes—are quite unexplained. We only see
that these arrangements seek to attain the same object as the totem
exogamy, and even strive for more. But whereas the totem exogamy makes
the impression of a sacred statute which sprang into existence, no one
knows how, and is therefore a custom, the complicated institutions of the
marriage classes, with their sub-divisions and the conditions attached to
them, seem to spring from legislation with a definite aim in view. They
have perhaps taken up afresh the task of incest prohibition because the
influence of the totem was on the wane. And while the totem system is, as
we know, the basis of all other social obligations and moral restrictions of
the tribe, the importance of the phratries generally ceases when the
regulation of the marriage choice at which they aimed has been
accomplished.
In the further development of the classification of the marriage system
there seems to be a tendency to go beyond the prevention of natural and
group incest, and to prohibit marriage between more distant group relations,
in a manner similar to the Catholic church, which extended the marriage
prohibitions always in force for brother and sisters, to cousins, and invented
for them the grades of spiritual kinship[16].
It would hardly serve our purpose to go into the extraordinarily intricate
and unsettled discussion concerning the origin and significance of the
marriage classes, or to go more deeply into their relation to totemism. It is
sufficient for our purposes to point out the great care expended by the
Australians as well as by other savage people to prevent incest[17]. We must
say that these savages are even more sensitive to incest than we, perhaps

because they are more subject to temptations than we are, and hence require
more extensive protection against it.
But the incest dread of these races does not content itself with the
creation of the institutions described, which, in the main, seem to be
directed against group incest. We must add a series of ‘customs’ which
watch over the individual behaviour to near relatives in our sense, which are
maintained with almost religious severity and of whose object there can
hardly be any doubt. These customs or custom prohibitions may be called
‘avoidances’. They spread far beyond the Australian totem races. But here
again I must ask the reader to be content with a fragmentary excerpt from
the abundant material.
Such restrictive prohibitions are directed in Melanesia against the
relations of boys with their mothers and sisters. Thus, for instance, on
Lepers Island, one of the New Hebrides, the boy leaves his maternal home
at a fixed age and moves to the ‘clubhouse’, where he there regularly sleeps
and takes his meals. He may still visit his home to ask for food; but if his
sister is at home he must go away before he has eaten; if no sister is about
he may sit down to eat near the door. If brother and sister meet by chance in
the open, she must run away or turn aside and conceal herself. If the boy
recognizes certain footprints in the sand as his sister’s he is not to follow
them, nor is she to follow his. He will not even mention her name and will
guard against using any current word if it forms part of her name. This
avoidance, which begins with the ceremony of puberty, is strictly observed
for life. The reserve between mother and son increases with age and
generally is more obligatory on the mother’s side. If she brings him
something to eat she does not give it to him herself but puts it down before
him, nor does she address him in the familiar manner of mother and son,
but uses the formal address. Similar customs obtain in New Caledonia. If
brother and sister meet, she flees into the bush and he passes by without
turning his head toward her[18].
On the Gazella Peninsula in New Britain a sister, beginning with her
marriage, may no longer speak with her brother, nor does she utter his name
but designates him by means of a circumlocution[19].
In New Mecklenburg some cousins are subject to such restrictions,
which also apply to brothers and sisters. They may neither approach each
other, shake hands, nor give each other presents, though they may talk to

each other at a distance of several paces. The penalty for incest with a sister
is death through hanging[20].
These rules of avoidance are especially severe in the Fiji Islands where
they concern not only consanguineous sisters but group sisters as well.
To hear that these savages hold sacred orgies in which persons of just
these forbidden degrees of kinship seek sexual union would seem still more
peculiar to us, if we did not prefer to make use of this contradiction to
explain the prohibition instead of being astonished at it[21].
Among the Battas of Sumatra these laws of avoidance affect all near
relationships. For instance, it would be most offensive for a Battan to
accompany his own sister to an evening party. A brother will feel most
uncomfortable in the company of his sister even when other persons are
also present. If either comes into the house, the other prefers to leave. Nor
will a father remain alone in the house with his daughter any more than the
mother with her son. The Dutch missionary who reported these customs
added that unfortunately he had to consider them well founded. It is
assumed without question by these races that a man and a woman left alone
together will indulge in the most extreme intimacy, and as they expect all
kinds of punishments and evil consequences from consanguineous
intercourse they do quite right to avoid all temptations by means of such
prohibitions[22].
Among the Barongos in Delagoa Bay, in Africa, the most rigorous
precautions are directed, curiously enough, against the sister-in-law, the
wife of the brother of one’s own wife. If a man meets this person who is so
dangerous to him, he carefully avoids her. He does not dare to eat out of the
same dish with her; he speaks only timidly to her, does not dare to enter her
hut, and greets her only with a trembling voice[23].
Among the Akamba (or Wakamba) in British East Africa, a law of
avoidance is in force which one would have expected to encounter more
frequently. A girl must carefully avoid her own father between the time of
her puberty and her marriage. She hides herself if she meets him on the
street and never attempts to sit down next to him, behaving in this way right
up to her engagement. But after her marriage no further obstacle is put in
the way of her social intercourse with her father[24].
The most widespread and strictest avoidance, which is perhaps the most
interesting one for civilized races is that which restricts the social relations

between a man and his mother-in-law. It is quite general in Australia, but it
is also in force among the Melanesian, Polynesian and Negro races of
Africa as far as the traces of totemism and group relationship reach, and
probably further still. Among some of these races similar prohibitions exist
against the harmless social intercourse of a wife with her father-in-law, but
these are by far not so constant or so serious. In a few cases both parents-in-
law become objects of avoidance.
As we are less interested in the ethnographic dissemination than in the
substance and the purpose of the mother-in-law avoidance, I will here also
limit myself to a few examples.
On the Banks Island these prohibitions are very severe and painfully
exact. A man will avoid the proximity of his mother-in-law as she avoids
his. If they meet by chance on a path, the woman steps aside and turns her
back until he is passed, or he does the same.
In Vanna Lava (Port Patterson) a man will not even walk behind his
mother-in-law along the beach until the rising tide has washed away the
trace of her footsteps. But they may talk to each other at a certain distance.
It is quite out of the question that he should ever pronounce the name of his
mother-in-law, or she his[25].
On the Solomon Islands, beginning with his marriage, a man must
neither see nor speak with his mother-in-law. If he meets her he acts as if he
did not know her and runs away as fast as he can in order to hide
himself[26].
Among the Zulu Kaffirs custom demands that a man should be ashamed
of his mother-in-law and that he should do everything to avoid her
company. He does not enter a hut in which she is, and when they meet he or
she goes aside, she perhaps hiding behind a bush while he holds his shield
before his face. If they cannot avoid each other and the woman has nothing
with which to cover herself, she at least binds a bunch of grass around her
head in order to satisfy the ceremonial requirements. Communication
between them must either be made through a third person or else they may
shout at each other at a considerable distance if they have some barrier
between them as, for instance, the enclosure of a kraal. Neither may utter
the other’s name[27].
Among the Basogas, a negro tribe living in the region of the Nile
sources, a man may talk to his mother-in-law only if she is in another room

of the house and is not visible to him. Moreover, this race abominates incest
to such an extent as not to let it go unpunished even among domestic
animals[28].
Whereas all observers have interpreted the purpose and meaning of the
avoidances between near relatives as protective measures against incest,
different interpretations have been given for those prohibitions which
concern the relationship with the mother-in-law. It was quite
incomprehensible why all these races should manifest such great fear of
temptation on the part of the man for an elderly woman, old enough to be
his mother[29].
The same objection was also raised against the conception of Fison who
called attention to the fact that certain marriage class systems show a gap in
that they make marriage between a man and his mother-in-law theoretically
not impossible and that a special guarantee was therefore necessary to guard
against this possibility.
Sir J. Lubbock, in his book The Origin of Civilization, traces back the
behaviour of the mother-in-law toward the son-in-law to the former
‘marriage by capture’. “As long as the capture of women actually took
place, the indignation of the parents was probably serious enough. When
nothing but symbols of this form of marriage survived, the indignation of
the parents was also symbolized and this custom continued after its origin
had been forgotten.” Crawley has found it easy to show how little this
tentative explanation agrees with the details of actual observation.
E. B. Tylor thinks that the treatment of the son-in-law on the part of the
mother-in-law is nothing more than a form of ‘cutting’ on the part of the
woman’s family. The man counts as a stranger, and this continues until the
first child is born. But even if no account is taken of cases in which this last
condition does not remove the prohibition, this explanation is subject to the
objection that it does not throw any light on the custom dealing with the
relation between mother-in-law and son-in-law, thus overlooking the sexual
factor, and that it does not take into account the almost sacred loathing
which finds expression in the laws of avoidance[30].
A Zulu woman who was asked about the basis for this prohibition
showed great delicacy of feeling in her answer: “It is not right that he
should see the breasts which nursed his wife.”[31]

It is known that also among civilized races the relation of son-in-law and
mother-in-law belongs to one of the most difficult sides of family
organization. Although laws of avoidance no longer exist in the society of
the white races of Europe and America, much quarrelling and displeasure
would often be avoided if they did exist and did not have to be re-
established by individuals. Many a European will see an act of high wisdom
in the laws of avoidance which savage races have established to preclude
any understanding between two persons who have become so closely
related. There is hardly any doubt that there is something in the
psychological situation of mother-in-law and son-in-law which furthers
hostilities between them and renders living together difficult. The fact that
the witticisms of civilized races show such a preference for this very
mother-in-law theme seems to me to point to the fact that the emotional
relations between mother-in-law and son-in-law are controlled by
components which stand in sharp contrast to each other. I mean that the
relation is really ‘ambivalent’, that is, it is composed of conflicting feelings
of tenderness and hostility.
A certain part of these feelings is evident. The mother-in-law is
unwilling to give up the possession of her daughter; she distrusts the
stranger to whom her daughter has been delivered, and shows a tendency to
maintain the dominating position, to which she became accustomed at
home. On the part of the man, there is the determination not to subject
himself any longer to any foreign will, his jealousy of all persons who
preceded him in the possession of his wife’s tenderness, and, last but not
least, his aversion to being disturbed in his illusion of sexual over-valuation.
As a rule such a disturbance emanates for the most part from his mother-in-
law who reminds him of her daughter through so many common traits but
who lacks all the charm of youth, such as beauty and that psychic
spontaneity which makes his wife precious to him.
The knowledge of hidden psychic feelings which psychoanalytic
investigation of individuals has given us, makes it possible to add other
motives to the above. Where the psycho-sexual needs of the woman are to
be satisfied in marriage and family life, there is always the danger of
dissatisfaction through the premature termination of the conjugal relation,
and the monotony in the wife’s emotional life. The ageing mother protects
herself against this by living through the lives of her children, by
identifying herself with them and making their emotional experiences her

own. Parents are said to remain young with their children, and this is, in
fact, one of the most valuable psychic benefits which parents derive from
their children. Childlessness thus eliminates one of the best means to endure
the necessary resignation imposed upon the individual through marriage.
This emotional indentification with the daughter may easily go so far with
the mother that she also falls in love with the man her daughter loves, which
leads, in extreme cases, to severe forms of neurotic ailments on account of
the violent psychic resistance against this emotional predisposition. At all
events the tendency to such infatuation is very frequent with the mother-in-
law, and either this infatuation itself or the tendency opposed to it joins the
conflict of contending forces in the psyche of the mother-in-law. Very often
it is just this harsh and sadistic component of the love emotion which is
turned against the son-in-law in order better to suppress the forbidden
tender feelings.
The relation of the husband to his mother-in-law is complicated through
similar feelings which, however, spring from other sources. The path of
object selection has normally led him to his love object through the image
of his mother and perhaps of his sister; in consequence of the incest barriers
his preference for these two beloved persons of his childhood has been
deflected and he is then able to find their image in strange objects. He now
sees the mother-in-law taking the place of his own mother and of his sister’s
mother, and there develops a tendency to return to the primitive selection,
against which everything in him resists. His incest dread demands that he
should not be reminded of the genealogy of his love selection; the actuality
of his mother-in-law, whom he had not known all his life like his mother so
that her picture can be preserved unchanged in his unconscious, facilitates
this rejection. An added mixture of irritability and animosity in his feelings
leads us to suspect that the mother-in-law actually represents an incest
temptation for the son-in-law, just as it not infrequently happens that a man
falls in love with his subsequent mother-in-law before his inclination is
transferred to her daughter.
I see no objection to the assumption that it is just this incestuous factor
of the relationship which motivates the avoidance between son-and mother-
in-law among savages. Among the explanations for the ‘avoidances’ which
these primitive races observe so strictly, we would therefore give preference
to the opinion originally expressed by Fison, who sees nothing in these
regulations but a protection against possible incest. This would also hold

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

CHAPTER II

TABOO AND THE AMBIVALENCE OF EMOTIONS

1
TABOO is a Polynesian word, the translation of which provides difficulties
for us because we no longer possess the idea which it connotes. It was still
current with the ancient Romans: their word ‘sacer’ was the same as the
taboo of the Polynesians. The ἁγος of the Greeks and the Kodaush of the
Hebrews must also have signified the same thing which the Polynesians
express through their word taboo and what many races in America, Africa
(Madagascar), North and Central Asia express through analogous
designations.
For us the meaning of taboo branches off into two opposite directions.
On the one hand it means to us sacred, consecrated: but on the other hand it
means, uncanny, dangerous, forbidden, and unclean. The opposite for taboo
is designated in Polynesian by the word noa and signifies something
ordinary and generally accessible. Thus something like the concept of
reserve inheres in taboo; taboo expresses itself essentially in prohibitions
and restrictions. Our combination of ‘holy dread’ would often express the
meaning of taboo.
The taboo restrictions are different from religious or moral prohibitions.
They are not traced to a commandment of a god but really they themselves
impose their own prohibitions; they are differentiated from moral
prohibitions by failing to be included in a system which declares
abstinences in general to be necessary and gives reasons for this necessity.
The taboo prohibitions lack all justification and are of unknown origin.
Though incomprehensible to us they are taken as a matter of course by
those who are under their dominance.
Wundt[32] calls taboo the oldest unwritten code of law of humanity. It is
generally assumed that taboo is older than the gods and goes back to the
pre-religious age.

As we are in need of an impartial presentation of the subject of taboo
before subjecting it to psychoanalytic consideration I shall now cite an
excerpt from the article Taboo in the Encyclopedia Britannica written by
the anthropologist Northcote W. Thomas[33]:
“Properly speaking taboo includes only (a) the sacred (or unclean)
character of persons or things, (b) the kind of prohibition which results from
this character, and (c) the sanctity (or uncleanliness) which results from a
violation of the prohibition. The converse of taboo in Polynesia is ‘noa’ and
allied forms which mean ‘general’ or ‘common’ ...
“Various classes of taboo in the wider sense may be distinguished: 1.
natural or direct, the result of ‘mana’ mysterious (power) inherent in a
person or thing; 2. communicated or indirect, equally the result of ‘mana’
but (a) acquired or (b) imposed by a priest, chief or other person; 3.
intermediate, where both factors are present, as in the appropriation of a
wife to her husband. The term taboo is also applied to ritual prohibitions of
a different nature; but its use in these senses is better avoided. It might be
argued that the term should be extended to embrace cases in which the
sanction of the prohibition is the creation of a god or spirit, i.e., to religious
interdictions as distinguished from magical, but there is neither automatic
action nor contagion in such a case, and a better term for it is religious
interdiction.
“The objects of the taboo are many: 1. direct taboos aim at (a) protection
of important persons—chiefs, priests, etc.—and things against harm; (b)
safeguarding of the weak—women children and common people generally
—from the powerful mana (magical influence) of chiefs and priests; (c)
providing against the dangers incurred by handling or coming in contact
with corpses, by eating certain food, etc.; (d) guarding the chief acts of life
—births, initiation, marriage and sexual functions—against interference; (e)
securing human beings against the wrath or power of gods and spirits[34]; (f)
securing unborn infants and young children who stand in a specially
sympathetic relation with their parents, from the consequence of certain
actions, and more especially from the communication of qualities supposed
to be derived from certain foods. 2. Taboos are imposed in order to secure
against thieves the property of an individual, his fields, tools, etc.”
Other parts of the article may be summarized as follows. Originally the
punishment for the violation of a taboo was probably left to an inner,

automatic arrangement. The violated taboo avenged itself. Wherever the
taboo was related to ideas of gods and demons an automatic punishment
was expected from the power of the godhead. In other cases, probably as a
result of a further development of the idea, society took over the
punishment of the offender, whose action has endangered his companions.
Thus man’s first systems of punishment are also connected with taboo.
“The violation of a taboo makes the offender himself taboo.” The author
goes on to say that certain dangers resulting from the violation of a taboo
may be exercised through acts of penance and ceremonies of purification.
A peculiar power inherent in persons and ghosts, which can be
transmitted from them to inanimate objects is regarded as the source of the
taboo. This part of the article reads as follows: “Persons or things which are
regarded as taboo may be compared to objects charged with electricity; they
are the seat of tremendous power which is transmissible by contact, and
may be liberated with destructive effect if the organisms which provoke its
discharge are too weak to resist it; the result of a violation of a taboo
depends partly on the strength of the magical influence inherent in the taboo
object or person, partly on the strength of the opposing mana of the violator
of the taboo. Thus, kings and chiefs are possessed of great power, and it is
death for their subjects to address them directly; but a minister or other
person of greater mana than common, can approach them unharmed, and
can in turn be approached by their inferiors without risk.... So, too, indirect
taboos depend for their strength on the mana of him who opposes them; if it
is a chief or a priest, they are more powerful than those imposed by a
common person.”
The fact that a taboo is transmissible has surely given rise to the effort of
removing it through expiatory ceremonies.
The author states that there are permanent and temporary taboos. The
former comprise priests and chiefs as well as the dead and everything that
has belonged to them. Temporary taboos attach themselves to certain
conditions such as menstruation and child-bed, the status of the warrior
before and after the expedition, the activities of fishing and of the chase,
and similar activities. A general taboo may also be imposed upon a large
district like an ecclesiastical interdict, and may then last for years.
If I judge my readers’ impressions correctly, I dare say that after hearing
all that was said about taboo they are far from knowing what to understand

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

sacred, above the ordinary, and at the same time dangerous, unclean and
mysterious.
Both this word and the system corresponding to it express a fragment of
psychic life which really is not comprehensible to us. And indeed it would
seem that no understanding of it could be possible without entering into the
study of the belief in spirits and demons which is so characteristic of these
low grades of culture.
Now why should we take any interest at all in the riddle of taboo? Not
only, I think, because every psychological problem is well worth the effort
of investigation for its own sake, but for other reasons as well. It may be
surmised that the taboo of Polynesian savages is after all not so remote from
us as we were at first inclined to believe; the moral and customary
prohibitions which we ourselves obey may have some essential relation to
this primitive taboo the explanation of which may in the end throw light
upon the dark origin of our own ‘categorical imperative.’
We are therefore inclined to listen with keen expectations when an
investigator like W. Wundt gives his interpretation of taboo, especially as he
promises to “go back to the very roots of the taboo concepts”[35].
Wundt states that the idea of taboo “includes all customs which express
dread of particular objects connected with cultic ideas or of actions having
reference to them”[36].
On another occasion he says: “In accordance with the general sense of
the word we understand by taboo every prohibition laid down in customs or
manners or in expressly formulated laws, not to touch an object or to take it
for one’s own use, or to make use of certain proscribed words....”
Accordingly there would not be a single race or stage of culture which had
escaped the injurious effects of taboo.
Wundt then shows why he finds it more practical to study the nature of
taboo in the primitive states of Australian savages rather than in the higher
culture of the Polynesian races. In the case of the Australians he divides
taboo prohibitions into three classes according as they concern animals,
persons or other objects. The animal taboo, which consists essentially of the
taboo against killing and eating, forms the nucleus of Totemism[37]. The
taboo of the second class, which has human beings for its object, is of an
essentially different nature. To begin with it is restricted to conditions which
bring about an unusual situation in life for the person tabooed. Thus young

men at the feast of initiation, women during menstruation and immediately
after delivery, newly born children, the deceased and especially the dead,
are all taboo. The constantly used property of any person, such as his
clothes, tools and weapons, is permanently taboo for everybody else. In
Australia the new name which a youth receives at his initiation into
manhood becomes part of his most personal property, it is taboo and must
be kept secret. The taboos of the third class, which apply to trees, plants,
houses and localities, are more variable and seem only to follow the rule
that anything which for any reason arouses dread or is mysterious, becomes
subject to taboo.
Wundt himself has to acknowledge that the changes which taboo
undergoes in the richer culture of the Polynesians and in the Malayan
Archipelago are not very profound. The greater social differentiation of
these races manifests itself in the fact that chiefs, kings and priests exercise
an especially effective taboo and are themselves exposed to the strongest
taboo compulsion.
But the real sources of taboo lie deeper than in the interests of the
privileged classes: “They begin where the most primitive and at the same
time the most enduring human impulses have their origin, namely, in the
fear of the effect of demonic powers”[38]. “The taboo, which originally was
nothing more than the objectified fear of the demonic power thought to be
concealed in the tabooed object, forbids the irritation of this power and
demands the placation of the demon whenever the taboo has been
knowingly or unknowingly violated.”
The taboo then gradually became an autonomous power which has
detached itself from demonism. It becomes the compulsion of custom and
tradition and finally of the law. “But the commandment concealed behind
taboo prohibitions which differ materially according to place and time, had
originally the meaning: Beware of the wrath of the demons.”
Wundt therefore teaches that taboo is the expression and evolution of the
belief of primitive races in demonic powers, and that later taboo has
dissociated itself from this origin and has remained a power simply because
it was one by virtue of a kind of a psychic persistence and in this manner it
became the root of our customs and laws. As little as one can object to the
first part of this statement I feel, however, that I am only voicing the
impression of many of my readers if I call Wundt’s explanation

disappointing. Wundt’s explanation is far from going back to the sources of
taboo concepts or to their deepest roots. For neither fear nor demons can be
accepted in psychology as finalities defying any further deduction. It would
be different if demons really existed; but we know that, like gods, they are
only the product of the psychic powers of man; they have been created from
and out of something.
Wundt also expresses a number of important though not altogether clear
opinions about the double meaning of taboo. According to him the division
between sacred and unclean does not yet exist in the first primitive stages
of taboo. For this reason these conceptions entirely lack the significance
which they could only acquire later on when they came to be contrasted.
The animal, person or place on which there is a taboo is demonic, that is,
not sacred, and therefore not yet, in the later sense, unclean. The expression
taboo is particularly suitable for this undifferentiated and intermediate
meaning of the demonic, in the sense of something which may not be
touched, since it emphasizes a characteristic which finally adheres both to
what is sacred and to the unclean, namely, the dread of contact. But the fact
that this important characteristic is permanently held in common points to
the existence of an original agreement here between these two spheres
which gave way to a differentiation only as the result of further conditions
through which both finally developed into opposites.
The belief associated with the original taboo, according to which a
demonic power concealed in the object avenges the touching of it or its
forbidden use by bewitching the offender was still an entirely objectified
fear. This had not yet separated into the two forms which it assumed at a
more developed stage, namely, awe and aversion.
How did this separation come about? According to Wundt, this was done
through the transference of taboo prohibitions from the sphere of demons to
that of theistic conceptions. The antithesis of sacred and unclean coincides
with the succession of two mythological stages the first of which did not
entirely disappear when the second was reached but continued in a state of
greatly lowered esteem which gradually turned into contempt. It is a general
law in mythology that a preceding stage, just because it has been overcome
and pushed back by a higher stage, maintains itself next to it in a debased
form so that the objects of its veneration become objects of aversion[39].

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

2
He who approaches the problem of taboo from the field of
psychoanalysis, which is concerned with the study of the unconscious part
of the individual’s psychic life, needs but a moment’s reflection to realize
that these phenomena are by no means foreign to him. He knows people
who have individually created such taboo prohibitions for themselves,
which they follow as strictly as savages observe the taboos common to their
tribe or society. If he were not accustomed to call these individuals
‘compulsion neurotics’ he would find the term ‘taboo disease’ quite
appropriate for their malady. Psychoanalytic investigation has taught him
the clinical etiology and the essential part of the psychological mechanism
of this compulsion disease, so that he cannot resist applying what he has
learnt there to explain corresponding manifestations in folk psychology.
There is one warning to which we shall have to give heed in making this
attempt. The similarity between taboo and compulsion disease may be
purely superficial, holding good only for the manifestations of both without
extending into their deeper characteristics. Nature loves to use identical
forms in the most widely different biological connections, as, for instance,
for coral stems and plants and even for certain crystals or for the formation
of certain chemical precipitates. It would certainly be both premature and
unprofitable to base conclusions relating to inner relationships upon the
correspondence of merely mechanical conditions. We shall bear this
warning in mind without, however, giving up our intended comparison on
account of the possibility of such confusions.
The first and most striking correspondence between the compulsion
prohibitions of neurotics and taboo lies in the fact that the origin of these
prohibitions is just as unmotivated and enigmatic. They have appeared at
some time or other and must now be retained on account of an
unconquerable anxiety. An external threat of punishment is superfluous,
because an inner certainty (a conscience) exists that violation will be
followed by unbearable disaster. The very most that compulsion patients
can tell us is the vague premonition that some person of their environment
will suffer harm if they should violate the prohibition. Of what the harm is

to consist is not known, and this inadequate information is more likely to be
obtained during the later discussions of the expiatory and defensive actions
than when the prohibitions themselves are being discussed.
As in the case of taboo the nucleus of the neurotic prohibition is the act
of touching, whence we derive the name ‘touching phobia’ or délire de
toucher. The prohibition extends not only to direct contact with the body
but also to the figurative use of the phrase as ‘to come into contact’ or ‘be in
touch with some one or something’. Anything that leads the thoughts to
what is prohibited and thus calls forth mental contact is just as much
prohibited as immediate bodily contact; this same extension is also found in
taboo.
Some prohibitions are easily understood from their purpose but others
strike us as incomprehensible, foolish and senseless. We designate such
commands as ‘ceremonials’ and we find that taboo customs show the same
variations.
Obsessive prohibitions possess an extraordinary capacity for
displacement; they make use of almost any form of connection to extend
from one object to another and then in turn make this new object
‘impossible’, as one of my patients aptly puts it. This impossibility finally
lays an embargo upon the whole world. The compulsion neurotics act as if
the ‘impossible’ persons and things were the carriers of a dangerous
contagion which is ready to displace itself through contact to all
neighbouring things. We have already emphasized the same characteristics
of contagion and transference in the description of taboo prohibitions. We
also know that any one who has violated a taboo by touching something
which is taboo becomes taboo himself, and no one may come into contact
with him.
I shall put side by side two examples of transference or, to use a better
term, displacement, one from the life of the Maori, and the other from my
observation of a woman suffering from a compulsion neurosis:
“For a similar reason a Maori chief would not blow on a fire with his
mouth; for his sacred breath would communicate its sanctity to the fire,
which would pass it on to the meat in the pot, which would pass it on to the
man who ate the meat which was in the pot, which stood on the fire, which
was breathed on by the chief; so that the eater, infected by the chiefs breath
conveyed through these intermediaries, would surely die”[40].

My patient demanded that a utensil which her husband had purchased
and brought home should be removed lest it make the place where she lives
impossible. For she has heard that this object was bought in a store which is
situated, let us say, in Stag Street. But as the word ‘stag’ is the name of a
friend now in a distant city, whom she has known in her youth under her
maiden name and whom she now finds ‘impossible’, that is taboo, the
object bought in Vienna is just as taboo as this friend with whom she does
not want to come into contact.
Compulsion prohibitions, like taboo prohibitions, entail the most
extraordinary renunciations and restrictions of life, but a part of these can
be removed by carrying out certain acts which now also must be done
because they have acquired a compulsive character (obsessive acts); there is
no doubt that these acts are in the nature of penances, expiations, defence
reactions, and purifications. The most common of these obsessive acts is
washing with water (washing obsession). A part of the taboo prohibitions
can also be replaced in this way, that is to say, their violation can be made
good through such a ‘ceremonial’, and here too lustration through water is
the preferred way.
Let us now summarize the points in which the correspondence between
taboo customs and the symptoms of compulsion neurosis are most clearly
manifested: 1. In the lack of motivation of the commandments, 2. in their
enforcement through an inner need, 3. in their capacity of displacement and
in the danger of contagion from what is prohibited, 4. and in the causation
of ceremonial actions and commandments which emanate from the
forbidden.
However, psychoanalysis has made us familiar with the clinical history
as well as the psychic mechanism of compulsion neurosis. Thus the history
of a typical case of touching phobia reads as follows: In the very beginning,
during the early period of childhood, the person manifested a strong
pleasure in touching himself, the object of which was much more
specialized than one would be inclined to suspect. Presently the carrying
out of this very pleasurable act of touching was opposed by a prohibition
from without[41]. The prohibition was accepted because it was supported by
strong inner forces[42]; it proved to be stronger than the impulse which
wanted to manifest itself through this act of touching. But due to the
primitive psychic constitution of the child this prohibition did not succeed
in abolishing the impulse. Its only success lay in repressing the impulse (the

pleasure of touching) and banishing it into the unconscious. Both the
prohibition and the impulse remained; the impulse because it had only been
repressed and not abolished, the prohibition, because if it had ceased the
impulse would have broken through into consciousness and would have
been carried out. An unsolved situation, a psychic fixation, had thus been
created and now everything else emanated from the continued conflict
between prohibition and impulse.
The main characteristic of the psychic constellation which has thus gone
under fixation lies in what one might call the ambivalent behaviour[43] of
the individual to the object, or rather to an action regarding it. The
individual constantly wants to carry out this action (the act of touching), he
sees in it the highest pleasure, but he may not carry it out, and he even
abominates it. The opposition between these two streams cannot be easily
adjusted because—there is no other way to express it—they are so localized
in the psychic life that they cannot meet. The prohibition becomes fully
conscious, while the surviving pleasure of touching remains unconscious,
the person knowing nothing about it. If this psychological factor did not
exist the ambivalence could neither maintain itself so long nor lead to such
subsequent manifestations.
In the clinical history of the case we have emphasized the appearance of
the prohibition in early childhood as the determining factor; but for the
further elaboration of the neurosis this rôle is played by the repression
which appears at this age. On account of the repression which has taken
place, which is connected with forgetting (amnesia), the motivation of the
prohibition that has become conscious remains unknown, and all attempts
to unravel it intellectually must fail, as the point of attack cannot be found.
The prohibition owes its strength—its compulsive character—to its
association with its unknown counterpart, the hidden and unabated pleasure,
that is to say, to an inner need into which conscious insight is lacking. The
transferability and reproductive power of the prohibition reflect a process
which harmonizes with the unconscious pleasure and is very much
facilitated through the psychological determinants of the unconscious. The
pleasure of the impulse constantly undergoes displacement in order to
escape the blocking which it encounters and seeks to acquire surrogates for
the forbidden in the form of substitutive objects and actions. For the same
reason the prohibition also wanders and spreads to the new aims of the
proscribed impulse. Every new advance of the repressed libido is answered

by the prohibition with a new severity. The mutual inhibition of these two
contending forces creates a need for discharge and for lessening the existing
tension, in which we may recognize the motivation for the compulsive acts.
In the neurosis there are distinctly acts of compromise which on the one
hand may be regarded as proofs of remorse and efforts to expiate and
similar actions; but on the other hand they are at the same time substitutive
actions which recompense the impulse for what has been forbidden. It is a
law of neurotic diseases that these obsessive acts serve the impulse more
and more and come nearer and nearer to the original and forbidden act.
We may now make the attempt to study taboo as if it were of the same
nature as the compulsive prohibitions of our patients. It must naturally be
clearly understood that many of the taboo prohibitions which we shall study
are already secondary, displaced and distorted, so that we shall have to be
satisfied if we can shed some light upon the earliest and most important
taboo prohibitions. We must also remember that the differences in the
situation of the savage and of the neurotic may be important enough to
exclude complete correspondence and prevent a point by point transfer
from one to the other such as would be possible if we were dealing with
exact copies.
First of all it must be said that it is useless to question savages as to the
real motivation of their prohibitions or as to the genesis of taboo. According
to our assumption they must be incapable of telling us anything about it
since this motivation is ‘unconscious’ to them. But following the model of
the compulsive prohibition we shall construct the history of taboo as
follows: Taboos are very ancient prohibitions which at one time were forced
upon a generation of primitive people from without, that is, they probably
were forcibly impressed upon them by an earlier generation. These
prohibitions concerned actions for which there existed a strong desire. The
prohibitions maintained themselves from generation to generation, perhaps
only as the result of a tradition set up by paternal and social authority. But
in later generations they have perhaps already become ‘organized’ as a
piece of inherited psychic property. Whether there are such ‘innate ideas’ or
whether these have brought about the fixation of the taboo by themselves or
by co-operating with education no one could decide in the particular case in
question. The persistence of taboo teaches, however, one thing, namely, that
the original pleasure to do the forbidden still continues among taboo races.
They therefore assume an ambivalent attitude toward their taboo

prohibitions; in their unconscious they would like nothing better than to
transgress them but they are also afraid to do it; they are afraid just because
they would like to transgress, and the fear is stronger than the pleasure. But
in every individual of the race the desire for it is unconscious, just as in the
neurotic.
The oldest and most important taboo prohibitions are the two basic laws
of totemism: namely not to kill the totem animal, and to avoid sexual
intercourse with totem companions of the other sex.
It would therefore seem that these must have been the oldest and
strongest desires of mankind. We cannot understand this and therefore we
cannot use these examples to test our assumptions as long as the meaning
and the origin of the totemic system is so wholly unknown to us. But the
very wording of these taboos and the fact that they occur together will
remind any one who knows the results of the psychoanalytic investigation
of individuals, of something quite definite which psychoanalysts call the
central point of the infantile wish life and the nucleus of the later
neurosis[44].
All other varieties of taboo phenomena which have led to the attempted
classifications noted above become unified if we sum them up in the
following sentence. The basis of taboo is a forbidden action for which there
exists a strong inclination in the unconscious.
We know, without understanding it, that whoever does what is prohibited
and violates the taboo, becomes himself taboo. But how can we connect this
fact with the other, namely that the taboo adheres not only to persons who
have done what is prohibited but also to persons who are in exceptional
circumstances, to these circumstances themselves, and to impersonal
things? What can this dangerous attribute be which always remains the
same under all these different conditions? Only one thing, namely, the
propensity to arouse the ambivalence of man and to tempt him to violate the
prohibition.
An individual who has violated a taboo becomes himself taboo because
he has the dangerous property of tempting others to follow his example. He
arouses envy; why should he be allowed to do what is prohibited to others?
He is therefore really contagious, in so far as every example incites to
imitation and therefore he himself must be avoided.

But a person may become permanently or temporarily taboo without
having violated any taboos, for the simple reason that he is in a condition
which has the property of inciting the forbidden desires of others and of
awakening the ambivalent conflict in them. Most of the exceptional
positions and conditions have this character and possess this dangerous
power. The king or chieftain rouses envy of his prerogatives; everybody
would perhaps like to be king. The dead, the newly born, and women when
they are incapacitated all act as incitements on account of their peculiar
helplessness, while the individual who has just reached sexual maturity
tempts through the promise of a new pleasure. Therefore all these persons
and all these conditions are taboo, for one must not yield to the temptations
which they offer.
Now, too, we understand why the forces inherent in the ‘mana’ of
various persons can neutralize one another so that the mana of one
individual can partly cancel that of the other. The taboo of a king is too
strong for his subject because the social difference between them is too
great. But a minister, for example, can become the harmless mediator
between them. Translated from the language of taboo into the language of
normal psychology this means: the subject who shrinks from the
tremendous temptation which contact with the king creates for him can
brook the intercourse of an official, whom he does not have to envy so
much and whose position perhaps seems attainable to him. The minister, on
his part, can moderate his envy of the king by taking into consideration the
power that has been granted to him. Thus smaller differences in the magic
power that lead to temptation are less to be feared than exceptionally big
differences.
It is equally clear how the violation of certain taboo prohibitions
becomes a social danger which must be punished or expiated by all the
members of society lest it harm them all. This danger really exists if we
substitute the known impulses for the unconscious desires. It consists in the
possibility of imitation, as a result of which society would soon be
dissolved. If the others did not punish the violation they would perforce
become aware that they want to imitate the evil doer.
Though the secret meaning of a taboo prohibition cannot possibly be of
so special a nature as in the case of a neurosis, we must not be astonished to
find that touching plays a similar rôle in taboo prohibition as in the délire de

toucher. To touch is the beginning of every act of possession, of every
attempt to make use of a person or thing.
We have interpreted the power of contagion which inheres in the taboo
as the property of leading into temptation, and of inciting to imitation. This
does not seem to be in accord with the fact that the contagiousness of the
taboo is above all manifested in the transference to objects which thus
themselves become carriers of the taboo.
This transferability of the taboo reflects what is found in the neurosis,
namely, the constant tendency of the unconscious impulse to become
displaced through associative channels upon new objects. Our attention is
thus drawn to the fact that the dangerous magic power of the ‘mana’
corresponds to two real faculties, the capacity of reminding man of his
forbidden wishes, and the apparently more important one of tempting him
to violate the prohibition in the service of these wishes. Both functions
reunite into one, however, if we assume it to be in accord with a primitive
psychic life that with the awakening of a memory of a forbidden action
there should also be combined the awakening of the tendency to carry out
the action. Memory and temptation then again coincide. We must also admit
that if the example of a person who has violated a prohibition leads another
to the same action, the disobedience of the prohibition has been transmitted
like a contagion, just as the taboo is transferred from a person to an object,
and from this to another.
If the violation of a taboo can be condoned through expiation or
penance, which means, of course, a renunciation of a possession or a
liberty, we have the proof that the observance of a taboo regulation was
itself a renunciation of something really wished for. The omission of one
renunciation is cancelled through a renunciation at some other point. This
would lead us to conclude that, as far as taboo ceremonials are concerned,
penance is more primitive than purification.
Let us now summarize what understanding we have gained of taboo
through its comparison with the compulsive prohibition of the neurotic.
Taboo is a very primitive prohibition imposed from without (by an
authority) and directed against the strongest desires of man. The desire to
violate it continues in the unconscious; persons who obey the taboo have an
ambivalent feeling toward what is affected by the taboo. The magic power
attributed to taboo goes back to its ability to lead man into temptation; it

behaves like a contagion, because the example is contagious, and because
the prohibited desire becomes displacing in the unconscious upon
something else. The expiation for the violation of a taboo through a
renunciation proves that a renunciation is at the basis of the observance of
the taboo.

3
We may ask what we have gained from the comparison of taboo with
compulsion neurosis and what value can be claimed for the interpretation
we have given on the basis of this comparison? Our intrepretation is
evidently of no value unless it affords an advantage not to be had in any
other way and unless it affords a better understanding of taboo than was
otherwise possible. We might claim that we have already given proof of its
usefulness in what has been said above; but we shall have to try to
strengthen our proof by continuing the explanation of taboo prohibitions
and customs in detail.
But we can avail ourselves of another method. We can shape our
investigation so as to ascertain whether a part of the assumptions which we
have transferred from the neurosis to the taboo, or the conclusions at which
we have thereby arrived can be demonstrated directly in the phenomena of
taboo. We must decide, however, what we want to look for. The assertion
concerning the genesis of taboo, namely, that it was derived from a
primitive prohibition which was once imposed from without, cannot, of
course, be proved. We shall therefore seek to confirm those psychological
conditions for taboo with which we have become acquainted in the case of
compulsion neurosis. How did we gain our knowledge of these
psychological factors in the case of neurosis? Through the analytical study
of the symptoms, especially the compulsive actions, the defence reactions
and the obsessive commands. These mechanisms gave every indication of
having been derived from ambivalent impulses or tendencies, they either
represented simultaneously the wish and counter-wish or they served
preponderantly one of the two contrary tendencies. If we should now
succeed in showing that ambivalence, i.e., the sway of contrary tendencies,
exists also in the case of taboo regulations or if we should find among taboo
mechanisms some which like neurotic obsessions give simultaneous
expression to both currents, we would have established what is practically

the most important point in the psychological correspondence between
taboo and compulsion neurosis.
We have already mentioned that the two fundamental taboo prohibitions
are inaccessible to our analysis because they belong to totemism; another
part of the taboo rules is of secondary origin and cannot be used for our
purpose. For among these races taboo has become the general form of law
giving and has helped to promote social tendencies which are certainly
younger; than taboo itself, as for instance, the taboos imposed by chiefs and
priests to insure their property and privileges. But there still remains a large
group of laws which we may undertake to investigate. Among these I lay
stress on those taboos which are attached (a) to enemies, (b) to chiefs, and
(c) to the dead; the material for our investigation is taken from the excellent
collection of J. G. Frazer in his great work, The Golden Bough[45].
(A) THE TREATMENT OF ENEMIES
Inclined as we may have been to ascribe to savage and semi-savage
races uninhibited and remorseless cruelty towards their enemies, it is of
great interest to us to learn that with them, too, the killing of a person
compels the observation of a series of rules which are associated with taboo
customs. These rules are easily brought under four groups; they demand 1.
reconciliation with the slain enemy, 2. restrictions, 3. acts of expiation, and
purifications of the manslayer, and 4. certain ceremonial rites. The
incomplete reports do not allow us to decide with certainty how general or
how isolated such taboo customs may be among these races, but this is a
matter of indifference as far as our interest in these occurrences is
concerned. Still, it may be assumed that we are dealing with widespread
customs and not with isolated peculiarities.
The reconciliation customs practised on the island of Timor, after a
victorious band of warriors has returned with the severed heads of the
vanquished enemy, are especially significant because the leader of the
expedition is subject to heavy additional restrictions. “At the solemn entry
of the victors, sacrifices are made to conciliate the souls of the enemy;
otherwise one would have to expect harm to come to the victors. A dance is
given and a song is sung in which the slain enemy is mourned and his
forgiveness is implored: ‘Be not angry’, they say ‘because your head is here
with us; had we been less lucky, our heads might have been exposed in your
village. We have offered the sacrifice to appease you. Your spirit may now

rest and leave us at peace. Why were you our enemy? Would it not have
been better that we should remain friends? Then your blood would not have
been spilt and your head would not have been cut off’”[46].
Similar customs are found among the Palu in Celebes; the Gallas
sacrifice to the spirits of their dead enemies before they return to their home
villages[47].
Other races have found methods of making friends, guardians and
protectors out of their former enemies after they are dead. This consists in
the tender treatment of the severed heads, of which many wild tribes of
Borneo boast. When the See-Dayaks of Sarawak bring home a head from a
war expedition, they treat it for months with the greatest kindness and
courtesy and address it with the most endearing names in their language.
The best morsels from their meals are put into its mouth, together with
titbits and cigars. The dead enemy is repeatedly entreated to hate his former
friends and to bestow his love upon his new hosts because he has now
become one of them. It would be a great mistake to think that any derision
is attached to this treatment, horrible though it may seem to us[48].
Observers have been struck by the mourning for the enemy after he is
slain and scalped, among several of the wild tribe of North America. When
a Choctaw had killed an enemy he began a month’s mourning during which
he submitted himself to serious restrictions. The Dakota Indians mourned in
the same way. One authority mentions that the Osaga Indians after
mourning for their own dead mourned for their foes as if they had been
friends[49].
Before proceeding to the other classes of taboo customs for the treatment
of enemies, we must define our position in regard to a pertinent objection.
Both Frazer as well as other authorities may well be quoted against us to
show that the motive for these rules of reconciliation is quite simple and has
nothing to do with ‘ambivalence.’ These races are dominated by a
superstitious fear of the spirits of the slain, a fear which was also familiar to
classical antiquity, and which the great British dramatist brought upon the
stage in the hallucinations of Macbeth and Richard the Third. From this
superstition all the reconciliation rules as well as the restrictions and
expiations which we shall discuss later can be logically deduced; moreover,
the ceremonies included in the fourth group also argue for this
interpretation, since the only explanation of which they admit is the effort to

drive away the spirits of the slain which pursue the manslayers[50]. Besides,
the savages themselves directly admit their fear for the spirits of their slain
foes and trace back the taboo customs under discussion to this fear.
This objection is certainly pertinent and if it were adequate as well we
would gladly spare ourselves the trouble of our attempt to find a further
explanation. We postpone the consideration of this objection until later and
for the present merely contrast it to the interpretation derived from our
previous discussion of taboo. All these rules of taboo lead us to conclude
that other impulses besides those that are merely hostile find expression in
the behaviour towards enemies. We see in them manifestations of
repentance, of regard for the enemy, and of a bad conscience for having
slain him. It seems that the commandment, Thou shalt not slay, which could
not be violated without punishment, existed also among these savages, long
before any legislation was received from the hands of a god.
We now return to the remaining classes of taboo rules. The restrictions
laid upon the victorious manslayer are unusually frequent and are mostly of
a serious nature. In Timor (compare the reconciliation customs mentioned
above) the leader of the expedition cannot return to his house under any
circumstances. A special hut is erected for him in which he spends two
months engaged in the observance of various rules of purification. During
this period he may not see his wife or nourish himself; another person must
put his food in his mouth.[51] Among some Dayak tribes warriors returning
from a successful expedition must remain sequestered for several days and
abstain from certain foods; they may not touch iron and must remain away
from their wives. In Logea, an island near New Guinea, men who have
killed an enemy or have taken part in the killing, lock themselves up in their
houses for a week. They avoid every intercourse with their wives and
friends, they do not touch their victuals with their hands and live on nothing
but vegetable foods which are cooked for them in special dishes. As a
reason for this last restriction it is alleged that they must smell the blood of
the slain, otherwise they would sicken and die. Among the Toaripi-or
Motumotu-tribes in New Guinea a manslayer must not approach his wife
and must not touch his food with his fingers. A second person must feed
him with special food. This continues until the next new moon.
I avoid the complete enumeration of all the cases of restrictions of the
victorious slayer mentioned by Frazer, and emphasize only such cases in

which the character of taboo is especially noticeable or where the restriction
appears in connection with expiation, purification and ceremonial.
Among the Monumbos in German New Guinea a man who has killed an
enemy in combat becomes ‘unclean’, the same word being employed which
is applied to women during menstruation or confinement. For a
considerable period he is not allowed to leave the men’s club-house, while
the inhabitants of his village gather about him and celebrate his victory with
songs and dances. He must not touch any one, not even his wife and
children; if he did so they would be afflicted with boils. He finally becomes
clean through washing and other ceremonies.
Among the Natchez in North America young warriors who had procured
their first scalp were bound for six months to the observance of certain
renunciations. They were not allowed to sleep with their wives or to eat
meat, and received only fish and maize pudding as nourishment. When a
Choctaw had killed and scalped an enemy he began a period of mourning
for one month, during which he was not allowed to comb his hair. When his
head itched he was not allowed to scratch it with his hand but used a small
stick for this purpose.
After a Pima Indian had killed an Apache he had to submit himself to
severe ceremonies of purification and expiation. During a fasting period of
sixteen days he was not allowed to touch meat or salt, to look at a fire or to
speak to any one. He lived alone in the woods, where he was waited upon
by an old woman who brought him a small allowance of food; he often
bathed in the nearest river, and carried a lump of clay on his head as a sign
of mourning. On the seventeenth day there took place a public ceremony
through which he and his weapons were solemnly purified. As the Pima
Indians took the manslayer taboo much more seriously than their enemies
and, unlike them, did not postpone expiation and purification until the end
of the expedition, their prowess in war suffered very much through their
moral severity or what might be called their piety. In spite of their
extraordinary bravery they proved to be unsatisfactory allies to the
Americans in their wars against the Apaches.
The detail and variations of these expiatory and purifying ceremonies
after the killing of an enemy would be most interesting for purposes of a
more searching study, but I need not enumerate any more of them here
because they cannot furnish us with any new points of view. I might

mention that the temporary or permanent isolation of the professional
executioner, which was maintained up to our time, is a case in point. The
position of the ‘free-holder’ in mediæval society really conveys a good idea
of the ‘taboo’ of savages[52].
The current explanation of all these rules of reconciliation, restriction,
expiation and purification, combines two principles, namely, the extension
of the taboo of the dead to everything that has come into contact with him,
and the fear of the spirit of the slain. In what combination these two
elements are to explain the ceremonial, whether they are to be considered as
of equal value or whether one of them is primary and the other secondary,
and which one, is nowhere stated, nor would this be an easy matter to
decide. In contradistinction to all this we emphasize the unity which our
interpretation gains by deducing all these rules from the ambivalence of the
emotion of savages towards their enemies.

(B) THE TABOO OF RULERS
The behaviour of primitive races towards their chiefs, kings, and priests,
is controlled by two principles which seem rather to supplement than to
contradict each other. They must both be guarded and be guarded
against[53].
Both objects are accomplished through innumerable rules of taboo. Why
one must guard against rulers is already known to us; because they are the
bearers of that mysterious and dangerous magic power which
communicates itself by contact, like an electric charge, bringing death and
destruction to any one not protected by a similar charge. All direct or
indirect contact with this dangerous sacredness is therefore avoided, and
where it cannot be avoided a ceremonial has been found to ward off the
dreaded consequences. The Nubas in East Africa, for instance, believe that
they must die if they enter the house of their priest-king, but that they
escape this danger if, on entering, they bare the left shoulder and induce the
king to touch it with his hand. Thus we have the remarkable case of the
king’s touch becoming the healing and protective measure against the very
dangers that arise from contact with the king; but it is probably a question
of the healing power of the intentional touching on the king’s part in
contradistinction to the danger of touching him, in other words, of the
opposition between passivity and activity towards the king.

Where the healing power of the royal touch is concerned we do not have
to look for examples among savages. In comparatively recent times the
kings of England exercised this power upon scrofula, whence it was called
‘The King’s Evil’. Neither Queen Elizabeth nor any of her successors
renounced this part of the royal prerogative. Charles I is said to have healed
a hundred sufferers at one time, in the year 1633. Under his dissolute son
Charles II, after the great English revolution had passed, royal healings of
scrofula attained their greatest vogue.
This king is said to have touched close to a hundred thousand victims of
scrofula in the course of his reign. The crush of those seeking to be cured
used to be so great that on one occasion six or seven patients suffered death
by suffocation instead of being healed. The sceptical king of Orange,
William III, who became king of England after the banishment of the
Stuarts, refused to exercise the spell; on the one occasion when he
consented to practise the touch, he did so with words: “May God give you
better health and more sense”[54].
The following account will bear witness to the terrible effect of touching
by virtue of which a person, even though unintentionally, becomes active
against his king or against what belongs to him. A chief of high rank and
great holiness in New Zealand happened to leave the remains of his meal by
the roadside. A young slave came along, a strong healthy fellow, who saw
what was left over and started to eat it. Hardly had he finished when a
horrified spectator informed him of his offence in eating the meal of the
chief. The man had been a strong, brave warrior, but as soon as he heard
this he collapsed and was afflicted by terrible convulsions, from which he
died towards sunset of the following day[55]. A Maori woman ate a certain
fruit and then learned that it came from a place on which there was a taboo.
She cried out that the spirit of the chief whom she had thus offended would
surely kill her. This incident occurred in the afternoon, and on the next day
at twelve o’clock she was dead[56]. The tinder box of a Maori chief once
cost several persons their lives. The chief had lost it, and those who found it
used it to light their pipes. When they learned whose property the tinder box
was they all died of fright[57].
It is hardly astonishing that the need was felt to isolate dangerous
persons like chiefs and priests, by building a wall around them which made
them inaccessible to others. We surmise that this wall, which originally was

constructed out of taboo rules, still exists to-day in the form of court
ceremony.
But probably the greater part of this taboo of the rulers cannot be traced
back to the need of guarding against them. The other point of view in the
treatment of privileged persons, the need of guarding them from dangers
with which they are threatened, has had a distinct share in the creation of
taboo and therefore of the origin of court etiquette.
The necessity of guarding the king from every conceivable danger arises
from his great importance for the weal and woe of his subjects. Strictly
speaking, he is a person who regulates the course of the world; his people
have to thank him not only for rain and sunshine, which allow the fruits of
the earth to grow, but also for the wind which brings the ships to their
shores and for the solid ground on which they set their feet[58].
These savage kings are endowed with a wealth of power and an ability to
bestow happiness which only gods possess; certainly in later stages of
civilization none but the most servile courtiers would play the hypocrite to
the extent of crediting their sovereigns with the possession of attributes
similar to these.
It seems like an obvious contradiction that persons of such perfection of
power should themselves require the greatest care to guard them against
threatening dangers, but this is not the only contradiction revealed in the
treatment of royal persons on the part of savages. These races consider it
necessary to watch over their kings to see that they use their powers in the
right way; they are by no means sure of their good intentions or of their
conscientiousness. A strain of mistrust is mingled with the motivation of the
taboo rules for the king. “The idea that early kingdoms are despotisms”,
says Frazer[59], “in which the people exist only for the sovereign, is wholly
inapplicable to the monarchies we are considering. On the contrary, the
sovereign in them exists only for his subjects: his life is only valuable so
long as he discharges the duties of his position by ordering the course of
nature for his people’s benefit. So soon as he fails to do so, the care, the
devotion, the religious homage which they had hitherto lavished on him
cease and are changed into hatred and contempt; he is ignominiously
dismissed and may be thankful if he escapes with his life. Worshipped as a
god one day, he is killed as a criminal the next. But in this changed
behaviour of the people there is nothing capricious or inconsistent. On the

contrary, their conduct is quite consistent. If their king is their god he is or
should be, also their preserver; and if he will not preserve them he must
make room for another who will. So long, however, as he answers their
expectations, there is no limit to the care which they take of him, and which
they compel him to take of himself. A king of this sort lives hedged in by
ceremonious etiquette, a network of prohibitions and observances, of which
the intention is not to contribute to his dignity, much less to his comfort, but
to restrain him from conduct which, by disturbing the harmony of nature,
might involve himself, his people, and the universe in one common
catastrophe. Far from adding to his comfort, these observances, by
trammelling his every act, annihilate his freedom and often render the very
life, which it is their object to preserve, a burden and sorrow to him.”
One of the most glaring examples of thus fettering and paralysing a holy
ruler through taboo ceremonial seems to have been reached in the life
routine of the Mikado of Japan, as it existed in earlier centuries. A
description which is now over two hundred years old[60] relates: “He thinks
that it would be very prejudicial to his dignity and holiness to touch the
ground with his feet; for this reason when he intends to go anywhere, he
must be carried thither on men’s shoulders. Much less will they suffer that
he should expose his sacred person to the open air, and the sun is not
thought worthy to shine on his head. There is such a holiness ascribed to all
the parts of his body that he dares to cut off neither his hair, nor his beard,
nor his nails. However, lest he should grow too dirty, they may clean him in
the night when he is asleep; because they say that what is taken from his
body at that time, hath been stolen from him, and that such a theft does not
prejudice his holiness or dignity. In ancient times, he was obliged to sit on
the throne for some hours every morning, with the imperial crown on his
head; but to sit altogether like a statue without stirring either hands or feet,
head or eyes, nor indeed any part of his body, because by this means it was
thought that he could preserve peace and tranquillity in his empire; for if
unfortunately, he turned himself on one side or other, or if he looked a good
while towards any part of his dominion, it was apprehended that war,
famine, fire or some other great misfortune was near at hand to desolate the
country.”
Some of the taboos to which barbarian kings are subject vividly recall
the restrictions placed on murderers. On Shark Point at Cape Padron in
Lower Guinea (West Africa), a priest-king called Kukulu lives alone in a

woods. He is not allowed to touch a woman or to leave his house and
cannot even rise out of his chair, in which he must sleep in a sitting
position. If he should lie down the wind would cease and shipping would be
disturbed. It is his function to keep storms in check, and in general, to see to
an even, healthy condition of the atmosphere[61]. The more powerful a king
of Loango is, says Bastian, the more taboos he must observe. The heir to the
throne is also bound to them from childhood on; they accumulate about him
while he is growing up, and by the time of his accession he is suffocated by
them.
Our interest in the matter does not require us to take up more space to
describe more fully the taboos that cling to royal and priestly dignity. We
merely add that restrictions as to freedom of movement and diet play the
main rôle among them. But two examples of taboo ceremonial taken from
civilized nations, and therefore from much higher stages of culture, will
indicate to what an extent association with these privileged persons tends to
preserve ancient customs.
The Flamen Dialis, the high-priest of Jupiter in Rome, had to observe an
extraordinarily large number of taboo rules. He was not allowed to ride, to
see a horse or an armed man, to wear a ring that was not broken, to have a
knot in his garments, to touch wheat flour or leaven, or even to mention by
name a goat, a dog, raw meat, beans and ivy; his hair could only be cut by a
free man and with a bronze knife, his hair combings and nail parings had to
be buried under a lucky tree; he could not touch the dead, go into the open
with bare head, and similar prohibitions. His wife, the Flaminica, also had
her own prohibitions: she was not allowed to ascend more than three steps
on a certain kind of stairs and on certain holidays she could not comb her
hair; the leather for her shoes could not be taken from any animal that had
died a natural death but only from one that had been slaughtered or
sacrificed; when she heard thunder she was unclean until she had made an
expiatory sacrifice[62].
The old kings of Ireland were subject to a series of very curious
restrictions, the observance of which was expected to bring every blessing
to the country while their violation entailed every form of evil. The
complete description of these taboos is given in the Book of Rights, of
which the oldest manuscript copies bear the dates 1890 and 1418. The
prohibitions are very detailed and concern certain activities at specified
places and times; in some cities, for instance, the king cannot stay on a

certain day of the week, while at some specified hour this or that river may
not be crossed, or again there is a plane on which he cannot camp a full nine
days, etc.[63]
Among many savage races the severity of the taboo restrictions for the
priest-kings has had results of historic importance which are especially
interesting from our point of view. The honour of being a priest-king ceased
to be desirable; the person in line for the succession often used every means
to escape it. Thus in Combodscha, where there is a fire and water king, it is
often necessary to use force to compel the successor to accept the honour.
On Niue or Savage Island, a coral island in the Pacific Ocean, monarchy
actually came to an end because nobody was willing to undertake the
responsible and dangerous office. In some parts of West Africa a general
council is held after the death of the king to determine upon the successor.
The man on whom the choice falls is seized, tied and kept in custody in the
fetish house until he has declared himself willing to accept the crown.
Sometimes the presumptive successor to the throne finds ways and means
to avoid the intended honour; thus it is related of a certain chief that he used
to go armed day and night and resist by force every attempt to place him on
the throne[64]. Among the negroes of Sierra Leone the resistance against
accepting the kingly honour was so great that most of the tribes were
compelled to make strangers their kings.
Frazer makes these conditions responsible for the fact that in the
development of history a separation of the original priest-kingship into a
spiritual and a secular power finally took place. Kings, crushed by the
burden of their holiness, became incapable of exercising their power over
real things and had to leave this to inferior but executive persons who were
willing to renounce the honours of royal dignity. From these there grew up
the secular rulers, while the spiritual over-lordship, which was now of no
practical importance, was left to the former taboo kings. It is well known to
what extent this hypothesis finds confirmation in the history of old Japan.
A survey of the picture of the relations of primitive peoples to their
rulers gives rise to the expectation that our advance from description to
psychoanalytic understanding will not be difficult. These relations are of an
involved nature and are not free from contradictions. Rulers are granted
great privileges which are practically cancelled by taboo prohibitions in
regard to other privileges. They are privileged persons, they can do or enjoy
what is withheld from the rest through taboo. But in contrast to this freedom

they are restricted by other taboos which do not affect the ordinary
individual. Here, therefore, is the first contrast, which amounts almost to a
contradiction, between an excess of freedom and an excess of restriction as
applied to the same persons. They are credited with extraordinary magic
powers, and contact with their person or their property is therefore feared,
while on the other hand the most beneficial effect is expected from these
contacts. This seems to be a second and an especially glaring contradiction;
but we have already learned that it is only apparent. The king’s touch,
exercised by him with benevolent intention, heals and protects; it is only
when a common man touches the king or his royal effects that the contact
becomes dangerous, and this is probably because the act may recall
aggressive tendencies. Another contradiction which is not so easily solved
is expressed in the fact that great power over the processes of nature is
ascribed to the ruler and yet the obligation is felt to guard him with especial
care against threatening dangers, as if his own power, which can do so
much, were incapable of accomplishing this. A further difficulty in the
relation arises because there is no confidence that the ruler will use his
tremendous power to the advantage of his subjects as well as for his own
protection; he is therefore distrusted and surveillance over him is
considered to be justified. The taboo etiquette, to which the life of the king
is subject, simultaneously serves all these objects of exercising a tutelage
over the king, of guarding him against dangers and of guarding his subjects
against danger which he brings to them.
We are inclined to give the following explanation of the complicated and
contradictory relation of the primitive peoples to their rulers. Through
superstition as well as through other motives, various tendencies find
expression in the treatment of kings, each of which is developed to the
extreme without regard to the other. As a result of this, contradictions arise
at which the intellect of savages takes no more offence than a highly
civilized person would as long as it is only a question of religious matters or
of ‘loyalty’.
That would be so far so good; but the psychoanalytic technique may
enable us to penetrate more deeply into the matter and to add something
about the nature of these various tendencies. If we subject the facts as stated
to analysis, just as if they formed the symptoms of a neurosis, our first
attention would be directed to the excess of anxious worry which is said to
be the cause of the taboo ceremonial. The occurrence of such excessive

tenderness is very common in the neurosis and especially in the compulsion
neurosis upon which we are drawing primarily for our comparison. We now
thoroughly understand the origin of this tenderness. It occurs wherever,
besides the predominant tenderness, there exists a contrary but unconscious
stream of hostility, that is to say, wherever the typical case of an ambivalent
affective attitude is realized. The hostility is then cried down by an
excessive increase of tenderness which is expressed as anxiety and becomes
compulsive because otherwise it would not suffice for its task of keeping
the unconscious opposition in a state of repression. Every psychoanalyst
knows how infallibly this anxious excess of tenderness can be resolved
even under the most improbable circumstances, as for instance, when it
appears between mother and child, or in the case of affectionate married
people. Applied to the treatment of privileged persons this theory of an
ambivalent feeling would reveal that their veneration, their very deification,
is opposed in the unconscious by an intense hostile tendency, so that, as we
had expected, the situation of an ambivalent feeling is here realized. The
distrust which certainly seems to contribute to the motivation of the royal
taboo, would be another direct manifestation of the same unconscious
hostility. Indeed the ultimate issues of this conflict show such a diversity
among different races that we would not be at a loss for examples in which
the proof of such hostility would be much easier. We learn from Frazer[65]
that the savage Timmes of Sierra Leone reserve the right to administer a
beating to their elected king on the evening before his coronation, and that
they make use of this constitutional right with such thoroughness that the
unhappy ruler sometimes does not long survive his accession to the throne;
for this reason the leaders of the race have made it a rule to elect some man
against whom they have a particular grudge. Nevertheless, even in such
glaring cases the hostility is not acknowledged as such, but is expressed as
if it were a ceremonial.
Another trait in the attitude of primitive races towards their rulers recalls
a mechanism which is universally present in mental disturbances, and is
openly revealed in the so-called delusions of persecution. Here the
importance of a particular person is extraordinarily heightened and his
omnipotence is raised to the improbable in order to make it easier to
attribute to him the responsibility for everything painful which happens to
the patient. Savages really do not act differently towards their rulers when
they ascribe to them power over rain and shine, wind and weather, and then

dethrone or kill them because nature has disappointed their expectation of a
good hunt or a ripe harvest. The prototype which the paranoiac reconstructs
in his persecution mania, is found in the relation of the child to its father.
Such omnipotence is regularly attributed to the father in the imagination of
the son, and distrust of the father has been shown to be intimately
connected with the highest esteem for him. When a paranoiac names a
person of his acquaintance as his ‘persecutor’, he thereby elevates him to
the paternal succession and brings him under conditions which enable him
to make him responsible for all the misfortune which he experiences. Thus
this second analogy between the savage and the neurotic may allow us to
surmise how much in the relation of the savage to his ruler arises from the
infantile attitude of the child to its father.
But the strongest support for our point of view, which seeks to compare
taboo prohibitions with neurotic symptoms, is to be found in the taboo
ceremonial itself, the significance of which for the status of kinship has
already been the subject of our previous discussion. This ceremonial
unmistakably reveals its double meaning and its origin from ambivalent
tendencies if only we are willing to assume that the effects it produces are
those which it intended from the very beginning. It not only distinguishes
kings and elevates them above all ordinary mortals, but it also makes their
life a torture and an unbearable burden and forces them into a thraldom
which is far worse than that of their subjects. It would thus be the correct
counterpart to the compulsive action of the neurosis, in which the
suppressed impulse and the impulse which suppresses it meet in mutual and
simultaneous satisfaction. The compulsive action is nominally a protection
against the forbidden action; but we would say that actually it is a repetition
of what is forbidden. The word ‘nominally’ is here applied to the conscious
whereas the word ‘actually’ applies to the unconscious instance of the
psychic life. Thus also the taboo ceremonial of kings is nominally an
expression of the highest veneration and a means of guarding them; actually
it is the punishment for their elevation, the revenge which their subjects
take upon them. The experiences which Cervantes makes Sancho Panza
undergo as governor on his island have evidently made him recognize this
interpretation of courtly ceremonial as the only correct one. It is very
possible that this point would be corroborated if we could induce kings and
rulers of to-day to express themselves on this point.

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

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

he had used during the dangerous period were broken and all his clothing
was thrown away.
The taboo customs after bodily contact with the dead are the same all
over Polynesia, in Melanesia, and in a part of Africa; their most constant
feature is the prohibition against handling one’s food and the consequent
necessity of being fed by somebody else. It is noteworthy that in Polynesia,
or perhaps only in Hawaii[67], priest-kings were subject to the same
restrictions during the exercise of holy functons. In the taboo of the dead on
the Island of Tonga the abatement and gradual abolition of the prohibitions
through the individual’s own taboo power are clearly shown. A person who
touched the corpse of a dead chieftain was unclean for ten months; but if he
was himself a chief, he was unclean for only three, four, or five months,
according to the rank of the deceased; if it was the corpse of the idolized
head-chief even the greatest chiefs became taboo for ten months. These
savages are so certain that any one who violates these taboo rules must
become seriously ill and die, that according to the opinion of an observer,
they have never yet dared to convince themselves of the contrary[68].
The taboo restrictions imposed upon persons whose contact with the
dead is to be understood in the transferred sense, namely the mourning
relatives such as widows and widowers, are essentially the same as those
mentioned above, but they are of greater interest for the point we are trying
to make. In the rules hitherto mentioned we see only the typical expression
of the virulence and power of diffusion of the taboo; in those about to be
cited we catch a gleam of the motives, including both the ostensible ones
and those which may be regarded as the underlying and genuine motives.
Among the Shuswap in British-Columbia widows and widowers have to
remain segregated during their period of mourning; they must not use their
hands to touch the body or the head and all utensils used by them must not
be used by any one else. No hunter will want to approach the hut in which
such mourners live, for that would bring misfortune; if the shadow of one of
the mourners should fall on him he would become ill. The mourners sleep
on thorn bushes, with which they also surround their beds. This last
precaution is meant to keep off the spirit of the deceased; plainer still is the
reported custom of other North American tribes where the widow, after the
death of her husband, has to wear a kind of trousers of dried grass in order
to make herself inaccessible to the approach of the spirit. Thus it is quite
obvious that touching ‘in the transferred sense’ is after all understood only

as bodily contact, since the spirit of the deceased does not leave his kin and
does not desist from ‘hovering about them’, during the period of mourning.
Among the Agutainos, who live on Palawan, one of the Philippine
Islands, a widow may not leave her hut for the first seven or eight days after
her husband’s death, except at night, when she need not expect encounters.
Whoever sees her is in danger of immediate death and therefore she herself
warns others of her approach by hitting the trees with a wooden stick with
every step she takes; these trees all wither. Another observation explains the
nature of the danger inherent in a widow. In the district of Mekeo, British
New Guinea, a widower forfeits all civil rights and lives like an outlaw. He
may not tend a garden, or show himself in public, or enter the village or go
on the street. He slinks about like an animal, in the high grass or in the
bushes, and must hide in a thicket if he sees anybody, especially a woman,
approaching. This last hint makes it easy for us to trace back the danger of
the widower or widow to the danger of temptation. The husband who has
lost his wife must evade the desire for a substitute; the widow has to
contend with the same wish, and beside this, she may arouse the desire of
other men because she is without a master. Every such satisfaction through
a substitute runs contrary to the intention of mourning and would cause the
anger of the spirit to flare up[69].
One of the most surprising, but at the same time one of the most
instructive taboo customs of mourning among primitive races is the
prohibition against pronouncing the name of the deceased. This is very
widespread, and has been subjected to many modifications with important
consequences.
Aside from the Australians and the Polynesians, who usually show us
taboo customs in their best state of preservation, we also find this
prohibition among races so far apart and unrelated to each other as the
Samojedes in Siberia and the Todas in South India, the Mongolians of
Tartary and the Tuaregs of the Sahara, the Aino of Japan and the Akamba
and Nandi in Central Africa, the Tinguanes in the Philippines and the
inhabitants of the Nikobari Islands and of Madagascar and Borneo[70].
Among some of these races the prohibition and its consequences hold good
only for the period of mourning while in others it remains permanent; but in
all cases it seems to diminish with the lapse of time after the death.

The avoidance of the name of the deceased is as a rule kept up with
extraordinary severity. Thus, among many South American tribes, it is
considered the gravest insult to the survivors to pronounce the name of the
deceased in their presence, and the penalty set for it is no less than that for
the slaying itself[71]. At first it is not easy to guess why the mention of the
name should be so abominated, but the dangers associated with it have
called into being a whole series of interesting and important expedients to
avoid this. Thus the Masai in Africa have hit upon the evasion of changing
the name of the deceased immediately upon his death; he may now be
mentioned without dread by this new name, while all the prohibitions
remain attached to the old name. It seems to be assumed that the ghost does
not know his new name and will not find it out. The Australian tribes on
Adelaide and Encounter Bay are so consistently cautious that when a death
occurs almost every person who has the same name as the deceased or a
very similar one, exchanges it for another. Sometimes by a further extension
of the same idea as seen among several tribes in Victoria and in North
America all the relatives of the deceased change their names regardless of
whether their names resemble the name of the deceased in sound. Among
the Guaycuru in Paraguay the chief used to give new names to all the
members of the tribe, on such sad occasions, which they then remembered
as if they had always had them[72].
Furthermore, if the deceased had the same name as an animal or object,
etc., some of the races just enumerated thought it necessary to give these
animals and objects new names, in order not to be reminded of the deceased
when they mentioned them. Through this there must have resulted a never
ceasing change of vocabulary, which caused a good deal of difficulty for the
missionaries, especially where the interdiction upon a name was permanent.
In the seven years which the missionary Dobrizhofer spent among the
Abipons in Paraguay, the name for jaguar was changed three times and the
words for crocodile, thorns and animal slaughter underwent a similar
fate[73]. But the dread of pronouncing a name which has belonged to a
deceased person extends also to the mention of everything in which the
deceased had any part, and a further important result of this process of
suppression is that these races have no tradition or any historical
reminiscences, so that we encounter the greatest difficulties in investigating
their past history. Among a number of these primitive races compensating
customs have also been established in order to re-awaken the names of the

deceased after a long period of mourning; they are bestowed upon children
who were regarded as reincarnations of the dead.
The strangeness of this taboo on names diminishes if we bear in mind
that the savage looks upon his name as an essential part and an important
possession of his personality, and that he ascribes the full significance of
things to words. Our children do the same, as I have shown elsewhere, and
therefore they are never satisfied with accepting a meaningless verbal
similarity, but consistently conclude that when two things have identical
names a deeper correspondence between them must exist. Numerous
peculiarities of normal behaviour may lead civilized man to conclude that
he too is not yet as far removed as he thinks from attributing the importance
of things to mere names and feeling that his name has become peculiarly
identified with his person. This is corroborated by psychoanalytic
experiences, where there is much occasion to point out the importance of
names in unconscious thought activity[74]. As was to be expected, the
compulsion neurotics behave just like savages in regard to names. They
show the full ‘complex sensitiveness’ towards the utterance and hearing of
special words (as do also other neurotics) and derive a good many, often
serious, inhibitions from their treatment of their own name. One of these
taboo patients whom I knew, had adopted the avoidance of writing down
her name for fear that it might get into somebody’s hands who thus would
come into possession of a piece of her personality. In her frenzied
faithfulness, which she needed to protect herself against the temptations of
her phantasy, she had created for herself the commandment, ‘not to give
away anything of her personality’. To this belonged first of all her name,
then by further application her hand-writing, so that she finally gave up
writing.
Thus it no longer seems strange to us that savages should consider a
dead person’s name as a part of his personality and that it should be
subjected to the same taboo as the deceased. Calling a dead person by name
can also be traced back to contact with him, so that we can turn our
attention to the more inclusive problem of why this contact is visited with
such a severe taboo.
The nearest explanation would point to the natural horror which a corpse
inspires, especially in view of the changes so soon noticeable after death.
Mourning for a dead person must also be considered as a sufficient motive
for everything which has reference to him. But horror of the corpse

evidently does not cover all the details of taboo rules, and mourning can
never explain to us why the mention of the dead is a severe insult to his
survivors. On the contrary, mourning loves to preoccupy itself with the
deceased, to elaborate his memory, and preserve it for the longest possible
time. Something besides mourning must be made responsible for the
peculiarities of taboo customs, something which evidently serves a different
purpose. It is this very taboo on names which reveals this still unknown
motive, and if the customs did not tell us about it we would find it out from
the statements of the mourning savages themselves.
For they do not conceal the fact that they fear the presence and the return
of the spirit of a dead person; they practise a host of ceremonies to keep him
off and banish him[75]. They look upon the mention of his name as a
conjuration which must result in his immediate presence[76]. They therefore
consistently do everything to avoid conjuring and awakening a dead person.
They disguise themselves in order that the spirit may not recognize
them[77], they distort either his name or their own, and become infuriated
when a ruthless stranger incites the spirit against his survivors by
mentioning his name. We can hardly avoid the conclusion that they suffer,
according to Wundt’s expression, from the fear of “his soul now turned into
a demon,”[78].
With this understanding we approach Wundt’s conception who, as we
have heard, sees the nature of taboo in the fear of demons.
The assumption which this theory makes, namely, that immediately after
death the beloved member of a family becomes a demon, from whom the
survivors have nothing but hostility to expect, so that they must protect
themselves by every means from his evil desires, is so peculiar that our first
impulse is not to believe it. Yet almost all competent authors agree as to this
interpretation of primitive races. Westermarck[79], who, in my opinion,
gives altogether too little consideration to taboo, makes this statement: “On
the whole facts lead me to conclude that the dead are more frequently
regarded as enemies than as friends and that Jevons and Grant Allen are
wrong in their assertion that it was formerly believed that the malevolence
of the dead was as a rule directed only against strangers, while they were
paternally concerned about the life and welfare of their descendants and the
members of their clan.”

R. Kleinpaul has written an impressive book in which he makes use of
the remnants of the old belief in souls among civilized races to show the
relation between the living and the dead[80]. According to him too, this
relation culminates in the conviction that the dead, thirsting for blood, draw
the living after them. The living did not feel themselves safe from the
persecutions of the dead until a body of water had been put between them.
That is why it was preferred to bury the dead on islands or to bring them to
the other side of a river: the expressions ‘here’ and ‘beyond’ originated in
this way. Later moderation has restricted the malevolence of the dead to
those categories where a peculiar right to feel rancour had to be admitted,
such as the murdered who pursue their murderer as evil spirits, and those
who, like brides, had died with their longings unsatisfied. Kleinpaul
believes that originally, however, the dead were all vampires, who bore ill-
will to the living, and strove to harm them and deprive them of life. It was
the corpse that first furnished the conception of an evil spirit.
The hypothesis that those whom we love best turn into demons after
death obviously allows us to put a further question. What prompted
primitive races to ascribe such a change of sentiment to the beloved dead?
Why did they make demons out of them? According to Westermarck this
question is easily answered[81]. “As death is usually considered the worst
calamity that can overtake man, it is believed that the deceased are very
dissatisfied with their lot. Primitive races believe that death comes only
through being slain, whether by violence or by magic, and this is considered
already sufficient reason for the soul to be vindictive and irritable. The soul
presumably envies the living and longs for the company of its former kin;
we can therefore understand that the soul should seek to kill with them
diseases in order to be re-united with them....
“ ...A further explanation of the malevolence ascribed to souls lies in the
instinctive fear of them, which is itself the result of the fear of death.”
Our study of psychoneurotic disturbances points to a more
comprehensive explanation, which includes that of Westermarck.
When a wife loses her husband, or a daughter her mother, it not
infrequently happens that the survivor is afflicted with tormenting scruples,
called ‘obsessive reproaches’ which raises the question whether she herself
has not been guilty through carelessness or neglect, of the death of the
beloved person. No recalling of the care with which she nursed the invalid,

or direct refutation of the asserted guilt can put an end to the torture, which
is the pathological expression of mourning and which in time slowly
subsides. Psychoanalytic investigation of such cases has made us
acquainted with the secret mainsprings of this affliction. We have
ascertained that these obsessive reproaches are in a certain sense justified
and therefore are immune to refutation or objections. Not that the mourner
has really been guilty of the death or that she has really been careless, as the
obsessive reproach asserts; but still there was something in her, a wish of
which she herself was unaware, which was not displeased with the fact that
death came, and which would have brought it about sooner had it been
strong enough. The reproach now reacts against this unconscious wish after
the death of the beloved person. Such hostility, hidden in the unconscious
behind tender love, exists in almost all cases of intensive emotional
allegiance to a particular person, indeed it represents the classic case, the
prototype of the ambivalence of human emotions. There is always more or
less of this ambivalence in everybody’s disposition; normally it is not strong
enough to give rise to the obsessive reproaches we have described. But
where there is abundant predisposition for it, it manifests itself in the
relation to those we love most, precisely where you would least expect it.
The disposition to compulsion neurosis which we have so often taken for
comparison with taboo problems, is distinguished by a particularly high
degree of this original ambivalence of emotions.
We now know how to explain the supposed demonism of recently
departed souls and the necessity of being protected against their hostility
through taboo rules. By assuming a similar high degree of ambivalence in
the emotional life of primitive races such as psychoanalysis ascribes to
persons suffering from compulsion neurosis, it becomes comprehensible
that the same kind of reaction against the hostility latent in the unconscious
behind the obsessive reproaches of the neurotic should also be necessary
here after the painful loss has occurred. But this hostility which is painfully
felt in the unconscious in the form of satisfaction with the demise,
experiences a different fate in the case of primitive man: the defence against
it is accomplished by displacement upon the object of hostility, namely the
dead. We call this defence process, frequent both in normal and diseased
psychic life, a projection. The survivor will deny that he has ever
entertained hostile impulses toward the beloved dead; but now the soul of
the deceased entertains them and will try to give vent to them during the

entire period of mourning. In spite of the successful defence through
projection, the punitive and remorseful character of this emotional reaction
manifests itself in being afraid, in self-imposed renunciations and in
subjection to restrictions which are partly disguised as protective measures
against the hostile demon. Thus we find again that taboo has grown out of
the soil of an ambivalent emotional attitude. The taboo of the dead also
originates from the opposition between the conscious grief and the
unconscious satisfaction at death. If this is the origin of the resentment of
spirits it is self-evident that just the nearest and formerly most beloved
survivors have to fear it most.
As in neurotic symptoms, the taboo regulations also evince opposite
feelings. Their restrictive character expresses mourning, while they also
betray very clearly what they are trying to conceal, namely, the hostility
towards the dead, which is now motivated as self-defence. We have learnt
to understand part of the taboo regulations as temptation fears. A dead
person is defenceless, which must act as an incitement to satisfy hostile
desires entertained against him; this temptation has to be opposed by the
prohibition.
But Westermarck is right in not admitting any difference in the savage’s
conception between those who have died by violence and those who have
died a natural death. As will be shown later[82], in the unconscious mode of
thinking even a natural death is perceived as murder; the person was killed
by evil wishes. Any one interested in the origin and meaning of dreams
dealing with the death of dear relatives such as parents and brothers and
sisters will find that the same feeling of ambivalence is responsible for the
fact that the dreamer, the child, and the savage all have the same attitude
towards the dead[83].
A little while ago we challenged Wundt’s conception, who explains the
nature of taboo through the fear of demons, and yet we have just agreed
with the explanation which traces back the taboo of the dead to a fear of the
soul of the dead after it has turned into a demon. This seems like a
contradiction, but it will not be difficult for us to explain it. It is true that we
have accepted the idea of demons, but we know that this assumption is not
something final which psychology cannot resolve into further elements. We
have, as it were, exposed the demons by recognizing them as mere
projections of hostile feelings which the survivor entertains towards the
dead.

The double feeling—tenderness and hostility—against the deceased,
which we consider well founded, endeavours to assert itself at the time of
bereavement as mourning and satisfaction. A conflict must ensue between
these contrary feelings, and as one of them, namely the hostility, is
altogether or for the greater part unconscious, the conflict cannot result in a
conscious difference in the form of hostility or tenderness as, for instance,
when we forgive an injury inflicted upon us by some one we love. The
process usually adjusts itself through a special psychic mechanism, which is
designated in psychoanalysis as projection. This unknown hostility, of
which we are ignorant and of which we do not wish to know, is projected
from our inner perception into the outer world and is thereby detached from
our own person and attributed to the other. Not we, the survivors, rejoice
because we are rid of the deceased, on the contrary, we mourn for him; but
now, curiously enough, he has become an evil demon who would rejoice in
our misfortune and who seeks our death. The survivors must now defend
themselves against this evil enemy; they are freed from inner oppression,
but they have only succeeded in exchanging it for an affliction from
without.
It is not to be denied that this process of projection, which turns the dead
into malevolent enemies, finds some support in the real hostilities of the
dead which the survivors remember and with which they really can
reproach the dead. These hostilities are harshness, the desire to dominate,
injustice, and whatever else forms the background of even the most tender
relations between men. But the process cannot be so simple that this factor
alone could explain the origin of demons by projection. The offences of the
dead certainly motivate in part the hostility of the survivors, but they would
have been ineffective if they had not given rise to this hostility and the
occasion of death would surely be the least suitable occasion for awakening
the memory of the reproaches which justly could have been brought against
the deceased. We cannot dispense with the unconscious hostility as the
constant and really impelling motive. This hostile tendency towards those
nearest and dearest could remain latent during their lifetime, that is to say, it
could avoid betraying itself to consciousness either directly or indirectly
through any substitutive formation. However, when the person who was
simultaneously loved and hated died, this was no longer possible, and the
conflict became acute. The mourning originating from the enhanced
tenderness, became on the one hand more intolerant of the latent hostility,

while on the other hand it could not tolerate that the latter should not give
origin to a feeling of pure gratification. Thus there came about the
repression of the unconscious hostility through projection, and the
formation of the ceremonial in which fear of punishment by demons finds
expression. With the termination of the period of mourning, the conflict also
loses its acuteness so that the taboo of the dead can be abated or sink into
oblivion.

4
Having thus explained the basis on which the very instructive taboo of
the dead has grown up, we must not miss the opportunity of adding a few
observations which may become important for the understanding of taboo
in general.
The projection of unconscious hostility upon demons in the taboo of the
dead is only a single example from a whole series of processes to which we
must grant the greatest influence in the formation of primitive psychic life.
In the foregoing case the mechanism of projection is used to settle an
emotional conflict; it serves the same purpose in a large number of psychic
situations which lead to neuroses. But projection is not specially created for
the purpose of defence, it also comes into being where there are no
conflicts. The projection of inner perceptions to the outside is a primitive
mechanism which, for instance, also influences our sense-perceptions, so
that it normally has the greatest share in shaping our outer world. Under
conditions that have not yet been sufficiently determined even inner
perceptions of ideational and emotional processes are projected outwardly,
like sense perceptions, and are used to shape the outer world, whereas they
ought to remain in the inner world. This is perhaps genetically connected
with the fact that the function of attention was originally directed not
towards the inner world, but to the stimuli streaming in from the outer
world, and only received reports of pleasure and pain from the endopsychic
processes. Only with the development of the language of abstract thought
through the association of sensory remnants of word representations with
inner processes, did the latter gradually become capable of perception.
Before this took place primitive man had developed a picture of the outer
world through the outward projection of inner perceptions, which we, with

our reinforced conscious perception, must now translate back into
psychology.
The projection of their own evil impulses upon demons is only a part of
what has become the world system (‘Weltanschauung’) of primitive man
which we shall discuss later as ‘animism’. We shall then have to ascertain
the psychological nature of such a system formation and the points of
support which we shall find in the analysis of these system formations will
again bring us face to face with the neurosis. For the present we merely
wish to suggest that the ‘secondary elaboration’ of the dream content is the
prototype of all these system formations[84]. And let us not forget that
beginning at the stage of system formation there are two origins for every
act judged by consciousness, namely the systematic, and the real but
unconscious origin[85].
Wundt[86] remarks that “among the influences which myth everywhere
ascribes to demons the evil ones preponderate, so that according to the
religions of races evil demons are evidently older than good demons.” Now
it is quite possible that the whole conception of demons was derived from
the extremely important relation to the dead. In the further course of human
development the ambivalence inherent in this relation then manifested itself
by allowing two altogether contrary psychic formations to issue from the
same root, namely, the fear of demons and of ghosts, and the reverence for
ancestors[87]. Nothing testifies so much to the influence of mourning on the
origin of belief in demons as the fact that demons were always taken to be
the spirits of persons not long dead. Mourning has a very distinct psychic
task to perform, namely, to detach the memories and expectations of the
survivors from the dead. When this work is accomplished the grief, and
with it the remorse and reproach, lessens, and therefore also the fear of the
demon. But the very spirits which at first were feared as demons now serve
a friendlier purpose; they are revered as ancestors and appealed to for help
in times of distress.
If we survey the relation of survivors to the dead through the course of
the ages, it is very evident that the ambivalent feeling has extraordinarily
abated. We now find it easy to suppress whatever unconscious hostility
towards the dead there may still exist without any special psychic effort on
our part. Where formerly satisfied hate and painful tenderness struggled
with each other, we now find piety, which appears like a cicatrice and
demands: De mortuis nil nisi bene. Only neurotics still blur the mourning

for the loss of their dear ones with attacks of compulsive reproaches which
psychoanalysis reveals as the old ambivalent emotional feeling. How this
change was brought about, and to what extent constitutional changes and
real improvement of familiar relations share in causing the abatement of the
ambivalent feeling, need not be discussed here. But this example would
lead us to assume that the psychic impulses of primitive man possessed a
higher degree of ambivalence than is found at present among civilized
human beings. With the decline of this ambivalence the taboo, as the
compromise symptom of the ambivalent conflict, also slowly disappeared.
Neurotics who are compelled to reproduce this conflict, together with the
taboo resulting from it, may be said to have brought with them an atavistic
remnant in the form of an archaic constitution the compensation of which in
the interest of cultural demands entails the most prodigious psychic efforts
on their part.
At this point we may recall the confusing information which Wundt
offered us about the double meaning of the word taboo, namely, holy and
unclean (see above). It was supposed that originally the word taboo did not
yet mean holy and unclean but signified something demonic, something
which may not be touched, thus emphasizing a characteristic common to
both extremes of the later conception; this persistent common trait proves,
however, that an original correspondence existed between what was holy
and what was unclean, which only later became differentiated.
In contrast to this, our discussion readily shows that the double meaning
in question belonged to the word taboo from the very beginning and that it
serves to designate a definite ambivalence as well as everything which has
come into existence on the basis of this ambivalence. Taboo is itself an
ambivalent word and by way of supplement we may add that the
established meaning of this word might of itself have allowed us to guess
what we have found as the result of extensive investigation, namely, that the
taboo prohibition is to be explained as the result of an emotional
ambivalence. A study of the oldest languages has taught us that at one time
there were many such words which included their own contrasts so that
they were in a certain sense ambivalent, though perhaps not exactly in the
same sense as the word taboo[88]. Slight vocal modifications of this
primitive word containing two opposite meanings later served to create a
separate linguistic expression for the two opposites originally united in one
word.

The word taboo has had a different fate; with the diminished importance
of the ambivalence which it connotes it has itself disappeared, or rather, the
words analogous to it have vanished from the vocabulary. In a later
connection I hope to be able to show that a tangible historic change is
probably concealed behind the fate of this conception; that the word at first
was associated with definite human relations which were characterized by
great emotional ambivalence from which it expanded to other analogous
relations.
Unless we are mistaken, the understanding of taboo also throws light
upon the nature and origin of conscience. Without stretching ideas we can
speak of a taboo conscience and a taboo sense of guilt after the violation of
a taboo. Taboo conscience is probably the oldest form in which we meet the
phenomenon of conscience.
For what is ‘conscience’? According to linguistic testimony it belongs to
what we know most surely; in some languages its meaning is hardly to be
distinguished from consciousness.
Conscience is the inner perception of objections to definite wish
impulses that exist in us; but the emphasis is put upon the fact that this
rejection does not have to depend on anything else, that it is sure of itself.
This becomes even plainer in the case of a guilty conscience, where we
become aware of the inner condemnation of such acts which realized some
of our definite wish impulses. Confirmation seems superfluous here;
whoever has a conscience must feel in himself the justification of the
condemnation, and the reproach for the accomplished action. But this same
character is evinced by the attitude of savages towards taboo. Taboo is a
command of conscience, the violation of which causes a terrible sense of
guilt which is as self-evident as its origin is unknown[89].
It is therefore probable that conscience also originates on the basis of an
ambivalent feeling from quite definite human relations which contain this
ambivalence. It probably originates under conditions which are in force
both for taboo and the compulsion neurosis, that is, one component of the
two contrasting feelings is unconscious and is kept repressed by the
compulsive domination of the other component. This is confirmed by many
things which we have learned from our analysis of neurosis. In the first
place the character of compulsion neurotics shows a predominant trait of
painful conscientiousness which is a symptom of reaction against the

temptation which lurks in the unconscious, and which develops into the
highest degrees of guilty conscience as their illness grows worse. Indeed,
one may venture the assertion that if the origin of guilty conscience could
not be discovered through compulsion neurotic patients, there would be no
prospect of ever discovering it. This task is successfully solved in the case
of the individual neurotic, and we are confident of finding a similar solution
in the case of races.
In the second place we cannot help noticing that the sense of guilt
contains much of the nature of anxiety; without hesitation it may be
described as ‘conscience phobia’. But fear points to unconscious sources.
The psychology of the neuroses taught us that when wish feelings undergo
repression their libido becomes transformed into anxiety. In addition we
must bear in mind that the sense of guilt also contains something unknown
and unconscious, namely the motivation for the rejection. The character of
anxiety in the sense of guilt corresponds to this unknown quantity.
If taboo expresses itself mainly in prohibitions it may well be considered
self-evident, without remote proof from the analogy with neurosis that it is
based on a positive, desireful impulse. For what nobody desires to do does
not have to be forbidden, and certainly whatever is expressly forbidden
must be an object of desire. If we applied this plausible theory to primitive
races we would have to conclude that among their strongest temptations
were desires to kill their kings and priests, to commit incest, to abuse their
dead and the like. That is not very probable. And if we should apply the
same theory to those cases in which we ourselves seem to hear the voice of
conscience most clearly we would arouse the greatest contradiction. For
there we would assert with the utmost certainty that we did not feel the
slightest temptation to violate any of these commandments, as for example,
the commandment: Thou shalt not kill, and that we felt nothing but
repugnance at the very idea.
But if we grant the testimony of our conscience the importance it claims,
then the prohibition—the taboo as well as our moral prohibitions—becomes
superfluous, while the existence of a conscience, in turn, remains
unexplained and the connection between conscience, taboo and neurosis
disappears. The net result of this would then be our present state of
understanding unless we view the problem psychoanalytically.

But if we take into account the following results of psychoanalysis, our
understanding of the problem is greatly advanced. The analysis of dreams
of normal individuals has shown that our own temptation to kill others is
stronger and more frequent than we had suspected and that it produces
psychic effects even where it does not reveal itself to our consciousness.
And when we have learnt that the obsessive rules of certain neurotics are
nothing but measures of self-reassurance and self-punishment erected
against the reinforced impulse to commit murder, we can return with fresh
appreciation to our previous hypothesis that every prohibition must conceal
a desire. We can then assume that this desire to murder actually exists and
that the taboo as well as the moral prohibition are psychologically by no
means superfluous but are, on the contrary, explained and justified through
our ambivalent attitude towards the impulse to slay.
The nature of this ambivalent relation so often emphasized as
fundamental, namely, that the positive underlying desire is unconscious,
opens the possibility of showing further connections and explaining further
problems. The pyschic processes in the unconscious are not entirely
identical with those known to us from our conscious psychic life, but have
the benefit of certain notable liberties of which the latter are deprived. An
unconscious impulse need not have originated where we find it expressed, it
can spring from an entirely different place and may originally have referred
to other persons and relations, but through the mechanism of displacement,
it reaches the point where it comes to our notice. Thanks to the
indestructibility of unconscious processes and their inaccessibility to
correction, the impulse may be saved over from earlier times to which it
was adapted to later periods and conditions in which its manifestations must
necessarily seem foreign. These are all only hints, but a careful elaboration
of them would show how important they may become for the understanding
of the development of civilization.
In closing these discussions we do not want to neglect to make an
observation that will be of use for later investigations. Even if we insist
upon the essential similarity between taboo and moral prohibitions we do
not dispute that a psychological difference must exist between them. A
change in the relations of the fundamental ambivalence can be the only
reason why the prohibition no longer appears in the form of a taboo.
In the analytical consideration of taboo phenomena we have hitherto
allowed ourselves to be guided by their demonstrable agreements with

compulsion neurosis; but as taboo is not a neurosis but a social creation we
are also confronted with the task of showing wherein lies the essential
difference between the neurosis and a product of culture like the taboo.
Here again I will take a single fact as my starting point. Primitive races
fear a punishment for the violation of a taboo, usually a serious disease or
death. This punishment threatens only him who has been guilty of the
violation. It is different with the compulsion neurosis. If the patient wants to
do something that is forbidden to him he does not fear punishment for
himself, but for another person. This person is usually indefinite, but, by
means of analysis, is easily recognized as some one very near and dear to
the patient. The neurotic therefore acts as if he were altruistic, while
primitive man seems egotistical. Only if retribution fails to overtake the
taboo violator spontaneously does a collective feeling awaken among
savages that they are all threatened through the sacrilege, and they hasten to
inflict the omitted punishment themselves. It is easy for us to explain the
mechanism of this solidarity. It is a question of fear of the contagious
example, the temptation to imitate, that is to say, of the capacity of the
taboo to infect. If some one has succeeded in satisfying the repressed desire,
the same desire must manifest itself in all his companions; hence, in order
to keep down this temptation, this envied individual must be despoiled of
the fruit of his daring. Not infrequently the punishment gives the executors
themselves an opportunity to commit the same sacrilegious act by justifying
it as an expiation. This is really one of the fundamentals of the human code
of punishment which rightly presumes the same forbidden impulses in the
criminal and in the members of society who avenge his offence.
Psychoanalysis here confirms what the pious were wont to say, that we
are all miserable sinners. How then shall we explain the unexpected nobility
of the neurosis which fears nothing for itself and everything for the beloved
person? Psychoanalytic investigation shows that this nobility is not primary.
Originally, that is to say at the beginning of the disease, the threat of
punishment pertained to one’s own person; in every case the fear was for
one’s own life; the fear of death being only later displaced upon another
beloved person. The process is somewhat complicated but we have a
complete grasp of it. An evil impulse—a death wish—towards the beloved
person is always at the basis of the formation of a prohibition. This is
repressed through a prohibition, and the prohibition is connected with a
certain act which by displacement usually substitutes the hostile for the

beloved person, and the execution of this act is threatened with the penalty
of death. But the process goes further and the original wish for the death of
the beloved other person is then replaced by fear for his death. The tender
altruistic trait of the neurosis therefore merely compensates for the opposite
attitude of brutal egotism which is at the basis of it. If we designate as
social those emotional impulses which are determined through regard for
another person who is not taken as a sexual object, we can emphasize the
withdrawal of these social factors as an essential feature of the neurosis,
which is later disguised through overcompensation.
Without lingering over the origin of these social impulses and their
relation to other fundamental impulses of man, we will bring out the second
main characteristic of the neurosis by means of another example. The form
in which taboo manifests itself has the greatest similarity to the touching
phobia of neurotics, the Délire de toucher. As a matter of fact this neurosis
is regularly concerned with the prohibition of sexual touching and
psychoanalysis has quite generally shown that the motive power which is
deflected and displaced in the neurosis is of sexual origin. In taboo the
forbidden contact has evidently not only sexual significance but rather the
more, general one of attack, of acquisition and of personal assertion. If it is
prohibited to touch the chief or something that was in contact with him it
means that an inhibition should be imposed upon the same impulse which
on other occasions expresses itself in suspicious surveillance of the chief
and even in physical ill-treatment of him before his coronation (see above).
Thus the preponderance of sexual components of the impulse over the
social components is the determining factor of the neurosis. But the social
impulses themselves came into being through the union of egotistical and
erotic components into special entities.
From this single example of a comparison between taboo and
compulsion neurosis it is already possible to guess the relation between
individual forms of the neurosis and the creations of culture, and in what
respect the study of the psychology of the neurosis is important for the
understanding of the development of culture.
In one way the neuroses show a striking and far-reaching
correspondence with the great social productions of art, religion and
philosophy, while again they seem like distortions of them. We may say that
hysteria is a caricature of an artistic creation, a compulsion neurosis, a
caricature of a religion, and a paranoic delusion, a caricature of a

philosophic system. In the last analysis this deviation goes back to the fact
that the neuroses are asocial formations; they seek to accomplish by private
means what arose in society through collective labour. In analysing the
impulse of the neuroses one learns that motive powers of sexual origin
exercise the determining influence in them, while the corresponding
cultural creations rest upon social impulses and on such as have issued from
the combination of egotistical and sexual components. It seems that the
sexual need is not capable of uniting men in the same way as the demands
of self preservation; sexual satisfaction is in the first place the private
concern of the individual.
Genetically the asocial nature of the neurosis springs from its original
tendency to flee from a dissatisfying reality to a more pleasurable world of
phantasy. This real world which neurotics shun is dominated by the society
of human beings and by the institutions created by them; the estrangement
from reality is at the same time a withdrawal from human companionship.

CHAPTER III

ANIMISM, MAGIC AND THE OMNIPOTENCE OF THOUGHT

1
IT is a necessary defect of studies which seek to apply the point of view of
psychoanalysis to the mental sciences that they cannot do justice to either
subject. They therefore confine themselves to the rôle of incentives and
make suggestions to the expert which he should take into consideration in
his work. This defect will make itself felt most strongly in an essay such as
this which tries to treat of the enormous sphere called animism[90].
Animism in the narrower sense is the theory of psychic concepts, and in
the wider sense, of spiritual beings in general. Animatism, the animation
theory of seemingly inanimate nature, is a further subdivision which also
includes animatism and animism. The name animism, formerly applied to a
definite philosophic system, seems to have acquired its present meaning
through E. B. Tylor[91].
What led to the formulation of these names is the insight into the very
remarkable conceptions of nature and the world of those primitive races
known to us from history and from our own times. These races populate the
world with a multitude of spiritual beings which are benevolent or
malevolent to them, and attribute the causation of natural processes to these
spirits and demons; they also consider that not only animals and plants, but
inanimate things as well are animated by them. A third and perhaps the
most important part of this primitive ‘nature philosophy’ seems far less
striking to us because we ourselves are not yet far enough removed from it,
though we have greatly limited the existence of spirits and to-day explain
the processes of nature by the assumption of impersonal physical forces.
For primitive people believe in a similar ‘animation’ of human individuals
as well. Human beings have souls which can leave their habitation and enter
into other beings; these souls are the bearers of spiritual activities and are,
to a certain extent, independent of the ‘bodies’. Originally souls were
thought of as being very similar to individuals; only in the course of a long

evolution did they lose their material character and attain a high degree of
‘spiritualization’[92].
Most authors incline to the assumption that these soul conceptions are
the original nucleus of the animistic system, that spirits merely correspond
to souls that have become independent, and that the souls of animals, plants
and things were formed after the analogy of human souls.
How did primitive people come to the peculiarly dualistic fundamental
conceptions on which this animistic system rests? Through the observation,
it is thought, of the phenomena of sleep (with dreams) and death which
resemble sleep, and through the effort to explain these conditions, which
affect each individual so intimately. Above all, the problem of death must
have become the starting point of the formation of the theory. To primitive
man the continuation of life—immortality—would be self-evident. The
conception of death is something accepted later, and only with hesitation,
for even to us it is still devoid of content and unrealizable. Very likely
discussions have taken place over the part which may have been played by
other observations and experiences in the formation of the fundamental
animistic conceptions such as dream imagery, shadows and reflections, but
these have led to no conclusion[93].
If primitive man reacted to the phenomena that stimulated his reflection
with the formation of conceptions of the soul, and then transferred these to
objects of the outer world, his attitude will be judged to be quite natural and
in no way mysterious. In view of the fact that animistic conceptions have
been shown to be similar among the most varied races and in all periods,
Wundt states that these “are the necessary psychological product of the
myth-forming consciousness, and primitive animism may be looked upon
as the spiritual expression of man’s natural state in so far as this is at all
accessible to our observation”[94]. Hume has already justified the animation
of the inanimate in his Natural History of Religions, where he said: “There
is a universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like
themselves and to transfer to every object those qualities with which they
are familiarly acquainted and of which they are intimately conscious”[95].
Animism is a system of thought, it gives not only the explanation of a
single phenomenon, but makes it possible to comprehend the totality of the
world from one point, as a continuity. Writers maintain that in the course of
time three such systems of thought, three great world systems came into

being: the animistic (mythological), the religious, and the scientific. Of
these animism, the first system is perhaps the most consistent and the most
exhaustive, and the one which explains the nature of the world in its
entirety. This first world system, of mankind is now a psychological theory.
It would go beyond our scope to show how much of it can still be
demonstrated in the life of to-day, either as a worthless survival in the form
of superstition, or in living form, as the foundation of our language, our
belief, and our philosophy.
It is in reference to the successive stages of these three world systems
that we say that animism in itself was not yet a religion but contained the
prerequisites from which religions were later formed. It is also evident that
myths are based upon animistic foundations, but the detailed relation of
myths to animism seem unexplained in some essential points.

2
Our psychoanalytic work will begin at a different point. It must not be
assumed that mankind came to create its first world system through a purely
speculative thirst for knowledge. The practical need of mastering the world
must have contributed to this effort. We are therefore not astonished to learn
that something else went hand in hand with the animistic system, namely
the elaboration of directions for making oneself master of men, animals and
things, as well as of their spirits. S. Reinach[96] wants to call these
directions, which are known under the names of ‘sorcery and magic’, the
strategy of animism; With Mauss and Hubert, I should prefer to compare
them to a technique[97].
Can the conceptions of sorcery and magic be separated? It can be done if
we are willing on our own authority to put ourselves above the vagaries of
linguistic usage. Then sorcery is essentially the art of influencing spirits by
treating them like people under the same circumstances, that is to say by
appeasing them, reconciling them, making them more favourably disposed
to one, by intimidating them, by depriving them of their power and by
making them subject to one’s will; all that is accomplished through the
same methods that have been found effective with living people. Magic,
however, is something else; it does not essentially concern itself with
spirits, and uses special means, not the ordinary psychological method. We
can easily guess that magic is the earlier and the more important part of

animistic technique, for among the means with which spirits are to be
treated there are also found the magic kind[98], and magic is also applied
where spiritualization of nature has not yet, as it seems to us, been
accomplished.
Magic must serve the most varied purposes. It must subject the processes
of nature to the will of man, protect the individual against enemies and
dangers, and give him the power to injure his enemies. But the principles on
whose assumptions the magic activity is based, or rather the principle of
magic, is so evident that it was recognized by all authors. If we may take
the opinion of E. B. Tylor at its face value it can be most tersely expressed
in his words: “mistaking an ideal connection for a real one”. We shall
explain this characteristic in the case of two groups of magic acts.
One of the most widespread magic procedures for injuring an enemy
consists of making an effigy of him out of any kind of material. The
likeness counts for little, in fact any object may be ‘named’ as his image.
Whatever is subsequently done to this image will also happen to the hated
prototype; thus if the effigy has been injured in any place he will be
afflicted by a disease in the corresponding part of the body. This same
magic technique, instead of being used for private enmity can also be
employed for pious purposes and can thus be used to aid the gods against
evil demons. I quote Frazer[99]: “Every night when the sun-god Ra in
ancient Egypt sank to his home in the glowing west he was assailed by
hosts of demons under the leadership of the archfiend Apepi. All night long
he fought them, and sometimes by day the powers of darkness sent up
clouds even into the blue Egyptian sky to obscure his light and weaken his
power. To aid the sun-god in this daily struggle, a ceremony was daily
performed in his temple at Thebes. A figure of his foe Apepi, represented as
a crocodile with a hideous face or a serpent with many coils, was made of
wax, and on it the demon’s name was written in green ink. Wrapt in a
papyrus case, on which another likeness of Apepi had been drawn in green
ink, the figure was then tied up with black hair, spat upon, hacked with a
stone knife and cast on the ground. There the priest trod on it with his left
foot again and again, and then burned it in a fire made of a certain plant or
grass. When Apepi himself had thus been effectively disposed of, waxen
effigies of each of his principle demons, and of their fathers, mothers, and
children, were made and burnt in the same way. The service accompanied
by the recitation of certain prescribed spells, was repeated not merely

morning, noon and night, but whenever a storm was raging or heavy rain
had set in, or black clouds were stealing across the sky to hide the sun’s
bright disk. The fiends of darkness, clouds and rain, felt the injury inflicted
on their images as if it had been done to themselves; they passed away, at
least for a time, and the beneficent sun-god shone out triumphant once
more”[100].
There is a great mass of magic actions which show a similar motivation,
but I shall lay stress upon only two, which have always played a great rôle
among primitive races and which have been partly preserved in the myths
and cults of higher stages of evolution: the art of causing rain and
fruitfulness by magic. Rain is produced by magic means, by imitating it,
and perhaps also by imitating the clouds and storm which produce it. It
looks as if they wanted to ‘play rain’. The Ainos of Japan, for instance,
make rain by pouring out water through a big sieve, while others fit out a
big bowl with sails and oars as if it were a ship, which is then dragged about
the village and gardens. But the fruitfulness of the soil was assured by
magic means by showing it the spectacle of human sexual intercourse. To
cite one out of many examples; in some part of Java, the peasants used to
go out into the fields at night for sexual intercourse when the rice was about
to blossom in order to stimulate the rice to fruitfulness through their
example[101]. At the same time it was feared that proscribed incestuous
relationships would stimulate the soil to grow weeds and render it
unfruitful[102].
Certain negative rules, that is to say magic precautions, must be put into
this first group. If some of the inhabitants of a Dayak village had set out on
a hunt for wild-boars, those remaining behind were in the meantime not
permitted to touch either oil or water with their hands, as such acts would
soften the hunters’ fingers and would let the quarry slip through their
hands[103]. Or when a Gilyak hunter was pursuing game in the woods, his
children were forbidden to make drawings on wood or in the sand, as the
paths in the thick woods might become as intertwined as the lines of the
drawing and the hunter would not find his way home[104].
The fact that in these as in a great many other examples of magic
influence, distance plays no part, telepathy is taken as a matter of course—
will cause us no difficulties in grasping the peculiarity of magic.

There is no doubt about what is considered the effective force in all these
examples. It is the similarity between the performed action and the expected
happening. Frazer therefore calls this kind of magic imitative or
homœopathic. If I want it to rain I only have to produce something that
looks like rain or recalls rain. In a later phase of cultural development,
instead of these magic conjurations of rain, processions are arranged to a
house of god, in order to supplicate the saint who dwells there to send rain.
Finally also this religious technique will be given up and instead an effort
will be made to find out what would influence the atmosphere to produce
rain.
In another group of magic actions the principle of similarity is no longer
involved, but in its stead there is another principle the nature of which is
well brought out in the following examples.
Another method may be used to injure an enemy. You possess yourself
of his hair, his nails, anything that he has discarded, or even a part of his
clothing, and do something hostile to these things. This is just as effective
as if you had dominated the person himself, and anything that you do to the
things that belong to him must happen to him too. According to the
conception of primitive men a name is an essential part of a personality; if
therefore you know the name of a person or a spirit you have acquired a
certain power over its bearer. This explains the remarkable precautions and
restrictions in the use of names which we have touched upon in the essay on
taboo[105]. In these examples similarity is evidently replaced by
relationship.
The cannibalism of primitive races derives its more sublime motivation
in a similar manner. By absorbing parts of the body of a person through the
act of eating we also come to possess the properties which belonged to that
person. From this there follow precautions and restrictions as to diet under
special circumstances. Thus a pregnant woman will avoid eating the meat of
certain animals because their undesirable properties, for example,
cowardice, might thus be transferred to the child she is nourishing. It makes
no difference to the magic influence whether the connection is already
abolished or whether it had consisted of only one very important contact.
Thus, for instance, the belief in a magic bond which links the fate of a
wound with the weapon which caused it can be followed unchanged
through thousands of years. If a Melanesian gets possession of the bow by
which he was wounded he will carefully keep it in a cool place in order thus

to keep down the inflammation of the wound. But if the bow has remained
in the possession of the enemy it will certainly be kept in close proximity to
a fire in order that the wound may burn and become thoroughly inflamed.
Pliny, in his Natural History, XXVIII, advises spitting on the hand which has
caused the injury if one regrets having injured some one; the pain of the
injured person will then immediately be eased. Francis Bacon, in his
Natural History, mentions the generally accredited belief that putting a
salve on the weapon which has made a wound will cause this wound to heal
of itself. It is said that even to-day English peasants follow this prescription,
and that if they have cut themselves with a scythe they will from that
moment on carefully keep the instrument clean in order that the wound may
not fester. In June, 1902, a local English weekly reported that a woman
called Matilde Henry of Norwich accidentally ran an iron nail into the sole
of her foot. Without having the wound examined or even taking off her
stocking she bade her daughter to oil the nail thoroughly in the expectation
that then nothing could happen to her. She died a few days later of
tetanus[106] in consequence of postponed antisepsis.
The examples from this last group illustrate Frazer’s distinction between
contagious magic and imitative magic. What is considered as effective in
these examples is no longer the similarity, but the association in space, the
contiguity, or at least the imagined contiguity, or the memory of its
existence. But since similarity and contiguity are the two essential
principles of the processes of association of ideas, it must be concluded that
the dominance of associations of ideas really explains all the madness of the
rules of magic. We can see how true Tylor’s quoted characteristic of magic:
“mistaking an ideal connection for a real one”, proves to be. The same may
be said of Frazer’s idea, who has expressed it in almost the same terms:
“men mistook the order of their ideas for the order of nature, and hence
imagined that the control which they have, or seem to have, over their
thoughts, permitted them to have a corresponding control over things”[107].
It will at first seem strange that this illuminating explanation of magic
could have been rejected by some authors as unsatisfactory[108]. But on
closer consideration we must sustain the objection that the association
theory of magic merely explains the paths that magic travels, and not its
essential nature, that is, it does not explain the misunderstanding which bids
it put psychological laws in place of natural ones. We are apparently in need
here of a dynamic factor; but while the search for this leads the critics of

Frazer’s theory astray, it will be easy to give a satisfactory explanation of
magic by carrying its association theory further and by entering more
deeply into it.
First let us examine the simpler and more important case of imitative
magic. According to Frazer this may be practised by itself, whereas
contagious magic as a rule presupposes the imitative[109]. The motives
which impel one to exercise magic are easily recognized; they are the
wishes of men. We need only assume that primitive man had great
confidence in the power of his wishes. At bottom everything which he
accomplished by magic means must have been done solely because he
wanted it. Thus in the beginning only his wish is accentuated.
In the case of the child which finds itself under analogous psychic
conditions, without being as yet capable of motor activity, we have
elsewhere advocated the assumption that it at first really satisfies its wishes
by means of hallucinations, in that it creates the satisfying situation through
centrifugal excitements of its sensory organs[110]. The adult primitive man
knows another way. A motor impulse, the will, clings to his wish and this
will which later will change the face of the earth in the service of wish
fulfilment is now used to represent the gratification so that one may
experience it, as it were, through motor hallucination. Such a representation
of the gratified wish is altogether comparable to the play of children, where
it replaces the purely sensory technique of gratification. If play and
imitative representation suffice for the child and for primitive man, it must
not be taken as a sign of modesty, in our sense, or of resignation due to the
realization of their impotence, on the contrary; it is the very obvious result
of the excessive valuation of their wish, of the will which depends upon the
wish and of the paths the wish takes. In time the psychic accent is displaced
from the motives of the magic act to its means, namely to the act itself.
Perhaps it would be more correct to say that primitive man does not become
aware of the over-valuation of his psychic acts until it becomes evident to
him through the means employed. It would also seem as if it were the magic
act itself which compels the fulfilment of the wish by virtue of its similarity
to the object desired. At the stage of animistic thinking there is as yet no
way of demonstrating objectively the true state of affairs, but this becomes
possible at later stages when, though such procedures are still practised, the
psychic phenomenon of scepticism already manifests itself as a tendency to
repression. At that stage men will acknowledge that the conjuration of

spirits avails nothing unless accompanied by belief, and that the magic
effect of prayer fails if there is no piety behind it[111].
The possibility of a contagious magic which depends upon contiguous
association will then show us that the psychic valuation of the wish and the
will has been extended to all psychic acts which the will can command. We
may say that at present there is a general over-valuation of all psychic
processes, that is to say there is an attitude towards the world which
according to our understanding of the relation of reality to thought must
appear like an over-estimation of the latter. Objects as such are over-
shadowed by the ideas representing them; what takes place in the latter
must also happen to the former, and the relations which exist between ideas
are also postulated as to things. As thought does not recognize distances and
easily brings together in one act of consciousness things spatially and
temporally far removed, the magic world also puts itself above spatial
distance by telepathy, and treats a past association as if it were a present
one. In the animistic age the reflection of the inner world must obscure that
other picture of the world which we believe we recognize.
Let us also point out that the two principles of association, similarity and
contiguity, meet in the higher unity of contact. Association by contiguity is
contact in the direct sense, and association by similarity is contact in the
transferred sense. Another identity in the psychic process which has not yet
been grasped by us is probably concealed in the use of the same word for
both kinds of associations. It is the same range of the concept of contact
which we have found in the analysis of taboo[112].
In summing up we may now say that the principle which controls magic,
and the technique of the animistic method of thought, is ‘Omnipotence of
Thought’.

3
I have adopted the term ‘Omnipotence of Thought’ from a highly
intelligent man, a former sufferer from compulsion neurosis, who, after
being cured through psychoanalytic treatment, was able to demonstrate his
efficiency and good sense[113]. He had coined this phrase to designate all
those peculiar and uncanny occurrences which seemed to pursue him just as
they pursue others afflicted with his malady. Thus if he happened to think of
a person, he was actually confronted with this person as if he had conjured
him up; if he inquired suddenly about the state of health of an acquaintance
whom he had long missed he was sure to hear that this acquaintance had
just died, so that he could believe that the deceased had drawn his attention
to himself by telepathic means; if he uttered a half meant imprecation
against a stranger, he could expect to have him die soon thereafter and
burden him with the responsibility for his death. He was able to explain
most of these cases in the course of the treatment, he could tell how the
illusion had originated, and what he himself had contributed towards
furthering his superstitious expectations[114]. All compulsion neurotics are
superstitious in this manner and often against their better judgment.
The existence of omnipotence of thought is most clearly seen in
compulsion neurosis, where the results of this primitive method of thought
are most often found or met in consciousness. But we must guard against
seeing in this a distinguishing characteristic of this neurosis, for analytic
investigation reveals the same mechanism in the other neuroses. In every
one of the neuroses it is not the reality of the experience but the reality of
the thought which forms the basis for the symptom formation. Neurotics
live in a special world in which, as I have elsewhere expressed it, only the
‘neurotic standard of currency’ counts, that is to say, only things intensively
thought of or affectively conceived are effective with them, regardless of
whether these things are in harmony with outer reality. The hysteric repeats
in his attacks and fixates through his symptoms, occurrences which have
taken place only in his phantasy, though in the last analysis they go back to
real events or have been built up from them. The neurotic’s guilty
conscience is just as incomprehensible if traced to real misdeeds. A
compulsion neurotic may be oppressed by a sense of guilt which is
appropriate to a wholesale murderer, while at the same time he acts towards

his fellow beings in a most considerate and scrupulous manner, a behaviour
which he evinced since his childhood. And yet his sense of guilt is justified;
it is based upon intensive and frequent death wishes which unconsciously
manifest themselves towards his fellow beings. It is motivated from the
point of view of unconscious thoughts, but not of intentional acts. Thus the
omnipotence of thought, the over-estimation of psychic processes as
opposed to reality, proves to be of unlimited effect in the neurotic’s
affective life and in all that emanates from it. But if we subject him to
psychoanalytic treatment, which makes his unconscious thoughts conscious
to him he refuses to believe that thoughts are free and is always afraid to
express evil wishes lest they be fulfilled in consequence of his utterance.
But through this attitude as well as through the superstition which plays an
active part in his life he reveals to us how close he stands to the savage who
believes he can change the outer world by a mere thought of his.
The primary obsessive actions of these neurotics are really altogether of
a magical nature. If not magic they are at least anti-magic and are destined
to ward off the expectation of evil with which the neurosis is wont to begin.
Whenever I was able to pierce these secrets it turned out that the content of
this expectation of evil was death. According to Schopenhauer the problem
of death stands at the beginning of every philosophy; we have heard that the
formation of the soul conception and of the belief in demons which
characterize animism, are also traced back to the impression which death
makes upon man. It is hard to decide whether these first compulsive and
protective actions follow the principle of similarity, or of contrast, for under
the conditions of the neurosis they are usually distorted through
displacement upon some trifle, upon some action which in itself is quite
insignificant[115]. The protective formulæ of the compulsion neurosis also
have a counterpart in the incantations of magic. But the evolution of
compulsive actions may be described by pointing out how these actions
begin as a spell against evil wishes which are very remote from anything
sexual, only to end up as a substitute for forbidden sexual activity, which
they imitate as faithfully as possible.
If we accept the evolution of man’s conceptions of the universe
mentioned above, according to which the animistic phase is succeeded by
the religious, and this in turn by the scientific, we have no difficulty in
following the fortunes of the ‘omnipotence of thought’ through all these
phases. In the animistic stage man ascribes omnipotence to himself; in the

religious he has ceded it to the gods, but without seriously giving it up, for
he reserves to himself the right to control the gods by influencing them in
some way or other in the interest of his wishes. In the scientific attitude
towards life there is no longer any room for man’s omnipotence; he has
acknowledged his smallness and has submitted to death as to all other
natural necessities in a spirit of resignation. Nevertheless, in our reliance
upon the power of the human spirit which copes with the laws of reality,
there still lives on a fragment of this primitive belief in the omnipotence of
thought.
In retracing the development of libidinous impulses in the individual
from its mature form back to its first beginnings in childhood, we at first
found an important distinction which is stated in the Three Contributions to
the Theory of Sex[116]. The manifestations of sexual impulses can be
recognized from the beginning, but at first they are not yet directed to any
outer object. Each individual component of the sexual impulse works for a
gain in pleasure and finds its gratification in its own body. This stage is
called autoerotism and is distinguished from the stage of object selection.
In the course of further study it proved to be practical and really
necessary to insert a third stage between these two or, if one prefers, to
divide the first stage of autoerotism into two. In this intermediary stage, the
importance of which increases the more we investigate it, the sexual
impulses which formerly were separate, have already formed into a unit and
have also found an object; but this object is not external and foreign to the
individual, but is his own ego, which is formed at this period. This new
stage is called narcism, in view of the pathological fixation of this condition
which may be observed later on. The individual acts as if he were in love
with himself; for the purposes of our analysis the ego impulses and the
libidinous wishes cannot yet be separated from each other.
Although this narcistic stage, in which the hitherto dissociated sexual
impulses combine into a unity and take the ego as their object, cannot as yet
be sharply differentiated, we can already surmise that the narcistic
organization is never altogether given up again. To a certain extent man
remains narcistic, even after he had found outer subjects for his libido, and
the objects on which he bestows it represent, as it were, emanations of the
libido which remain with his ego and which can be withdrawn into it. The
state of being in love, so remarkable psychologically, and the normal

prototype of the psychoses, corresponds to the highest stage of these
emanations, in contrast to the state of self-love.
This high estimation of psychic acts found among primitives and
neurotics, which we feel to be an overestimation, may now appropriately be
brought into relation to narcism, and interpreted as an essential part of it.
We would say that among primitive people thinking is still highly
sexualized and that this accounts for the belief in the omnipotence of
thought, the unshaken confidence in the capacity to dominate the world and
the inaccessibility to the obvious facts which could enlighten man as to his
real place in the world. In the case of neurotics a considerable part of this
primitive attitude had remained as a constitutional factor, while on the other
hand the sexual repression occurring in them has brought about a new
sexualization of the processes of thought. In both cases, whether we deal
with an original libidinous investment of thought or whether the same
process has been accomplished regressively, the psychic results are the
same, namely, intellectual narcism and omnipotence of thought[117].
If we may take the now established omnipotence of thought among
primitive races as a proof of their narcism, we may venture to compare the
various evolutionary stages of man’s conception of the universe with the
stages of the libidinous evolution of the individual. We find that the
animistic phase corresponds in time as well as in content with narcism, the
religious phase corresponds to that stage of object finding which is
characterized by dependence on the parents, while the scientific stage has
its full counterpart in the individual’s stage of maturity where, having
renounced the pleasure principle and having adapted himself to reality, he
seeks his object in the outer world[118].
Only in one field has the omnipotence of thought been retained in our
own civilization, namely in art. In art alone it still happens that man,
consumed by his wishes, produces something similar to the gratification of
these wishes, and this playing, thanks to artistic illusion, calls forth effects
as if it were something real. We rightly speak of the magic of art and
compare the artist with a magician. But this comparison is perhaps more
important than it claims to be. Art, which certainly did not begin as art for
art’s sake, originally served tendencies which to-day have for the greater
part ceased to exist. Among these we may suspect various magic
intentions[119].

4
Animism, the first conception of the world which man succeeded in
evolving, was therefore psychological. It did not yet require any science to
establish it, for science sets in only after we have realized that we do not
know the world and that we must therefore seek means of getting to know
it. But animism was natural and self-evident to primitive man; he knew how
the things of the world were constituted, and as man conceived himself to
be. We are therefore prepared to find that primitive man transferred the
structural relations of his own psyche to the outer world[120], and on the
other hand we may make the attempt to transfer back into the human soul
what animism teaches about the nature of things.
Magic, the technique of animism, clearly and unmistakably shows the
tendency of forcing the laws of psychic life upon the reality of things, under
conditions where spirits did not yet have to play any rôle, and could still be
taken as objects of magic treatment. The assumptions of magic are therefore
of older origin than the spirit theory, which forms the nucleus of animism.
Our psychoanalytic view here coincides with a theory of R. R. Marett,
according to which animism is preceded by a pre-animistic stage the nature
of which is best indicated by the name Animatism (the theory of general
animation). We have practically no further knowledge of pre-animism, as
no race has yet been found without conceptions of spirits[121].
While magic still retains the full omnipotence of ideas, animism has
ceded part of this omnipotence to spirits and thus has started on the way to
form a religion. Now what could have moved primitive man to this first act
of renunciation? It could hardly have been an insight into the incorrectness
of his assumptions, for he continued to retain the magic technique.
As pointed out elsewhere, spirits and demons were nothing but the
projection of primitive man’s emotional impulses[122]; he personified the
things he endowed with effects, populated the world with them and then
rediscovered his inner psychic processes outside himself, quite like the
ingenious paranoiac Schreber, who found the fixations and detachments of
his libido reflected in the fates of the ‘God-rays’ which he invented[123].
As on a former occasion[124], we want to avoid the problem as to the
origin of the tendency to project psychic processes into the outer world. It is
fair to assume, however, that this tendency becomes stronger where the
projection into the outer world offers psychic relief. Such a state of affairs

can with certainty be expected if the impulses struggling for omnipotence
have come into conflict with each other, for then they evidently cannot all
become omnipotent. The morbid process in paranoia actually uses the
mechanism of projection to solve such conflicts which arise in the psychic
life. However, it so happens that the model case of such a conflict between
two parts of an antithesis is the ambivalent attitude which we have analysed
in detail in the situation of the mourner at the death of one dear to him.
Such a case appeals to us especially fitted to motivate the creation of
projection formations. Here again we are in agreement with those authors
who declare that evil spirits were the first born among spirits, and find the
origin of soul conceptions in the impression which death makes upon the
survivors. We differ from them only in not putting the intellectual problem
which death imposes upon the living into the foreground, instead of which
we transfer the force which stimulates inquiry to the conflict of feelings into
which this situation plunges the survivor.
The first theoretical accomplishment of man, the creation of spirits
would therefore spring from the same source as the first moral restrictions
to which he subjects himself, namely, the rules of taboo. But the fact that
they have the same source should not prejudice us in favour of a
simultaneous origin. If it really were the situation of the survivor confronted
by the dead which first caused primitive man to reflect, so that he was
compelled to surrender some of his omnipotence to spirits and to sacrifice a
part of the free will of his actions, these cultural creations would be a first
recognition of the ἁνἁγκη, which opposes man’s narcism. Primitive man
would bow to the superior power of death with the same gesture with which
he seems to deny it.
If we have the courage to follow our assumptions further, we may ask
what essential part of our psychological structure is reflected and reviewed
in the projection formation of souls and spirits. It is then difficult to dispute
that the primitive conception of the soul, though still far removed from the
later and wholly immaterial soul, nevertheless shares its nature and
therefore looks upon a person or a thing as a duality, over the two elements
of which the known properties and changes of the whole are distributed.
This origin duality, we have borrowed the term from Herbert Spencer[125],
is already identical with the dualism which manifests itself in our customary
separation of spirit from body, and whose indestructible linguistic

manifestations we recognize, for instance, in the description of a person
who faints or raves as one who is ‘beside himself.’[126]
The thing which we, just like primitive man, project in outer reality, can
hardly be anything else than the recognition of a state in which a given
thing is present to the senses and to consciousness, next to which another
state exists in which the thing is latent, but can reappear, that is to say, the
co-existence of perception and memory, or, to generalize it, the existence of
unconscious psychic processes next to conscious ones[127]. It might be said
that in the last analysis the ‘spirit’ of a person or thing is the faculty of
remembering and representing the object, after he or it was withdrawn from
conscious perception.
Of course we must not expect from either the primitive or the current
conception of the ‘soul’ that its line of demarcation from other parts should
be as marked as that which contemporary science draws between conscious
and unconscious psychic activity. The animistic soul, on the contrary, unites
determinants from both sides. Its flightiness and mobility, its faculty of
leaving the body, of permanently or temporarily taking possession of
another body, all these are characteristics which remind us unmistakably of
the nature of consciousness. But the way in which it keeps itself concealed
behind the personal appearance reminds us of the unconscious; to-day we
no longer ascribe its unchangeableness and indestructibility to conscious
but to unconscious processes and look upon these as the real bearers of
psychic activity.
We said before that animism is a system of thought, the first complete
theory of the world; we now want to draw certain inferences through
psychoanalytic interpretation of such a system. Our everyday experience is
capable of constantly showing us the main characteristics of the ‘system’.
We dream during the night and have learnt to interpret the dream in the
daytime. The dream can, without being untrue to its nature, appear confused
and incoherent; but on the other hand it can also imitate the order of
impressions of an experience, infer one occurrence from another, and refer
one part of its contents to another. The dream succeeds more or less in this,
but hardly ever succeeds so completely that an absurdity or a gap in the
structure does not appear somewhere. If we subject the dream to
interpretation we find that this unstable and irregular order of its
components is quite unimportant for our understanding of it. The essential
part of the dream are the dream thoughts, which have, to be sure, a

significant, coherent, order. But their order is quite different from that
which we remember from the manifest content of the dream. The coherence
of the dream thoughts has been abolished and may either remain altogether
lost or can be replaced by the new coherence of the dream content. Besides
the condensation of the dream elements there is almost regularly a re-
grouping of the same which is more or less independent of the former order.
We say in conclusion, that what the dream-work has made out of the
material of the dream thoughts has been subjected to a new influence, the
so-called secondary elaboration, the object of which evidently is to do away
with the incoherence and incomprehensibility caused by the dream-work, in
favour of a new ‘meaning’. This new meaning which has been brought
about by the secondary elaboration is no longer the meaning of the dream
thoughts.
The secondary elaboration of the product of the dream-work is an
excellent example of the nature and the pretensions of a system. An
intellectual function in us demands the unification, coherence and
comprehensibility of everything perceived and thought of, and does not
hesitate to construct a false connexion if, as a result of special
circumstances, it cannot grasp the right one. We know such system
formation not only from the dream, but also from phobias, from compulsive
thinking and from the types of delusions. The system formation is most
ingenious in delusional states (paranoia) and dominates the clinical picture,
but it also must not be overlooked in other forms of neuropsychoses. In
every case we can show that a re-arrangement of the psychic material takes
place, which may often be quite violent, provided it seems comprehensible
from the point of view of the system. The best indication that a system has
been formed then lies in the fact that each result of it can be shown to have
at least two motivations one of which springs from the assumptions of the
system and is therefore eventually delusional,—and a hidden one which,
however, we must recognize as the real and effective motivation.
An example from a neurosis may serve as illustration. In the chapter on
taboo I mentioned a patient whose compulsive prohibitions correspond very
neatly to the taboo of the Maori.[128] The neurosis of this woman was
directed against her husband and culminated in the defence against the
unconscious wish for his death. But her manifest systematic phobia
concerned the mention of death in general, in which her husband was
altogether eliminated and never became the object of conscious solicitude.

One day she heard her husband give an order to have his dull razors taken
to a certain shop to have them sharpened. Impelled by a peculiar unrest she
went to the shop herself, and on her return from this reconnoitre she asked
her husband to lay the razors aside for good because she had discovered that
there was a warehouse of coffins and funeral accessories next to the shop he
mentioned. She claimed that he had intentionally brought the razors into
permanent relation with the idea of death. This was then the systematic
motivation of the prohibition, but we may be sure that the patient would
have brought home the prohibition relating to the razors even if she had not
discovered this warehouse in the neighbourhood. For it would have been
sufficient if on her way to the shop she had met a hearse, a person in
mourning, or somebody carrying a wreath. The net of determinants was
spread out far enough to catch the prey in any case, it was simply a question
whether she should pull it in or not. It could be established with certainty
that she did not mobilize the determinants of the prohibition in other
circumstances. She would then have said it had been one of her ‘better
days’. The real reason for the prohibition of the razor was, of course, as we
can easily guess, her resistance against a pleasurably accentuated idea that
her husband might cut his throat with the sharpened razors.
In much the same way a motor inhibition, an abasia or an agoraphobia,
becomes perfected and detailed if the symptom once succeeds in
representing an unconscious wish and of imposing a defence against it. All
the patient’s remaining unconscious phantasies and effective reminiscences
strive for symptomatic expression through this outlet, when once it has been
opened, and range themselves appropriately in the new order within the
sphere of the disturbance of gait. It would therefore be a futile and really
foolish way to begin to try to understand the symptomatic structure, and the
details of, let us say, an agoraphobia, in terms of its basic assumptions. For
the whole logic and strictness of connexion is only apparent. Sharper
observation can reveal, as in the formation of the façade in the dream, the
greatest inconsistency and arbitrariness in the symptom formation. The
details of such a systematic phobia take their real motivation from
concealed determinants which must have nothing to do with the inhibition
in gait; it is for this reason that the form of such a phobia varies so and is so
contradictory in different people.
If we now attempt to retrace the system of animism with which we are
concerned, we may conclude from our insight into other psychological

systems that ‘superstition’ need not be the only and actual motivation of
such a single rule or custom even among primitive races, and that we are
not relieved of the obligation of seeking for concealed motives. Under the
dominance of an animistic system it is absolutely essential that each rule
and activity should receive a systematic motivation which we to-day call
‘superstitious’. But ‘superstition’, like ‘anxiety’, ‘dreams’, and ‘demons’, is
one of the preliminaries of psychology which have been dissipated by
psychoanalytic investigation. If we get behind these structures, which like a
screen conceal understanding, we realize that the psychic life and the
cultural level of savages have hitherto been inadequately appreciated.
If we regard the repression of impulses as a measure of the level of
culture attained, we must admit that under the animistic system too,
progress and evolution have taken place, which unjustly have been under-
estimated on account of their superstitious motivation. If we hear that the
warriors of a savage tribe impose the greatest chastity and cleanliness upon
themselves as soon as they go upon the war-path[129], the obvious
explanation is that they dispose of their refuse in order that the enemy may
not come into possession of this part of their person in order to harm them
by magical means, and we may surmise analogous superstitious motivations
for their abstinence. Nevertheless the fact remains that the impulse is
renounced and we probably understand the case better if we assume that the
savage warrior imposes such restrictions upon himself in compensation,
because he is on the point of allowing himself the full satisfaction of cruel
and hostile impulses otherwise forbidden. The same holds good for the
numerous cases of sexual restriction while he is preoccupied with difficult
or responsible tasks[130]. Even if the basis of these prohibitions can be
referred to some association with magic, the fundamental conception of
gaining greater strength by foregoing gratification of desires nevertheless
remains unmistakable, and besides the magic rationalization of the
prohibition, one must not neglect its hygienic root. When the men of a
savage tribe go away to hunt, fish, make war, or collect valuable plants, the
women at home are in the meantime subjected to numerous oppressive
restrictions which, according to the savages themselves, exert a sympathetic
effect upon the success of the far away expedition. But it does not require
much acumen to guess that this element acting at a distance is nothing but a
thought of home, the longing of the absent, and that these disguises conceal
the sound psychological insight that the men will do their best only if they

are fully assured of the whereabouts of their guarded women. On other
occasions the thought is directly expressed without magic motivation that
the conjugal infidelity of the wife thwarts the absent husband’s efforts.
The countless taboo rules to which the women of savages are subject
during their menstrual periods are motivated by the superstitious dread of
blood which in all probability actually determines it. But it would be wrong
to overlook the possibility that this blood dread also serves æsthetic and
hygienic purposes which in every case have to be covered by magic
motivations.
We are probably not mistaken in assuming that such attempted
explanations expose us to the reproach of attributing a most improbable
delicacy of psychic activities to contemporary savages.
But I think that we may easily make the same mistake with the
psychology of these races who have remained at the animistic stage that we
made with the psychic life of the child, which we adults understood no
better and whose richness and fineness of feeling we have therefore so
greatly undervalued.
I want to consider another group of hitherto unexplained taboo rules
because they admit of an explanation with which the psychoanalyst is
familiar. Under certain conditions it is forbidden to many savage races to
keep in the house sharp weapons and instruments for cutting[131]. Frazer
sites a German superstition that a knife must not be left lying with the edge
pointing upward because God and the angels might injure themselves with
it. May we not recognize in this taboo a premonition of certain
‘symptomatic actions’[132] for which the sharp weapon might be used by
unconscious evil impulses?

CHAPTER IV

THE INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM

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

1
The first chapter of this book made us acquainted with the conception of
totemism. We heard that totemism is a system which takes the place of
religion among certain primitive races in Australia, America, and Africa,
and furnishes the basis of social organization. We know that in 1869 the
Scotchman MacLennan attracted general interest to the phenomena of
totemism, which until then had been considered merely as curiosities, by his
conjecture that a large number of customs and usages in various old as well
as modern societies were to be taken as remnants of a totemic epoch.
Science has since then fully recognized this significance of totemism. I
quote a passage from the Elements of the Psychology of Races by W. Wundt
(1912), as the latest utterance on this question[133]: ‘Taking all this together
it becomes highly probable that a totemic culture was at one time the
preliminary stage of every later evolution as well as a transition stage
between the state of primitive man and the age of gods and heroes.’
It is necessary for the purposes of this chapter to go more deeply into the
nature of totemism. For reasons that will be evident later I here give
preference to an outline by S. Reinach, who in the year 1900 sketched the

following Code du Totémisme in twelve articles, like a catechism of the
totemic religion[134]:
1. Certain animals must not be killed or eaten, but men bring up
individual animals of these species and take care of them.
2. An animal that dies accidentally is mourned and buried with the same
honours as a member of the tribe.
3. The prohibition as to eating sometimes refers only to a certain part of
the animal.
4. If pressure of necessity compels the killing of an animal usually
spared, it is done with excuses to the animal and the attempt is made to
mitigate the violation of the taboo, namely the killing, through various
tricks and evasions.
5. If the animal is sacrificed by ritual, it is solemnly mourned.
6. At specified solemn occasions, like religious ceremonies, the skins of
certain animals are donned. Where totemism still exists, these are totem
animals.
7. Tribes and individuals assume the names of totem animals.
8. Many tribes use pictures of animals as coats of arms and decorate
their weapons with them; the men paint animal pictures on their bodies or
have them tattooed.
9. If the totem is one of the feared and dangerous animals it is assumed
that the animal will spare the members of the tribe named after it.
10. The totem animal protects and warns the members of the tribe.
11. The totem animal foretells the future to those faithful to it and serves
as their leader.
12. The members of a totem tribe often believe that they are connected
with the totem animal by the bond of common origin.
The value of this catechism of the totem religion can be more
appreciated if one bears in mind that Reinach has here also incorporated all
the signs and clews which lead to the conclusion that the totemic system
had once existed. The peculiar attitude of this author to the problem is
shown by the fact that to some extent he neglects the essential traits of
totemism, and we shall see that of the two main tenets of the totemistic
catechism he has forced one into the background and completely lost sight
of the other.

In order to get a more correct picture of the characteristics of totemism
we turn to an author who has devoted four volumes to the theme,
combining the most complete collection of the observations in question
with the most thorough discussion of the problems they raise. We shall
remain indebted to J. G. Frazer, the author of Totemism and Exogamy[135],
for the pleasure and information he affords, even though psychoanalytic
investigation may lead us to results which differ widely from his[136].
“A totem,” wrote Frazer in his first essay[137], “is a class of material
objects which a savage regards with superstitious respect, believing that
there exists between him and every member of the class an intimate and
altogether special relation. The connexion between a person and his totem is
mutually beneficent; the totem protects the man and the man shows his
respect for the totem in various ways, by not killing it if it be an animal, and
not cutting or gathering it if it be a plant. As distinguished from a fetich, a
totem is never an isolated individual but always a class of objects, generally
a species of animals or of plants, more rarely a class of inanimate natural
objects, very rarely a class of artificial objects.”
At least three kinds of totem can be distinguished:
1. The tribal totem which a whole tribe shares and which is hereditary
from generation to generation,
2. The sex totem which belongs to all the masculine or feminine
members of a tribe to the exclusion of the opposite sex, and
3. The individual totem which belongs to the individual and does not
descend to his successors.
The last two kinds of totem are comparatively of little importance
compared to the tribal totem. Unless we are mistaken they are recent
formations and of little importance as far as the nature of the taboo is
concerned.
The tribal totem (clan totem) is the object of veneration of a group of
men and women who take their name from the totem and consider
themselves consanguineous offspring of a common ancestor, and who are
firmly associated with each other through common obligations towards
each other as well as by the belief in their totem.
Totemism is a religious as well as a social system. On its religious side it
consists of the relations of mutual respect and consideration between a
person and his totem, and on its social side it is composed of obligations of

the members of the clan towards each other and towards other tribes. In the
later history of totemism these two sides show a tendency to part company;
the social system often survives the religious and conversely remnants of
totemism remain in the religion of countries in which the social system
based upon totemism had disappeared. In the present state of our ignorance
about the origin of totemism we cannot say with certainty how these two
sides were originally combined. But there is on the whole a strong
probability that in the beginning the two sides of totemism were
indistinguishable from each other. In other words, the further we go back
the clearer it becomes that a member of a tribe looks upon himself as being
of the same genus as his totem and makes no distinction between his
attitude towards the totem and his attitude towards his tribal companions.
In the special description of totemism as a religious system, Frazer lays
stress on the fact that the members of a tribe assume the name of their totem
and also as a rule believe that they are descended from it. It is due to this
belief that they do not hunt the totem animal or kill or eat it, and that they
deny themselves every other use of the totem if it is not an animal. The
prohibitions against killing or eating the totem are not the only taboos
affecting it; sometimes it is also forbidden to touch it and even to look at it;
in a number of cases the totem must not be called by its right name.
Violation of the taboo prohibitions which protect the totem is punished
automatically by serious disease or death[138].
Specimens of the totem animals are sometimes raised by the clan and
taken care of in captivity[139]. A totem animal found dead is mourned and
buried like a member of the clan. If a totem animal had to be killed it was
done with a prescribed ritual of excuses and ceremonies of expiation.
The tribe expected protection and forbearance from its totem. If it was a
dangerous animal (a beast of prey or a poisonous snake), it was assumed
that it would not harm, and where this assumption did not come true the
person attacked was expelled from the tribe. Frazer thinks that oaths were
originally ordeals, many tests as to descent and genuineness being in this
way left to the decision of the totem. The totem helps in case of illness and
gives the tribe premonitions and warnings. The appearance of the totem
animal near a house was often looked upon as an announcement of death.
The totem had come to get its relative[140].

A member of a clan seeks to emphasize his relationship to the totem in
various significant ways; he imitates an exterior similarity by dressing
himself in the skin of the totem animal, by having the picture of it tattooed
upon himself, and in other ways. On the solemn occasions of birth,
initiation into manhood or funeral obsequies this identification with the
totem is carried out in deeds and words. Dances in which all the members
of the tribe disguise themselves as their totem and act like it, serve various
magic and religious purposes. Finally there are the ceremonies at which the
totem animal is killed in a solemn manner[141].
The social side of totemism is primarily expressed in a sternly observed
commandment and in a tremendous restriction. The members of a totem
clan are brothers and sisters, pledged to help and protect each other; if a
member of the clan is slain by a stranger the whole tribe of the slayer must
answer for the murder and the clan of the slain man shows its solidarity in
the demand for expiation for the blood that has been shed. The ties of the
totem are stronger than our ideas of family ties, with which they do not
altogether coincide, since the transfer of the totem takes place as a rule
through maternal inheritance, paternal inheritance possibly not counting at
all in the beginning.
But the corresponding taboo restriction consists in the prohibition
against members of the same clan marrying each other or having any kind
of sexual intercourse whatsoever with each other. This is the famous and
enigmatic exogamy connexion with totemism. We have devoted the whole
first chapter of this book to it, and therefore need only mention here that
this exogamy springs from the intensified incest dread of primitive races,
that it becomes entirely comprehensible as a security against incest in group
marriages, and that at first it accomplishes the avoidance of incest for the
younger generation and only in the course of further development becomes
a hindrance to the older generation as well[142].
To this presentation of totemism by Frazer, one of the earliest in the
literature on the subject, I will now add a few excerpts from one of the
latest summaries. In the Elements of the Psychology of Races, which
appeared in 1912, W. Wundt says[143]: “The totem animal is considered the
ancestral animal. ‘Totem’ is therefore both a group name and a birth name
and in the latter aspect this name has at the same time a mythological
meaning. But all these uses of the conception play into each other and the
particular meanings may recede so that in some cases the totems have

become almost a mere nomenclature of the tribal divisions, while in others
the idea of the descent or else the cultic meaning of the totem remains in the
foreground.... The conception of the totem determines the tribal
arrangement and the tribal organization. These norms and their
establishment in the belief and feelings of the members of the tribe account
for the fact that originally the totem animal was certainly not considered
merely a name for a group division but that it usually was considered the
progenitor of the corresponding division.... This accounted for the fact that
these animal ancestors enjoyed a cult.... This animal cult expresses itself
primarily in the attitude towards the totem animal, quite aside from special
ceremonies and ceremonial festivities: not only each individual animal but
every representative of the same species was to a certain degree a sanctified
animal; the member of the totem was forbidden to eat the flesh of the totem
animal or he was allowed to eat it only under special circumstances. This is
in accord with the significant contradictory phenomenon found in this
connexion, namely, that under certain conditions there was a kind of
ceremonial consumption of the totem flesh....”
“ ...But the most important social side of this totemic tribal arrangement
consists in the fact that it was connected with certain rules of conduct for
the relations of the groups with each other. The most important of these
were the rules of conjugal relations. This tribal division is thus connected
with an important phenomenon which first made its appearance in the
totemic age, namely with exogamy.”
If we wish to arrive at the characteristics of the original totemism by
sifting through everything that may correspond to later development or
decline, we find the following essential facts: The totems were originally
only animals and were considered the ancestors of single tribes. The totem
was hereditary only through the female line; it was forbidden to kill the
totem (or to eat it, which under primitive conditions amounts to the same
thing); members of a totem were forbidden to have sexual intercourse with
each other[144].
It may now seem strange to us that in the Code du totémisme which
Reinach has drawn up the one principal taboo, namely exogamy, does not
appear at all while the assumption of the second taboo, namely the descent
from the totem animal, is only casually mentioned. Yet Reinach is an author
to whose work in this field we owe much and I have chosen his presentation

in order to prepare us for the differences of opinion among the authors,
which will now occupy our attention.

2
The more convinced we became that totemism had regularly formed a
phase of every culture, the more urgent became the necessity of arriving at
an understanding of it and of casting light upon the riddle of its nature. To
be sure, everything about totemism is in the nature of a riddle; the decisive
questions are the origin of the totem, the motivation of exogamy (or rather
of the incest taboo which it represents) and the relation between the two, the
totem organization and the incest prohibition. The understanding should be
at once historical and psychological; it should inform us under what
conditions this peculiar institution developed and to what psychic needs of
man it has given expression.
The reader will certainly be astonished to hear from how many different
points of view the answer to these questions has been attempted and how
far the opinions of expert investigators vary. Almost everything that might
be asserted in general about totemism is doubtful; even the above statement
of it, taken from an article by Frazer in 1887, cannot escape the criticism
that it expresses an arbitrary preference of the author and would be
challenged to-day by Frazer himself, who has repeatedly changed his view
on the subject[145].
It is quite obvious that the nature of totemism and exogamy could be
most readily grasped if we could get into closer touch with the origin of
both institutions. But in judging the state of affairs we must not forget the
remark of Andrew Lang, that even primitive races have not preserved these
original forms and the conditions of their origin, so that we are altogether
dependent upon hypotheses to take the place of the observation we lack[146].
Among the attempted explanations some seem inadequate from the very
beginning in the judgment of the psychologist. They are altogether too
rational and do not take into consideration the effective character of what
they are to explain. Others rest on assumptions which observation fails to
verify; while still others appeal to facts which could better be subjected to
another interpretation. The refutation of these various opinions as a rule
hardly presents any difficulties; the authors are, as usual, stronger in the
criticism which they practice on each other than in their own work. The

final result as regards most of the points treated is a non liquet. It is
therefore not surprising that most of the new literature on the subject, which
we have largely omitted here, shows the unmistakable effort to reject a
general solution of totemic problems as unfeasible. (See, for instance, B.
Goldenweiser in the Journal of American Folklore XXIII, 1910. Reviewed in
the Brittanica Year Book, 1913.) I have taken the liberty of disregarding the
chronological order in stating these contradictory hypotheses.

(a) The Origin of Totemism
The question of the origin of totemism can also be formulated as
follows: How did primitive people come to select the names of animals,
plants and inanimate objects for themselves and their tribes?[147]
The Scotchman, MacLennan, who discovered totemism and exogamy
for science[148], refrained from publishing his views of the origin of
totemism. According to a communication of Andrew Lang[149] he was for a
time inclined to trace totemism back to the custom of tattooing. I shall
divide the accepted theories of the derivation of totemism into three groups,
(α) nominalistic, β) sociological, (γ) psychological.

(α) The Nominalistic Theories
The information about these theories will justify their summation under
the headings I have used.
Garcilaso de La Vega, a descendant of the Peruvian Inkas, who wrote the
history of his race in the seventeenth century, is already said to have traced
back what was known to him about totemic phenomena to the need of the
tribes to differentiate themselves from each other by means of names[150].
The same idea appears centuries later in the Ethnology of A. K. Keane
where totems are said to be derived from heraldic badges through which
individuals, families and tribes wanted to differentiate themselves[151].
Max Müller expresses the same opinion about the meaning of the totem
in his Contributions to the Science of Mythology[152]. A totem is said to be,
1. a mark of the clan, 2. a clan name, 3. the name of the ancestor of the clan,
4. the name of the object which the clan reveres. J. Pikler wrote later, in
1899, that men needed a permanent name for communities and individuals
that could be preserved in writing.... Thus totemism arises, not from a

religious, but from a prosaic everyday need of mankind. The giving of
names, which is the essence of totemism, is a result of the technique of
primitive writing. The totem is of the nature of an easily represented writing
symbol. But if savages first bore the name of an animal they deduced the
idea of relationship from this animal[153].
Herbert Spencer[154], also, thought that the origin of totemism was to be
found in the giving of names. The attributes of certain individuals, he
showed, had brought about their being named after animals so that they had
come to have names of honour or nicknames which continued in their
descendants. As a result of the indefiniteness and incomprehensibility of
primitive languages, these names are said to have been taken by later
generations as proof of their descent from the animals themselves.
Totemism would thus be the result of a mistaken reverence for ancestors.
Lord Avebury (better known under his former name, Sir John Lubbock)
has expressed himself quite similarly about the origin of totemism, though
without emphasizing the misunderstanding. If we want to explain the
veneration of animals we must not forget how often human names are
borrowed from animals. The children and followers of a man who was
called bear or lion naturally made this their ancestral name. In this way it
came about that the animal itself came to be respected and finally
venerated.
Fison has advanced what seems an irrefutable objection to such a
derivation of the totem name from the names of individuals[155]. He shows
from conditions in Australia that the totem is always the mark of a group of
people and never of an individual. But if it were otherwise, if the totem was
originally the name of a single individual, it could never, with the system of
maternal inheritance, descend to his children.
The theories thus far stated are evidently inadequate. They may explain
how animal names came to be applied to primitive tribes but they can never
explain the importance attached to the giving of names which constitutes
the totemic system. The most noteworthy theory of this group has been
developed by Andrew Lang in his books, Social Origins, 1903, and The
Secret of the Totem, 1905. This theory still makes naming the centre of the
problem, but it uses two interesting psychological factors and thus may
claim to have contributed to the final solution of the riddle of totemism.

Andrew Lang holds that it does not make any difference how clans
acquired their animal names. It might be assumed that one day they awoke
to the consciousness that they had them without being able to account from
where they came. The origin of these names had been forgotten. In that case
they would seek to acquire more information by pondering over their
names, and with their conviction of the importance of names they
necessarily came to all the ideas that are contained in the totemic system.
For primitive men, as for savages of to-day and even for our children[156], a
name is not indifferent and conventional as it seems to us, but is something
important and essential. A man’s name is one of the main constituents of his
person and perhaps a part of his psyche. The fact that they had the same
names as animals must have led primitive men to assume a secret and
important bond between their persons and the particular animal species.
What other bond than consanguinity could it be? But if the similarity of
names once led to this assumption it could also account directly for all the
totemic prohibitions of the blood taboo, including exogamy.
“No more than these three things—a group animal name of unknown
origin; belief in a transcendental connexion between all bearers, human and
bestial, of the same name; and belief in the blood superstitions—were
needed to give rise to all the totemic creeds and practices, including
exogamy” (Secret of the Totem, p. 126).
Lang’s explanation extends over two periods. It derives the totemic
system of psychological necessity from the totem names, on the assumption
that the origin of the naming has been forgotten. The other part of the
theory now seeks to clear up the origin of these names. We shall see that it
bears an entirely different stamp.
This other part of the Lang theory is not markedly different from those
which I have called ‘nominalistic’. The practical need of differentiation
compelled the individual tribes to assume names and therefore they
tolerated the names which every tribe ascribed to the other. This ‘naming
from without’ is the peculiarity of Lang’s construction. The fact that the
names which thus originated were borrowed from animals is not further
remarkable and need not have been felt by primitive men as abuse or
derision. Besides, Lang has cited numerous cases from later epochs of
history in which names given from without that were first meant to be
derisive were accepted by those nicknamed and voluntarily borne (The
Guises, Whigs and Tories). The assumption that the origin of these names

was forgotten in the course of time connects this second part of the Lang
theory with the first one just mentioned.

(β) The Sociological Theories
S. Reinach, who successfully traced the relics of the totemic system in
the cult and customs of later periods, though attaching from the very
beginning only slight value to the factor of descent from the totem animal,
once made the casual remark that totemism seemed to him to be nothing but
“une hypertrophie de l’instinct social.”[157]
The same interpretation seems to permeate the new work of E.
Durkheim, Les Formes Élémentaires de la Vie Religieuse; Le Systême
Totémique en Australie, 1912. The totem is the visible representative of the
social religion of these races. It embodies the community, which is the real
object of veneration.
Other authors have sought a more intimate reason for the share which
social impulses have played in the formation of totemic institutions. Thus
A. C. Haddon has assumed that every primitive tribe originally lived on a
particular plant or animal species and perhaps also traded with this food and
exchanged it with other tribes. It then was inevitable that a tribe should
become known to other tribes by the name of the animal which played such
weighty rôle with it. At the same time this tribe would develop a special
familiarity with this animal, and a kind of interest for it which, however,
was based upon the psychic motive of man’s most elementary and pressing
need, namely, hunger[158].
The objections against this most rational of all the totem theories are that
such a state of the food supply is never found among primitive men and
probably never existed. Savages are the more omnivorous the lower they
stand in the social scale. Besides, it is incomprehensible how such an
exclusive diet could have developed an almost religious relation to the
totem, culminating in an absolute abstention from the referred food.
The first of the three theories about the origin of totemism which Frazer
stated was a psychological one. We shall report it elsewhere.
Frazer’s second theory, which we will discuss here, originated under the
influence of an important publication by two investigators of the inhabitants
of Central Australia[159].

Spencer and Gillen describe a series of peculiar institutions, customs,
and opinions of a group of tribes, the so-called Arunta nation, and Frazer
subscribes to their opinion that these peculiarities are to be looked upon as
characteristics of a primary state and that they can explain the first and real
meaning of totemism.
In the Arunta tribe itself (a part of the Arunta nation) these peculiarities
are as follows:
1. They have the division into totem clans but the totem is not hereditary
but is individually determined (as will be shown later).
2. The totem clans are not exogamous, and the marriage restrictions are
brought about by a highly developed division into marriage classes which
have nothing to do with the totems.
3. The function of the totem clan consists of carrying out a ceremony
which in a subtle magic manner brings about an increase of the edible
totem. (This ceremony is called Intichiuma.)
4. The Aruntas have a peculiar theory about conception and re-birth.
They assume that the spirits of the dead who belonged to their totem wait
for their re-birth in definite localities and penetrate into the bodies of the
women who pass such a spot. When a child is born the mother states at
which spirit abode she thinks she conceived her child. This determines the
totem of the child. It is further assumed that the spirits (of the dead as well
as of the re-born) are bound to peculiar stone amulets, called Churinga,
which are found in these places.
Two factors seem to have induced Frazer to believe that the oldest form
of totemism had been found in the institution of the Aruntas. In the first
place the existence of certain myths which assert that the ancestors of the
Aruntas always lived on their totem animal, and that they married no other
women except those of their own totem. Secondly, the apparent disregard of
the sexual act in their theory of conception. People who have not yet
realized that conception was the result of the sexual act might well be
considered the most backward and primitive people living to-day.
Frazer, in having recourse to the Intichiuma ceremony to explain
totemism, suddenly saw the totemic system in a totally different light as a
thoroughly practical organization for accomplishing the most natural needs
of man. (Compare Haddon above[160].) The system was simply an
extraordinary piece of ‘co-operative magic’. Primitive men formed what

might be called a magic production and consumption club. Each totem clan
undertook to see to the cleanliness of a certain article of food. If it were a
question of inedible totems like harmful animals, rain, wind, or similar
objects, it was the duty of the totem clan to dominate this part of nature and
to ward off its injuriousness. The efforts of each clan were for the good of
all the others. As the clan could not eat its totem or could eat only a very
little of it, it furnished this valuable product for the rest and was in turn
furnished with what these had to take care of as their social totem duty. In
the light of this interpretation furnished by the Intichiuma ceremony, it
appeared to Frazer as if the prohibition against eating the totem had misled
observers to neglect the more important side of the relation, namely the
commandment to supply as much as possible of the edible totem for the
needs of others.
Frazer accepted the tradition of the Aruntas that each totem clan had
originally lived on its totem without any restriction. It then became difficult
to understand the evolution that followed through which savages were
satisfied to ensure the totem for others while they themselves abstained
from eating it. He then assumed that this restriction was by no means the
result of a kind of religious respect, but came about through the observation
that no animal devoured its own kind, so that this break in the identification
with the totem was injurious to the power which savages sought to acquire
over the totem. Or else it resulted from the endeavour to make the being
favourably disposed by sparing it. Frazer did not conceal the difficulties of
this explanation from himself[161], nor did he dare to indicate in what way
the habit of marrying within the totem, which the myths of the Aruntas
proclaimed, was converted into exogamy.
Frazer’s theory based on the Intichiuma, stands or falls with the
recognition of the primitive nature of the Arunta institutions. But it seems
impossible to hold to this in the fact of the objections advanced by
Durkheim[162] and Lang[163]. The Aruntas seem on the contrary to be the
most developed of the Australian tribes and to represent rather a dissolution
stage of totemism than its beginning. The myths that made such an
impression on Frazer because they emphasize, in contrast to prevailing
institutions of to-day, that the Aruntas are free to eat the totem and to marry
within it, easily explain themselves to us as wish phantasies, which are
projected into the past, like the myths of the Golden Age.

(γ) The Psychological Theories
Frazer’s first psychological theories, formed before his acquaintance
with the observations of Spencer and Gillen, were based upon the belief in
an ‘outward soul’[164]. The totem was meant to represent a safe place of
refuge where the soul is deposited in order to avoid the dangers which
threaten it. After primitive man had housed his soul in his totem he himself
became invulnerable and he naturally took care himself not to harm the
bearer of his soul. But as he did not know which individual of the species in
question was the bearer of his soul he was concerned in sparing the whole
species. Frazer himself later gave up this derivation of totemism from the
belief in souls.
When he became acquainted with the observations of Spencer and Gillen
he set up the other social theory which has just been stated, but he himself
then saw that the motive from which he had derived totemism was
altogether too ‘rational’ and that he had assumed a social organization for it
which was altogether too complicated to be called primitive[165]. The magic
co-operative companies now appeared to him rather as the fruit than as the
germ of totemism. He sought a simpler factor for the derivation of totemism
in the shape of a primitive superstition behind these forms. He then found
this original factor in the remarkable conception theory of the Aruntas.
As already stated, the Aruntas establish no connexion between
conception and the sexual act. If a woman feels herself to be a mother it
means that at that moment one of the spirits from the nearest spirit abode
who has been watching for a re-birth, has penetrated into her body and is
born as her child. This child has the same totem as all the spirits that lurk in
that particular locality. But if we are willing to go back a step further and
assume that the woman originally believed that the animal, plant, stone, or
other object which occupied her fancy at the moment when she first felt
herself pregnant had really penetrated into her and was being born through
her in human form, then the identity of a human being with his totem would
really be founded on the belief of the mother, and all the other totem
commandments (with the exception of exogamy) could easily be derived
from this belief. Men would refuse to eat the particular animal or plant
because it would be just like eating themselves. But occasionally they
would be impelled to eat some of their totem in a ceremonial manner
because they could thus strengthen their identification with the totem,

which is the essential part of totemism. W. H. R. Rivers’ observations
among the inhabitants of the Bank Islands seemed to prove men’s direct
identification with their totems on the basis of such a conception theory[166].
The ultimate sources of totemism would then be the ignorance of
savages as to the process of procreation among human beings and animals;
especially their ignorance as to the rôle which the male plays in
fertilization. This ignorance must be facilitated by the long interval which is
interposed between the fertilizing act and the birth of the child or the
sensation of the child’s first movements. Totemism is therefore a creation of
the feminine mind and not of the masculine. The sick fancies of the
pregnant woman are the roots of it. Anything indeed that struck a woman at
that mysterious moment of her life when she first knows herself to be a
mother might easily be identified by her with the child in her womb. Such
maternal fancies, so natural and seemingly so universal, appear to be the
root of totemism[167].
The main objection to this third theory of Frazer’s is the same which has
already been advanced against his second, sociological theory. The Aruntas
seem to be far removed from the beginnings of totemism. Their denial of
fatherhood does not apparently rest upon primitive ignorance; in many
cases they even have paternal inheritance. They seem to have sacrificed
fatherhood to a kind of a speculation which strives to honour the ancestral
spirits[168]. Though they raise the myth of immaculate conception through a
spirit to a general theory of conception, we cannot for that reason credit
them with ignorance as to the conditions of procreation any more than we
could the old races who lived during the rise of the Christian myths.
Another psychological theory of the origin of totemism has been
formulated by the Dutch writer, G. A. Wilcken. It establishes a connexion
between totemism and the migration of souls. “The animal into which,
according to general belief, the souls of the dead passed, became a blood
relative, an ancestor, and was revered as such.” But the belief in the soul’s
migration to animals is more readily derived from totemism than
inversely[169].
Still another theory of totemism is advanced by the excellent American
ethnologists, Franz Boas, Hill-Tout, and others. It is based on observations
of totemic Indian tribes and asserts that the totem is originally the guardian
spirit of an ancestor who has acquired it through a dream and handed it on

to his descendants. We have already heard the difficulties which the
derivation of totemism through inheritance from a single individual offers;
besides, the Australian observations seem by no means to support the
tracing back of the totem to the guardian spirit[170].
Two facts have become decisive for the last of the psychological theories
as stated by Wundt; in the first place, that the original and most widely
known totem object was an animal, and secondly, that the earliest totem
animals corresponded to animals which had a soul[171]. Such animals as
birds, snakes, lizards, mice are fitted by their extreme mobility, their flight
through the air, and by other characteristics which arouse surprise and fear,
to become the bearers of souls which leave their bodies. The totem animal
is a descendant of the animal transformations of the spirit-soul. Thus with
Wundt totemism is directly connected with the belief in souls or with
animism.

(b) and (c) The Origin of Exogamy and Its Relation to Totemism
I have put forth the theories of totemism with considerable detail and yet
I am afraid that I have not made them clear enough on account of the
condensation that was constantly necessary. In the interest of the reader I
am taking the liberty of further condensing the other questions that arise.
The discussions about the exogamy of totem races become especially
complicated and untractable, one might even say confused, on account of
the nature of the material used. Fortunately the object of this treatise
permits me to limit myself to pointing out several guide-posts and referring
to the frequently quoted writings of experts in the field for a more thorough
pursuit of the subject.
The attitude of an author to the problems of exogamy is of course not
independent of the stand he has taken toward one or the other of the totem
theories. Some of these explanations of totemism lack all connexion with
exogamy so that the two institutions are entirely separated. Thus we find
here two opposing views, one of which clings to the original likelihood that
exogamy is an essential part of the totemic system while the other disputes
such a connection and believes in an accidental combination of these two
traits of the most ancient cultures. In his later works Frazer has
emphatically stood for this latter point of view.

“I must request the reader to bear constantly in mind that the two
institutions of totemism and exogamy are fundamentally distinct in origin
and nature though they have accidentally crossed and blended in many
tribes.” (Totemism and Exogamy I, Preface XII.)
He warns directly against the opposite view as being a source of endless
difficulties and misunderstandings. In contrast to this, many authors have
found a way of conceiving exogamy as a necessary consequence of the
basic views on totemism. Durkheim[172] has shown in his writings how the
taboo, which is attached to the totem, must have entailed the prohibition
against putting a woman of the same totem to sexual uses. The totem is of
the same blood as the human being and for this reason the blood bann (in
reference to defloration and menstruation) forbids sexual intercourse with a
woman of the same totem[173]. Andrew Lang, who here agrees with
Durkheim, goes so far as to believe that the blood taboo was not necessary
to bring about the prohibition in regard to the women of the same tribe[174].
The general totem taboo which, for instance, forbids any one to sit in the
shadow of the totem tree, would have sufficed. Andrew Lang also contends
for another derivation of exogamy (see below) and leaves it in doubt how
these two explanations are related to each other.
As regards the temporal relations, the majority of authors subscribe to
the opinion that totemism is the older institution and that exogamy came
later[175].
Among the theories which seek to explain exogamy independently of
totemism only a few need be mentioned in so far as they illustrate different
attitudes of the authors towards the problem of incest.
MacLennan[176] had ingeniously guessed that exogamy resulted from the
remnants of customs pointing to earlier forms of female rape. He assumed
that it was the general custom in ancient times to procure women from
strange tribes so that marriage with a woman from the same tribe gradually
became “improper because it was unusual”. He sought the motive for the
exogamous habit in the scarcity of women among these tribes, which had
resulted from the custom of killing most female children at birth. We are not
concerned here with investigation whether actual conditions corroborate
MacLennan’s assumptions. We are more interested in the argument that
these premises still leave it unexplained why the male members of the tribe
should have made these few women of their blood inaccessible to

themselves, as well as in the manner in which the incest problem is here
entirely neglected[177].
Other writers have on the contrary assumed, and evidently with more
right, that exogamy is to be interpreted as an institution for the prevention
of incest[178].
If we survey the gradually increasing complication of Australian
marriage restrictions we can hardly help agreeing with the opinion of
Morgan Frazer, Hewitt and Baldwin Spencer[179], that these institutions bear
the stamp of ‘deliberate design’, as Frazer puts it, and that they were meant
to do what they have actually accomplished. “In no other way does it seem
possible to explain in all its details a system at once so complex and so
regular”[180].
It is of interest to point out that the first restrictions which the
introduction of marriage classes brought about affected the sexual freedom
of the younger generation, in other words, incest between brothers and
sisters and between sons and mothers, while incest between father and
daughter was only abrogated by more sweeping measures.
However, to trace back exogamous sexual restrictions to legal intentions
does not add anything to the understanding of the motive which created
these institutions. From what source, in the final analysis, springs the dread
of incest which must be recognized as the root of exogamy? It evidently
does not suffice to appeal to an instinctive aversion against sexual
intercourse with blood relatives, that is to say, to the fact of incest dread, in
order to explain the dread of incest, if social experience shows that, in spite
of this instinct, incest is not a rare occurrence even in our society, and if the
experience of history can acquaint us with cases in which incestuous
marriage of privileged persons was made the rule.
Westermarck[181] advanced the following to explain the dread of incest:
“that an innate aversion against sexual intercourse exists between persons
who live together from childhood and that this feeling, since such persons
are as a rule consanguineous, finds a natural expression in custom and law
through the abhorrence of sexual intercourse between those closely
related.” Though Havelock Ellis disputed the instinctive character of this
aversion in the Studies in the Psychology of Sex, he otherwise supported the
same explanation in its essentials by declaring: “The normal absence of the
manifestation of the pairing instinct where brothers and sisters or boys and

girls living together from childhood are concerned, is a purely negative
phenomenon due to the fact that under these circumstances the antecedent
conditions for arousing the mating instinct must be entirely lacking.... For
persons who have grown up together from childhood habit has dulled the
sensual attraction of seeing, hearing and touching and has led it into a
channel of quiet attachment, robbing it of its power to call forth the
necessary erethistic excitement required to produce sexual tumescence.”
It seems to me very remarkable that Westermarck looks upon this innate
aversion to sexual intercourse with persons with whom we have shared
childhood as being at the same time a psychic representative of the
biological fact that inbreeding means injury to the species. Such a
biological instinct would hardly go so far astray in its psychological
manifestation as to affect the companions of home and hearth which in this
respect are quite harmless, instead of the blood relatives which alone are
injurious to procreation. And I cannot resist citing the excellent criticism
which Frazer opposes to Westermarck’s assertion. Frazer finds it
incomprehensible that sexual sensibility to-day is not at all opposed to
sexual intercourse with companions of the hearth and home while the dread
of incest, which is said to be nothing but an offshoot of this reluctance, has
nowadays grown to be so overpowering. But other remarks of Frazer’s go
deeper and I set them down here in unabbreviated form because they are in
essential agreement with the arguments developed in my chapter on taboo.
“It is not easy to see why any deep human instinct should need
reinforcement through law. There is no law commanding men to eat and
drink, or forbidding them to put their hands in the fire. Men eat and drink
and keep their hands out of the fire instinctively, for fear of natural, not
legal penalties, which would be entailed by violence done to these instincts.
The law only forbids men to do what their instincts incline them to do; what
nature itself prohibits and punishes it would be superfluous for the law to
prohibit and punish. Accordingly we may always safely assume that crimes
forbidden by law are crimes which many men have a natural propensity to
commit. If there were no such propensity there would be no such crimes,
and if no such crimes were committed, what need to forbid them? Instead of
assuming therefore, from the legal prohibition of incest, that there is a
natural aversion to incest we ought rather to assume that there is a natural
instinct in favour of it, and that if the law represses it, it does so because

civilized men have come to the conclusion that the satisfaction of these
natural instincts is detrimental to the general interests of society”[182].
To this valuable argument of Frazer’s I can add that the experiences of
psychoanalysis make the assumption of such an innate aversion to
incestuous relations altogether impossible. They have taught, on the
contrary, that the first sexual impulses of the young are regularly of an
incestuous nature and that such repressed impulses play a rôle which can
hardly be overestimated as the motive power of later neuroses.
The interpretation of incest dread as an innate instinct must therefore be
abandoned. The same holds true of another derivation of the incest
prohibition which counts many supporters, namely the assumption that
primitive races very soon observed the dangers with which inbreeding
threatened their race and that they therefore had decreed the incest
prohibition with a conscious purpose. The objections to this attempted
explanation crowd upon each other[183]. Not only must the prohibition of
incest be older than all breeding of domestic animals from which men could
derive experience of the effect of inbreeding upon the characteristics of the
breed, but the harmful consequences of inbreeding are not established
beyond all doubt even to-day and in man they can be shown only with
difficulty. Besides, everything that we know about contemporaneous
savages makes it very improbable that the thoughts of their far-removed
ancestors should already have been occupied with preventing injury to their
later descendants. It sounds almost ridiculous to attribute hygienic and
eugenic motives such as have hardly yet found consideration in our culture,
to these children of the race who lived without thought of the morrow[184].
And finally it must be pointed out that a prohibition against inbreeding
as an element weakening to the race, which is imposed from practical
hygienic motives, seems quite inadequate to explain the deep abhorrence
which our society feels against incest. This dread of incest, as I have shown
elsewhere[185], seems to be even more active and stronger among primitive
races living to-day than among the civilized.
In inquiring into the origin of incest dread it could be expected that here
also there is the choice between possible explanations of a sociological,
biological, and psychological nature in which the psychological motives
might have to be considered as representative of biological forces. Still, in
the end, one is compelled to subscribe to Frazer’s resigned statement,

namely, that we do not know the origin of incest dread and do not even
know how to guess at it. None of the solutions of the riddle thus far
advanced seems satisfactory to us[186].
I must mention another attempt to explain the origin of incest dread
which is of an entirely different nature from those considered up to now. It
might be called an historic explanation.
This attempt is associated with a hypothesis of Charles Darwin about the
primal social state of man. From the habits of the higher apes Darwin
concluded that man, too, lived originally in small hordes in which the
jealousy of the oldest and strongest male prevented sexual promiscuity. “We
may indeed conclude from what we know of the jealousy of all male
quadrupeds, armed, as many of them are, with special weapons for battling
with their rivals, that promiscuous intercourse in a state of nature is
extremely improbable.... If we therefore look back far enough into the
stream of time and judging from the social habits of man as he now exists,
the most probable view is that he originally lived in small communities,
each with a single wife, or if powerful with several, whom he jealously
defended against all other men. Or he may not have been a social animal
and yet have lived with several wives, like the gorilla; for all the natives
agree that only the adult male is seen in a band; when the young male grows
up a contest takes place for mastery, and the strongest, by killing and
driving out the others, establishes himself as the head of the community (Dr
Savage in the Boston Journal of Natural History, Vol. V, 1845-7). The
younger males being thus driven out and wandering about would also, when
at last successful in finding a partner, prevent too close breeding within the
limits of the same family”[187].
Atkinson[188] seems to have been the first to recognize that these
conditions of the Darwinian primal horde would in practice bring about the
exogamy of the young men. Each one of those driven away could found a
similar horde in which, thanks to jealousy of the chief, the same prohibition
as to sexual intercourse obtained, and in the course of time these conditions
would have brought about the rule which is now known as law: no sexual
intercourse with the members of the horde. After the advent of totemism the
rule would have changed into a different form: no sexual intercourse within
the totem.

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

3
Into this darkness psychoanalytic experience throws one single ray of
light.
The relation of the child to animals has much in common with that of
primitive man. The child does not yet show any trace of the pride which
afterwards moves the adult civilized man to set a sharp dividing line
between his own nature and that of all other animals. The child
unhesitatingly attributes full equality to animals; he probably feels himself
more closely related to the animal than to the undoubtedly mysterious adult,
in the freedom with which he acknowledges his needs.
Not infrequently a curious disturbance manifests itself in this excellent
understanding between child and animal. The child suddenly begins to fear
a certain animal species and to protect himself against seeing or touching
any individual of this species. There results the clinical picture of animal
phobia, which is one of the most frequent among the psychoneurotic
diseases of this age and perhaps the earliest form of such an ailment. The
phobia is as a rule in regard to animals for which the child has until then
shown the liveliest interest and has nothing to do with the individual
animal. In cities the choice of animals which can become the object of
phobia is not great. They are horses, dogs, cats, more seldom birds, and
strikingly often very small animals like bugs and butterflies. Sometimes
animals which are known to the child only from picture books and fairy
stories become objects of the senseless and inordinate anxiety which is
manifested with these phobias; it is seldom possible to learn the manner in
which such an unusual choice of anxiety has been brought about. I am
indebted to Dr Karl Abraham for the report of a case in which the child
itself explained its fear of wasps by saying that the colour and the stripes of
the body of the wasp had made it think of the tiger of which, from all that it
had heard, it might well be afraid.

The animal phobias have not yet been made the object of careful
analytical investigation, although they very much merit it. The difficulties
of analysing children of so tender an age have probably been the motive of
such neglect. It cannot therefore be asserted that the general meaning of
these illnesses is known, and I myself do not think that it would turn out to
be the same in all cases. But a number of such phobias directed against
larger animals have proved accessible to analysis and have thus betrayed
their secret to the investigator. In every case it was the same: the fear at
bottom was of the father, if the children examined were boys, and was
merely displaced upon the animal.
Every one of any experience in psychoanalysis has undoubtedly seen
such cases and has received the same impression from them. But I can refer
to only a few detailed reports on the subject. This is an accident of the
literature of such cases, from which the conclusion should not be drawn that
our general assertion is based on merely scattered observation. For instance
I mention an author, M. Wulff of Odessa, who has very intelligently
occupied himself with the neuroses of childhood. He tells, in relating the
history of an illness, that a nine year old boy suffered from a dog phobia at
the age of four. “When he saw a dog running by on the street he wept and
cried: ‘Dear dog, don’t touch me, I will be good.’” By “being good” he
meant “not to play violin any more” (to practise onanism)[A].
The same author later sums up as follows: “His dog phobia is really his
fear of the father displaced upon the dog, for his peculiar expression: ‘Dog,
I will be good’—that is to say, I will not masturbate—really refers to the
father who has forbidden masturbation.” He then adds something in a note
which fully agrees with my experience and at the same time bears witness
to the abundance of such experiences: “such phobias (of horses, dogs, cats,
chickens and other domestic animals) are, I think, at least as prevalent as
pavor nocturnus in childhood, and usually reveal themselves in the analysis
as a displacement of fear from one of the parents to animals. I am not
prepared to assert that the wide-spread mouse and rat phobia has the same
mechanism.”
I reported the “Analysis of the Phobia of a five-year-old Boy”[191] which
the father of the little patient had put at my disposal. It was a fear of horses
as a result of which the boy refused to go on the street. He expressed his
apprehension that the horse would come into the room and bite him. It
proves that this was meant to be the punishment for his wish that the horse

should fall over (die). After assurances had relieved the boy of his fear of
his father, it proved that he was fighting against wishes whose content was
the absence (departure or death) of the father. He indicated only too plainly
that he felt the father to be his rival for the favour of the mother, upon
whom his budding sexual wishes were by dark premonitions directed. He
therefore had the typical attitude of the male child to its parents which we
call the ‘Oedipus complex’ in which we recognize the central complex of
the neuroses in general. Through the analysis, of ‘little John’ we have learnt
a fact which is very valuable in relation to totemism, namely, that under
such conditions the child displaces a part of its feelings from the father
upon some animal.
Analysis showed the paths of association, both significant and accidental
in content, along which such a displacement took place. It also allowed one
to guess the motives for the displacement. The hate which resulted from the
rivalry for the mother could not permeate the boy’s psychic life without
being inhibited; he had to contend with the tenderness and admiration
which he had felt for his father from the beginning, so that the child
assumed a double or ambivalent emotional attitude towards the father and
relieved himself of this ambivalent conflict by displacing his hostile and
anxious feelings upon a substitute for the father. The displacement could
not, however, relieve the conflict by bringing about a smooth division
between the tender and the hostile feelings. On the contrary, the conflict
was continued in reference to the object to which displacement has been
made and to which also the ambivalence spreads. There was no doubt that
little John had not only fear, but respect and interest for horses. As soon as
his fear was moderated he identified himself with the feared animal; he
jumped around like a horse, and now it was he who bit the father[192]. In
another stage of solution of the phobia he did not scruple to identify his
parents with other large animals[193].
We may venture the impression that certain traits of totemism return as a
negative expression in these animal phobias of children. But we are
indebted to S. Ferenczi for a beautiful individual observation of what must
be called a case of positive totemism in the child[194]. It is true that with the
little Arpád, whom Ferenczi reports, the totemic interests do not awaken in
direct connexion with the Oedipus complex, but on the basis of a narcistic
premise, namely, the fear of castration. But whoever looks attentively
through the history of little John will also find there abundant proof that the

father was admired as the possessor of large genitals and was feared as
threatening the child’s own genitals. In the Oedipus as well as in the
castration complex the father plays the same rôle of feared opponent to the
infantile sexual interests. Castration and its substitute through blinding is
the punishment he threatens[195].
When little Arpád was two and a half years old he once tried, while at a
summer resort, to urinate into the chicken coop, and on this occasion a
chicken bit his penis or snapped at it. When he returned to the same place a
year later he became a chicken himself, was interested only in the chicken
coop and in everything that occurred there, and gave up human speech for
cackling and crowing. During the period of observation, at the age of five,
he spoke again, but his speech was exclusively about chickens and other
fowl. He played with no other toy and sang only songs in which there was
something about poultry. His behaviour towards his totem animal was
subtly ambivalent, expressing itself in immoderate hating and loving. He
loved best to play killing chickens. “The slaughtering of poultry was quite a
festival for him. He could dance around the animals’ bodies for hours at a
time in a state of intense excitement[196].” But then he kissed and stroked
the slaughtered animal, and cleaned and caressed the chicken effigies which
he himself had ill-used.
Arpád himself saw to it that the meaning of his curious activity could not
remain hidden. At times he translated his wishes from the totemic method,
of expression back into that of everyday life. “Now I am small, now I am a
chicken. When I get bigger I shall be a fowl. When I am bigger still, I shall
be a cock.” On another occasion he suddenly expressed the wish to eat a
“potted mother” (by analogy, potted fowl). He was very free with open
threats of castration against others, just as he himself had received them on
account of onanistic preoccupation with his penis.
According to Ferenczi there was no doubt as to the source of his interest
in the activities of the chicken yard: “The continual sexual activity between
cock and hen, the laying of eggs and the creeping out of the young
brood”[197] satisfied his sexual curiosity which really was directed towards
human family life. His object wishes have been formed on the model of
chicken life when we find him saying to a woman neighbour: “I am going
to marry you and your sister and my three cousins and the cook; no, instead
of the cook I’ll marry my mother.”

We shall be able to complete our consideration of these observations
later; at present we will only point out two traits that show a valuable
correspondence with totemism: the complete identification with the totem
animal[198], and the ambivalent affective attitude towards it. In view of
these observations we consider ourselves justified in substituting the father
for the totem animal in the male’s formula of totemism. We then notice that
in doing so we have taken no new or especially daring step. For primitive
men say it themselves and, as far as the totemic system is still in effect to-
day, the totem is called ancestor and primal father. We have only taken
literally an expression of these races which ethnologists did not know what
to do with and were therefore inclined to put it into the background.
Psychoanalysis warns us, on the contrary, to emphasize this very point and
to connect it with the attempt to explain totemism[199].
The first result of our substitution is very remarkable. If the totem animal
is the father, then the two main commandments of totemism, the two taboo
rules which constitute its nucleus,—not to kill the totem animal and not to
use a woman belonging to the same totem for sexual purposes,—agree in
content with the two crimes of Oedipus, who slew his father and took his
mother to wife, and also with the child’s two primal wishes whose
insufficient repression or whose re-awakening forms the nucleus of perhaps
all neuroses. If this similarity is more than a deceptive play of accident it
would perforce make it possible for us to shed light upon the origin of
totemism in prehistoric times. In other words, we should succeed in making
it probable that the totemic system resulted from the conditions underlying
the Oedipus complex, just as the animal phobia of ‘little John’ and the
poultry perversion of ‘little Arpád’ resulted from it. In order to trace this
possibility we shall in what follows study a peculiarity of the totemic
system or, as we may say, of the totemic religion, which until now could
hardly be brought into the discussion.

4
W. Robertson Smith, who died in 1894, was a physicist, philologist,
Bible critic, and archæologist, a many-sided as well as keen and free-
thinking man, expressed the assumption in his work, The Religion of the
Semites[200], published in 1889, that a peculiar ceremony, the so-called
totem feast, had, from the very beginning, formed an integral part of the

totemic system. For the support of this supposition he had at his disposal at
that time only a single description of such an act from the year 500 A.D.; he
knew, however, how to give a high degree of probability to his assumption
through his analysis of the nature of sacrifice among the old Semites. As
sacrifice assumes a godlike person we are dealing here with an inference
from a higher phase of religious rite to its lowest phase in totemism.
I shall now cite from Robertson Smith’s excellent book[201] those
statements about the origin and meaning of the sacrificial right which are of
great interest to us; I shall omit the only too numerous tempting details as
well as the parts dealing with all later developments. In such an excerpt it is
quite impossible to give the reader any sense of the lucidity or of the
argumentative force of the original.
Robertson Smith shows that sacrifice at the altar was the essential part of
the rite of old religions. It plays the same rôle in all religions, so that its
origin must be traced back to very general causes whose effects were
everywhere the same.
But the sacrifice—the holy action κατεξογη (sacrificium ἱερουργἱα)—
originally meant something different from what later times understood by it:
the offering to the deity in order to reconcile him or to incline him to be
favourable. The profane use of the word was afterwards derived from the
secondary sense of self-denial. As is demonstrated the first sacrifice was
nothing else than “an act of social fellowship between the deity and his
worshipper”.
Things to eat and drink were brought as sacrifice; man offered to his god
the same things as those on which he himself lived, flesh, cereals, fruits,
wine and oil. Only in regard to sacrificial flesh did there exist restrictions
and exceptions. The god partakes of the animal sacrifices with his
worshippers while the vegetable sacrifices are left to him alone. There is no
doubt that animal sacrifices are older and at one time were the only forms
of sacrifice. The vegetable sacrifices resulted from the offering of the first-
fruits and correspond to a tribute to the lord of the soil and the land. But
animal sacrifice is older than agriculture.
Linguistic survivals make it certain that the part of the sacrifice destined
for the god was looked upon as his real food. This conception became
offensive with the progressive dematerialization of the deity, and was
avoided by offering the deity only the liquid part of the meal. Later the use

of fire, which made the sacrificial flesh ascend in smoke from the altar,
made it possible to prepare human food in such a way that it was more
suitable for the deity. The drink sacrifice was originally the blood of the
sacrificed animals; wine was used later as a substitute for the blood.
Primitive man looked upon wine as the “blood of the grape”, as our poets
still call it.
The oldest form of sacrifice, older than the use of fire and the knowledge
of agriculture, was therefore the sacrifice of animals, whose flesh and blood
the god and his worshippers ate together. It was essential that both
participants should receive their shares of the meal.
Such a sacrifice was a public ceremony, the celebration of a whole clan.
As a matter of fact all religion was a public affair; religious duty was a part
of the social obligation. Sacrifice and festival go together among all races;
each sacrifice entails a holiday and no holiday can be celebrated without a
sacrifice. The sacrificial festival was an occasion for joyously transcending
one’s own interests and emphasizing social community and community
with god.
The ethical power of the public sacrificial feast was based upon primal
conceptions of the meaning of eating and drinking in common. To eat and
drink with some one was at the same time a symbol and a confirmation of
social community and of the assumption of mutual obligations; the
sacrificial eating gave direct expression to the fact that the god and his
worshippers are communicants, thus confirming all their other relations.
Customs that to-day still are in force among the Arabs of the desert prove
that the binding force resulting from the common meal is not a religious
factor but that the subsequent mutual obligations are due to the act of eating
itself. Whoever has shared the smallest bite with such a Bedouin, or has
taken a swallow of his milk, need not fear him any longer as an enemy, but
may be sure of his protection and help. Not indeed, forever, strictly
speaking this lasts only while it may be assumed that the food partaken
remains in the body. So realistically is the bond of union conceived; it
requires repetition to strengthen it and make it endure.
But why is this binding power ascribed to eating and drinking in
common? In the most primitive societies there is only one unconditional
and never failing bond, that of kinship. The members of a community stand
by each other jointly and severally, a kin is a group of persons whose life is

so bound into a physical unity that they can be considered as parts of a
common life. In case of the murder of one of this kin they therefore do not
say: the blood of so and so has been spilt, but our blood has been spilt. The
Hebraic phrase by which the tribal relation is acknowledged is: “Thou art
my bone and my flesh”. Kinship therefore signifies having part in a general
substance. It is natural then that it is based not only upon the fact that we
are a part of the substance of our mother who has borne us, and whose milk
nourished us, but also that the food eaten later through which the body is
renewed, can acquire and strengthen kinship. If one shared a meal with
one’s god the conviction was thus expressed that one was of the same
substance as he; no meal was therefore partaken with any one recognized as
a stranger.
The sacrificial repast was therefore originally a feast of the kin,
following the rule that only those of kin could eat together. In our society
the meal unites the members of the family; but the sacrificial repast has
nothing to do with the family. Kinship is older than family life; the oldest
families known to us regularly comprised persons who belonged to various
bonds of kinship. The men married women of strange clans and the children
inherited the clan of the mother; there was no kinship between the man and
the rest of the members of the family. In such a family there was no
common meal. Even to-day savages eat apart and alone, and the religious
prohibitions of totemism as to eating often make it impossible for them to
eat with their wives and children.
Let us now turn to the sacrificial animal. There was, as we have heard,
no meeting of the kin without animal sacrifice, but, and this is significant,
no animal was slaughtered except for such a solemn occasion. Without any
hesitation the people ate fruits, game and the milk of domestic animals, but
religious scruples made it impossible for the individual to kill a domestic
animal for his own use. There is not the least doubt, says Robertson Smith,
that every sacrifice was originally a clan sacrifice, and that the killing of a
sacrificial animal originally belonged to those acts which were forbidden to
the individual and were only justified if the whole kin assumed the
responsibility. Primitive men had only one class of actions, which were thus
characterized, namely, actions which touched the holiness of the kin’s
common blood. A life which no individual might take and which could be
sacrificed only through the consent and participation of all the members of
the clan was on the same plane as the life of a member of the kin. The rule

that every guest of the sacrificial repast must partake of the flesh of the
sacrificial animal, had the same meaning as the rule that the execution of a
guilty member of the kin must be performed by the whole kin. In other
words: the sacrificial animal was treated like one of kin; the sacrificing
community, its god, and the sacrificial animal were of the same blood, and
the members of a clan.
On the basis of much evidence Robertson Smith identifies the sacrificial
animal with the old totem animal. In a later age there were two kinds of
sacrifices, those of domestic animals which usually were also eaten, and the
unusual sacrifice of animals which were forbidden as being unclean.
Further investigation then shows that these unclean animals were holy and
that they were sacrificed to the gods to whom they were holy, that these
animals were originally identified with the gods themselves and that at the
sacrifice the worshippers in some way emphasized their blood relationship
to the god and to the animal. But this difference between usual and ‘mystic’
sacrifices does not hold good for still earlier times. Originally all animals
were holy, their meat was forbidden and might be eaten only on solemn
occasions, with the participation of the whole kin. The slaughter of the
animal amounted to the spilling of the kin’s blood and had to be done with
the same precautions and assurances against reproach.
The taming of domestic animals and the rise of cattle-breeding seems
everywhere to have put an end to the pure and rigorous totemism of earliest
times[202]. But such holiness as still clung to domestic animals in what was
now a ‘pastoral’ religion, is sufficiently distinct for us to recognize its
totemic character. Even in late classical times the rite in several localities
prescribed flight for the sacrificer after the sacrifice, as if to escape revenge.
In Greece the idea must once have been general that the killing of an ox was
really a crime. At the Athenian festival of the Bouphonia a formal trial, to
which all the participants were summoned, was instituted after the sacrifice.
Finally it was agreed to put the blame for the murder upon the knife, which
was then cast into the sea.
In spite of the dread which protects the life of the animal as being of kin,
it became necessary to kill it from time to time in solemn conclave, and to
divide its flesh and blood among the members of the clan. The motive
which commands this act reveals the deepest meaning of the essence of
sacrifice. We have heard that in later times every eating in common, the
participation in the same substance which entered into their bodies,

established a holy bond between the communicants; in oldest time this
meaning seemed to be attached only to participation in the substance of a
holy sacrifice. The holy mystery of the sacrificial death was justified in that
only in this way could the holy bond be established which united the
participants with each other and with their god[203].
This bond was nothing else than the life of the sacrificial animal which
lived on its flesh and blood and was shared by all the participants by means
of the sacrificial feast. Such an idea was the basis of all the blood bonds
through which men in still later times became pledged to each other. The
thoroughly realistic conception of consanguinity as an identity of substance
makes comprehensible the necessity of renewing it from time to time
through the physical process of the sacrificial repast.
We will now stop quoting from Robertson Smith’s train of thought in
order to give a condensed summary of what is essential in it. When the idea
of private property came into existence sacrifice was conceived as a gift to
the deity, as a transfer from the property of man to that of the god. But this
interpretation left all the peculiarities of the sacrificial ritual unexplained. In
oldest times the sacrificial animal itself had been holy and its life inviolate;
it could be taken only in the presence of the god, with the whole tribe taking
part and sharing the guilt in order to furnish the holy substance through the
eating of which the members of the clan assured themselves of their
material identity with each other and with the deity. The sacrifice was a
sacrament, and the sacrificial animal itself was one of the kin. In reality it
was the old totem animal, the primitive god himself through the slaying and
eating of whom the members of the clan revived and assured their similarity
with the god.
From this analysis of the nature of sacrifice Robertson Smith drew the
conclusion that the periodic killing and eating of the totem before the period
when the anthropomorphic deities were venerated was an important part of
totem religion. The ceremonial of such a totem feast was preserved for us,
he thought, in the description of a sacrifice in later times. Saint Nilus tells
of a sacrificial custom of the Bedouins in the desert of Sinai towards the
end of the fourth century A.D. The victim, a camel, was bound and laid upon
a rough altar of stones; the leader of the tribe made the participants walk
three times around the altar to the accompaniment of song, inflicted the first
wound upon the animal and greedily drank the spurting blood; then the
whole community threw itself upon the sacrifice, cut off pieces of the

palpitating flesh with their swords and ate them raw in such haste that in a
short interval between the rise of the morning star, for whom this sacrifice
was meant, and its fading before the rays of the sun, the whole sacrificial
animal, flesh, skin, bones, and entrails, were devoured. According to every
testimony this barbarous rite, which speaks of great antiquity, was not a rare
custom but the general original form of the totem sacrifice, which in later
times underwent the most varied modifications.
Many authors have refused to grant any weight to this conception of the
totem feast because it could not be strengthened by direct observation at the
stage of totemism. Robertson Smith himself has referred to examples in
which the sacramental meaning of sacrifices seems certain, such as the
human sacrifices of the Aztecs and others which recall the conditions of the
totem feast, the bear sacrifices of the bear tribe of the Ouataouaks in
America, and the bear festival of the Ainus in Japan. Frazer has given a full
account of these and similar cases in the two divisions of his great work that
have last appeared[204]. An Indian tribe in California which reveres the
buzzard, a large bird of prey, kills it once a year with solemn ceremony,
whereupon the bird is mourned and its skin and feathers preserved. The
Zuni Indians in New Mexico do the same thing with their holy turtle.
In the Intichiuma ceremonies of Central Australian tribes a trait has been
observed which fits in excellently with the assumptions of Robertson Smith.
Every tribe that practises magic for the increase of its totem, which it
cannot eat itself, is bound to eat a part of its totem at the ceremony before it
can be touched by the other tribes. According to Frazer the best example of
the sacramental consumption of the otherwise forbidden totem is to be
found among the Bini in West Africa, in connexion with the burial
ceremony of this tribe[205].
But we shall follow Robertson Smith in the assumption that the
sacramental killing and the common consumption of the otherwise
forbidden totem animal was an important trait of the totem religion[206].

5
Let us now envisage the scene of such a totem meal and let us embellish
it further with a few probable features which could not be adequately
considered before. Thus we have the clan, which on a solemn occasion kills
its totem in a cruel manner and eats it raw, blood, flesh, and bones. At the

same time the members of the clan disguised in imitation of the totem,
mimic it in sound and movement as if they wanted to emphasize their
common identity. There is also the conscious realization that an action is
being carried out which is forbidden to each individual and which can only
be justified through the participation of all, so that no one is allowed to
exclude himself from the killing and the feast. After the act is accomplished
the murdered animal is bewailed and lamented. The death lamentation is
compulsive, being enforced by the fear of a threatening retribution, and its
main purpose is, as Robertson Smith remarks on an analogous occasion, to
exculpate oneself from responsibility for the slaying[207].
But after this mourning there follows loud festival gaiety accompanied
by the unchaining of every impulse and the permission of every
gratification. Here we find an easy insight into the nature of the holiday.
A holiday is permitted, or rather a prescribed excess, a solemn violation
of a prohibition. People do not commit the excesses which at all times have
characterized holidays, as a result of an order to be in a holiday mood, but
because in the very nature of a holiday there is excess; the holiday mood is
brought about by the release of what is otherwise forbidden.
But what has mourning over the death of the totem animal to do with the
introduction of this holiday spirit? If men are happy over the slaying of the
totem, which is otherwise forbidden to them, why do they also mourn it?
We have heard that members of a clan become holy through the
consumption of the totem and thereby also strengthen their identification
with it and with each other. The fact that they have absorbed the holy life
with which the substance of the totem is charged may explain the holiday
mood and everything that results from it.
Psychoanalysis has revealed to us that the totem animal is really a
substitute for the father, and this really explains the contradiction that it is
usually forbidden to kill the totem animal, that the killing of it results in a
holiday and that the animal is killed and yet mourned. The ambivalent
emotional attitude which to-day still marks the father complex in our
children and so often continues into adult life also extended to the father
substitute of the totem animal.
But if we associate the translation of the totem as given by
psychoanalysis, with the totem feast and the Darwinian hypothesis about
the primal state of human society, a deeper understanding becomes possible

and a hypothesis is offered which may seem fantastic but which has the
advantage of establishing an unexpected unity among a series of hitherto
separated phenomena.
The Darwinian conception of the primal horde does not, of course, allow
for the beginning of totemism. There is only a violent, jealous father who
keeps all the females for himself and drives away the growing sons. This
primal state of society has nowhere been observed. The most primitive
organization we know, which to-day is still in force with certain tribes, is
associations of men consisting of members with equal rights, subject to the
restrictions of the totemic system, and founded on matriarchy, or descent
through the mother[208]. Can the one have resulted from the other, and how
was this possible?
By basing our argument upon the celebration of the totem we are in a
position to give an answer: One day[209] the expelled brothers joined forces,
slew and ate the father, and thus put an end to the father horde. Together
they dared and accomplished what would have remained impossible for
them singly. Perhaps some advance in culture, like the use of a new
weapon, had given them the feeling of superiority. Of course these
cannibalistic savages ate their victim. This violent primal father had surely
been the envied and feared model for each of the brothers. Now they
accomplished their identification with him by devouring him and each
acquired a part of his strength. The totem feast, which is perhaps mankind’s
first celebration, would be the repetition and commemoration of this
memorable, criminal act with which so many things began, social
organization, moral restrictions and religion[210].
In order to find these results acceptable, quite aside from our
supposition, we need only assume that the group of brothers banded
together were dominated by the same contradictory feelings towards the
father which we can demonstrate as the content of ambivalence of the father
complex in all our children and in neurotics. They hated the father who
stood so powerfully in the way of their sexual demands and their desire for
power, but they also loved and admired him. After they had satisfied their
hate by his removal and had carried out their wish for identification with
him, the suppressed tender impulses had to assert themselves[211]. This took
place in the form of remorse, a sense of guilt was formed which coincided
here with the remorse generally felt. The dead now became stronger than
the living had been, even as we observe it to-day in the destinies of men.

What the fathers’ presence had formerly prevented they themselves now
prohibited in the psychic situation of ‘subsequent obedience’, which we
know so well from psychoanalysis. They undid their deed by declaring that
the killing of the father substitute, the totem, was not allowed, and
renounced the fruits of their deed by denying themselves the liberated
women. Thus they created the two fundamental taboos of totemism out of
the sense of guilt of the son, and for this very reason these had to
correspond with the two repressed wishes of the Oedipus complex.
Whoever disobeyed became guilty of the two only crimes which troubled
primitive society[212].
The two taboos of totemism with which the morality of man begins are
psychologically not of equal value. One of them, the sparing of the totem
animal, rests entirely upon emotional motives; the father had been removed
and nothing in reality could make up for this. But the other, the incest
prohibition, had, besides, a strong practical foundation. Sexual need does
not unite men; it separates them. Though the brothers had joined forces in
order to overcome the father, each was the other’s rival among the women.
Each one wanted to have them all to himself like the father, and in the fight
of each against the other the new organization would have perished. For
there was no longer any one stronger than all the rest who could have
successfully assumed the rôle of the father. Thus there was nothing left for
the brothers, if they wanted to live together, but to erect the incest
prohibition—perhaps after many difficult experiences—through which they
all equally renounced the women whom they desired, and on account of
whom they had removed the father in the first place. Thus they saved the
organization which had made them strong and which could be based upon
the homo-sexual feelings and activities which probably manifested
themselves among them during the time of their banishment. Perhaps this
situation also formed the germ of the institution of the mother right
discovered by Bachofen, which was then abrogated by the patriarchal
family arrangement.
On the other hand the claim of totemism to be considered the first
attempt at a religion is connected with the other taboo which protects the
life of the totem animal. The feelings of the sons found a natural and
appropriate substitute for the father in the animal, but their compulsory
treatment of it expressed more than the need of showing remorse. The
surrogate for the father was perhaps used in the attempt to assuage the

burning sense of guilt, and to bring about a kind of reconciliation with the
father. The totemic system was a kind of agreement with the father in which
the latter granted everything that the child’s phantasy could expect from
him, protection, care, and forbearance, in return for which the pledge was
given to honour his life, that is to say, not to repeat the act against the totem
through which the real father had perished. Totemism also contained an
attempt at justification, “If the father had treated us like the totem we
should never have been tempted to kill him.” Thus totemism helped to gloss
over the real state of affairs and to make one forget the event to which it
owed its origin.
In this connexion some features were formed which henceforth
determined the character of every religion. The totem religion had issued
from the sense of guilt of the sons as an attempt to palliate this feeling and
to conciliate the injured father through subsequent obedience. All later
religions prove to be attempts to solve the same problem, varying only in
accordance with the stage of culture in which they are attempted and
according to the paths which they take; they are all, however, reactions
aiming at the same great event with which culture began and which ever
since has not let mankind come to rest.
There is still another characteristic faithfully preserved in religion which
already appeared in totemism at this time. The ambivalent strain was
probably too great to be adjusted by any arrangement, or else the
psychological conditions are entirely unfavourable to any kind of settlement
of these contradictory feelings. It is certainly noticeable that the
ambivalence attached to the father complex also continues in totemism and
in religions in general. The religion of totemism included not only
manifestations of remorse and attempts at reconciliation, but also serves to
commemorate the triumph over the father. The gratification obtained
thereby creates the commemorative celebration of the totem feast at which
the restrictions of subsequent obedience are suspended, and makes it a duty
to repeat the crime of parricide through the sacrifice of the totem animal as
often as the benefits of this deed, namely, the appropriation of the father’s
properties, threaten to disappear as a result of the changed influences of life.
We shall not be surprised to find that a part of the son’s defiance also
reappears, often in the most remarkable disguises and inversions, in the
formation of later religions.

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

6
I am under the influence of many strong motives which restrain me from
the attempt to discuss the further development of religions from their
beginning in totemism up to their present state. I shall follow out only two
threads as I see them appearing in the weft with especial distinctness: the
motive of the totem sacrifice and the relation of the son to the father[213].
Robertson Smith has shown us that the old totem feast returns in the
original form of sacrifice. The meaning of the rite is the same: sanctification
through participation in the common meal. The sense of guilt, which can
only be allayed through the solidarity of all the participants, has also been
retained. In addition to this there is the tribal deity in whose supposed

presence the sacrifice takes place, who takes part in the meal like a member
of the tribe, and with whom identification is effected by the act of eating the
sacrifice. How does the god come into this situation which originally was
foreign to him?
The answer might be that the idea of god had meanwhile appeared,—no
one knows whence—and had dominated the whole religious life, and that
the totem feast, like everything else that wished to survive, had been forced
to fit itself into the new system. However, psychoanalytic investigation of
the individual teaches with especial emphasis that god is in every case
modelled after the father and that our personal relation to god is dependent
upon our relation to our physical, fluctuating and changing with him, and
that god at bottom is nothing but an exalted father. Here also, as in the case
of totemism, psychoanalysis advises us to believe the faithful, who call god
father just as they called the totem their ancestor. If psychoanalysis deserves
any consideration at all, then the share of the father in the idea of a god
must be very important, quite aside from all the other origins and meanings
of god upon which psychoanalysis can throw no light. But then the father
would be represented twice in primitive sacrifice, first as god, and secondly
as the totem-animalsacrifice, and we must ask, with all due regard for the
limited number of solutions which psychoanalysis offers, whether this is
possible and what the meaning of it may be.
We know that there are a number of relations of the god to the holy
animal (the totem and the sacrificial animal): 1. Usually one animal is
sacred to every god, sometimes even several animals. 2. In certain,
especially holy, sacrifices, the so-called ‘mystical’ sacrifices, the very
animal which had been sanctified through the god was sacrificed to
him[214]. 3. The god was often revered in the form of an animal, or from
another point of view, animals enjoyed a godlike reverence long after the
period of totemism. 4. In myths the god is frequently transformed into an
animal, often into the animal that is sacred to him. From this the assumption
was obvious that the god himself was the animal, and that he had evolved
from the totem animal at a later stage of religious feeling. But the reflection
that the totem itself is nothing but a substitute for the father relieves us of
all further discussion. Thus the totem may have been the first form of the
father substitute and the god a later one in which the father regained his
human form. Such a new creation from the root of all religious evolution,
namely, the longing for the father, might become possible if in the course of

time an essential change had taken place in the relation to the father and
perhaps also to the animal.
Such changes are easily divined even if we disregard the beginning of a
psychic estrangement from the animal as well as the disintegration of
totemism through animal domestication[215]. The situation created by the
removal of the father contained an element which in the course of time must
have brought about an extraordinary increase of longing for the father. For
the brothers who had joined forces to kill the father had each been animated
by the wish to become like the father and had given expression to this wish
by incorporating parts of the substitute for him in the totem feast. In
consequence of the pressure which the bonds of the brother clan exercised
upon each member, this wish had to remain unfulfilled. No one could or
was allowed to attain the father’s perfection of power, which was the thing
they had all sought. Thus the bitter feeling against the father which had
incited to the deed could subside in the course of time, while the longing for
him grew, and an ideal could arise having as a content the fullness of power
and the freedom from restriction of the conquered primal father, as well as
the willingness to subject themselves to him. The original democratic
equality of each member of the tribe could no longer be retained on account
of the interference of cultural changes; in consequence of which there arose
a tendency to revive the old father ideal in the creation of gods through the
veneration of those individuals who had distinguished themselves above the
rest. That a man should become a god and that a god should die, which to-
day seems to us an outrageous presumption, was still by no means offensive
to the conceptions of classical antiquity[216]. But the deification of the
murdered father from whom the tribe now derived its origin, was a much
more serious attempt at expiation than the former covenant with the totem.
In this evolution I am at a loss to indicate the place of the great maternal
deities who perhaps everywhere preceded the paternal deities. But it seems
certain that the change in the relation to the father was not restricted to
religion but logically extended to the other side of human life influenced by
the removal of the father, namely, the social organization. With the
institution of paternal deities the fatherless society gradually changed into a
patriarchal one. The family was a reconstruction of the former primal horde
and also restored a great part of their former rights to the fathers. Now there
were patriarchs again but the social achievements of the brother clan had
not been given up and the actual difference between the new family

patriarchs and the unrestricted primal father was great enough to ensure the
continuation of the religious need, the preservation of the unsatisfied
longing for the father.
The father therefore really appears twice in the scene of sacrifice before
the tribal god, once as the god and again as the totem-sacrificial-animal. But
in attempting to understand this situation we must beware of interpretations
which superficially seek to translate it as an allegory, and which forget the
historical stages in the process. The twofold presence of the father
corresponds to the two successive meanings of the scene. The ambivalent
attitude towards the father as well as the victory of the son’s tender
emotional feelings over his hostile ones, have here found plastic expression.
The scene of vanquishing the father, his greatest degradation, furnishes here
the material to represent his highest triumph. The meaning which sacrifice
has quite generally acquired is found in the fact that in the very same action
which continues the memory of this misdeed it offers satisfaction to the
father for the ignominy put upon him.
In the further development the animal loses its sacredness and the
sacrifice its relation to the celebration of the totem; the rite becomes a
simple offering to the deity, a self-deprivation in favour of the god. God
himself is now so exalted above man that he can be communicated with
only through a priest as intermediary. At the same time the social order
produces godlike kings who transfer the patriarchal system to the state. It
must be said that the revenge of the deposed and reinstated father has been
very cruel; it culminated in the dominance of authority. The subjugated sons
have used the new relation to disburden themselves still more of their sense
of guilt. Sacrifice, as it is now constituted, is entirely beyond their
responsibility. God himself has demanded and ordained it. Myths in which
the god himself kills the animal that is sacred to him, which he himself
really is, belong to this phase. This is the greatest possible denial of the
great misdeed with which society and the sense of guilt began. There is an
unmistakable second meaning in this sacrificial demonstration. It expresses
satisfaction at the fact that the earlier father substitute has been abandoned
in favour of the higher conception of god. The superficial allegorical
translation of the scene here roughly corresponds with its psychoanalytic
interpretation by saying that god is represented as overcoming the animal
part of his nature[217].

But it would be erroneous to believe that in this period of renewed
patriarchal authority the hostile impulses which belong to the father
complex had entirely subsided. On the contrary, the first phases in the
domination of the two new substitutive formations for the father, those of
gods and kings, plainly show the most energetic expression of that
ambivalence which is characteristic of religion.
In his great work, The Golden Bough, Frazer has expressed the
conjecture that the first kings of the Latin tribes were strangers who played
the part of a deity and were solemnly sacrificed in this rôle on specified
holidays. The yearly sacrifice (self-sacrifice is a variant) of a god seems to
have been an important feature of Semitic religions. The ceremony of
human sacrifice in various parts of the inhabited world makes it certain that
these human beings ended their lives as representatives of the deity. This
sacrificial custom can still be traced in later times in the substitution of an
inanimate imitation (doll) for the living person. The theanthropic god
sacrifice into which unfortunately I cannot enter with the same
thoroughness with which the animal sacrifice has been treated throws the
clearest light upon the meaning of the older forms of sacrifice. It
acknowledges with unsurpassable candour that the object of the sacrificial
action has always been the same, being identical with what is now revered
as a god, namely with the father. The question as to the relation of animal to
human sacrifice can now be easily solved. The original animal sacrifice was
already a substitute for a human sacrifice, for the solemn killing of the
father, and when the father substitute regained its human form, the animal
substitute could also be retransformed into a human sacrifice.
Thus the memory of that first great act of sacrifice had proved to be
indestructible despite all attempts to forget it, and just at the moment when
men strove to get as far away as possible from its motives, the undistorted
repetition of it had to appear in the form of the god sacrifice. I need not
fully indicate here the developments of religious thought which made this
return possible in the form of rationalizations. Robertson Smith who is, of
course, far removed from the idea of tracing sacrifice back to this great
event of man’s primal history, says that the ceremony of the festivals in
which the old Semites celebrated the death of a deity were interpreted as “a
commemoration of a mythical tragedy” and that the attendant lament was
not characterized by spontaneous sympathy, but displayed a compulsive
character, something that was imposed by the fear of a divine wrath[218]. We

are in a position to acknowledge that this interpretation was correct, the
feelings of the celebrants being well explained by the basic situation.
We may now accept it as a fact that in the further development of
religions these two inciting factors, the son’s sense of guilt and his defiance,
were never again extinguished. Every attempted solution of the religious
problem and every kind of reconciliation of the two opposing psychic
forces gradually falls to the ground, probably under the combined influence
of cultural changes, historical events, and inner psychic transformations.
The endeavour of the son to put himself in place of the father god,
appeared with greater and greater distinctness. With the introduction of
agriculture the importance of the son in the patriarchal family increased. He
was emboldened to give new expression to his incestuous libido which
found symbolic satisfaction in labouring over mother earth. There came into
existence figures of gods like Attis, Adonis, Tammuz, and others, spirits of
vegetation as well as youthful divinities who enjoyed the favours of
maternal deities and committed incest with the mother in defiance of the
father. But the sense of guilt which was not allayed through these creations,
was expressed in myths which visited these youthful lovers of the maternal
goddesses with short life and punishment through castration or through the
wrath of the father god appearing in animal form. Adonis was killed by the
boar, the sacred animal of Aphrodite; Attis, the lover of Kybele, died of
castration[219]. The lamentation for these gods and the joy at their
resurrection have gone over into the ritual of another son which divinity
was destined to survive long.
When Christianity began its entry into the ancient world it met with the
competition of the religion of Mithras and for a long time it was doubtful
which deity was to be the victor.
The bright figure of the youthful Persian god has eluded our
understanding. Perhaps we may conclude from the illustrations of Mithras
slaying the steers that he represented the son who carried out the sacrifice of
the father by himself and thus released the brothers from their oppressing
complicity in the deed. There was another way of allaying this sense of guilt
and this is the one that Christ took. He sacrificed his own life and thereby
redeemed the brothers from primal sin.
The theory of primal sin is of Orphic origin; it was preserved in the
mysteries and thence penetrated into the philosophic schools of Greek

antiquity[220]. Men were the descendants of Titans, who had killed and
dismembered the young Dionysos-Zagreus; the weight of this crime
oppressed them. A fragment of Anaximander says that the unity of the
world was destroyed by a primordial crime and everything that issued from
it must carry on the punishment for this crime[221]. Although the features of
banding together, killing, and dismembering as expressed in the deed of the
Titans very clearly recall the totem sacrifice described by St Nilus—as also
many other myths of antiquity, for example, the death of Orpheus himself—
we are nevertheless disturbed here by the variation according to which a
youthful god was murdered.
In the Christian myth man’s original sin is undoubtedly an offence
against God the Father, and if Christ redeems mankind from the weight of
original sin by sacrificing his own life, he forces us to the conclusion that
this sin was murder. According to the law of retaliation which is deeply
rooted in human feeling, a murder can be atoned only by the sacrifice of
another life; the self-sacrifice points to a blood-guilt[222]. And if this
sacrifice of one’s own life brings about a reconciliation with god, the father,
then the crime which must be expiated can only have been the murder of
the father.
Thus in the Christian doctrine mankind most unreservedly acknowledges
the guilty deed of primordial times because it now has found the most
complete expiation for this deed in the sacrificial death of the son. The
reconciliation with the father is the more thorough because simultaneously
with this sacrifice there follows the complete renunciation of woman, for
whose sake mankind rebelled against the father. But now also the
psychological fatality of ambivalence demands its rights. In the same deed
which offers the greatest possible expiation to the father, the son also attains
the goal of his wishes against the father. He becomes a god himself beside
or rather in place of his father. The religion of the son succeeds the religion
of the father. As a sign of this substitution the old totem feast is revived
again in the form of communion in which the band of brothers now eats the
flesh and blood of the son and no longer that of the father, the sons thereby
identifying themselves with him and becoming holy themselves. Thus
through the ages we see the identity of the totem feast with the animal
sacrifice, the theanthropic human sacrifice, and the Christian eucharist, and
in all these solemn occasions we recognize the after-effects of that crime
which so oppressed men but of which they must have been so proud. At

bottom, however, the Christian communion is a new setting aside of the
father, a repetition of the crime that must be expiated. We see how well
justified is Frazer’s dictum that “the Christian communion has absorbed
within itself a sacrament which is doubtless far older than Christianity”[223].

7
A process like the removal of the primal father by the band of brothers
must have left ineradicable traces in the history of mankind and must have
expressed itself the more frequently in numerous substitutive formations the
less it itself was to be remembered.[224] I am avoiding the temptation of
pointing out these traces in mythology, where they are not hard to find, and
am turning to another field in following a hint of S. Reinach in his
suggestive treatment of the death of Orpheus[225].
There is a situation in the history of Greek art which is strikingly
familiar even if profoundly divergent, to the scene of a totem feast
discovered by Robertson Smith. It is the situation of the oldest Greek
tragedy. A group of persons, all of the same name and dressed in the same
way, surround a single figure upon whose words and actions they are
dependent, to represent the chorus and the original single impersonator of
the hero. Later developments created a second and a third actor in order to
represent opponents in playing, and off-shoots of the hero, but the character
of the hero as well as his relation to the chorus remains unchanged. The
hero of the tragedy had to suffer; this is to-day still the essential content of a
tragedy. He had taken upon himself the so-called ‘tragic guilt’, which is not
always easy to explain; it is often not a guilt in the ordinary sense. Almost
always it consisted of a rebellion against a divine or human authority and
the chorus accompanied the hero with their sympathies, trying to restrain
and warn him, and lamented his fate after he had met with what was
considered fitting punishment for his daring attempt.
But why did the hero of the tragedy have to suffer, and what was the
meaning of his ‘tragic’ guilt? We will cut short the discussion by a prompt
answer. He had to suffer because he was the primal father, the hero of that
primordial tragedy the repetition of which here serves a certain tendency,
and the tragic guilt is the guilt which he had to take upon himself in order to
free the chorus of theirs. The scene upon the stage came into being through
purposive distortion of the historical scene or, one is tempted to say, it was

the result of refined hypocrisy. Actually, in the old situation, it was the
members of the chorus themselves who had caused the suffering of the
hero; here, on the other hand, they exhaust themselves in sympathy and
regret, and the hero himself is to blame for his suffering. The crime foisted
upon him, namely, presumption and rebellion against a great authority, is
the same as that which in the past oppressed the colleagues of the chorus,
namely, the band of brothers. Thus the tragic hero, though still against his
will, is made the redeemer of the chorus.
When one bears in mind the suffering of the divine goat Dionysos in the
performance of the Greek tragedy and the lament of the retinue of goats
who identified themselves with him, one can easily understand how the
almost extinct drama was reviewed in the Middle Ages in the Passion of
Christ.
In closing this study, which has been carried out in extremely condensed
form, I want to state the conclusion that the beginnings of religion, ethics,
society, and art meet in the Oedipus complex. This is in entire accord with
the findings of psychoanalysis, namely, that the nucleus of all neuroses as
far as our present knowledge of them goes is the Oedipus complex. It
comes as a great surprise to me that these problems of racial psychology
can also be solved through a single concrete instance, such as the relation to
the father. Perhaps another psychological problem must be included here.
We have so frequently had occasion to show the ambivalence of emotions
in its real sense, that is to say the coincidence of love and hate towards the
same object, at the root of important cultural formations. We know nothing
about the origin of this ambivalence. It may be assumed to be a
fundamental phenomenon of our emotional life. But the other possibility
seems to me also worthy of consideration: that ambivalence, originally
foreign to our emotional life was acquired by mankind from the father
complex[226], where psychoanalytic investigation of the individual to-day
still reveals the strongest expression of it[227].
Before closing we must take into account that the remarkable
convergence reached in these illustrations, pointing to a single inclusive
relation, ought not to blind us to the uncertainties of our assumptions and to
the difficulties of our conclusions. Of these difficulties I will point out only
two which must have forced themselves upon many readers.

In the first place it can hardly have escaped any one that we base
everything upon the assumption of a psyche of the mass in which psychic
processes occur as in the psychic life of the individual. Moreover, we let the
sense of guilt for a deed survive for thousands of years, remaining effective
in generations which could not have known anything of this deed. We allow
an emotional process such as might have arisen among generations of sons
that had been ill-treated by their fathers, to continue to new generations
which had escaped such treatment by the very removal of the father. These
seem indeed to be weighty objections and any other explanation which can
avoid such assumptions would seem to merit preference.
But further consideration shows that we ourselves do not have to carry
the whole responsibility for such daring. Without the assumption of a mass
psyche, or a continuity in the emotional life of mankind which permits us to
disregard the interruptions of psychic acts through the transgression of
individuals, social psychology could not exist at all. If psychic processes of
one generation did not continue in the next, if each had to acquire its
attitude towards life afresh, there would be no progress in this field and
almost no development. We are now confronted by two new questions: how
much can be attributed to this psychic continuity within the series of
generations, and what ways and means does a generation use to transfer its
psychic states to the next generation? I do not claim that these problems
have been sufficiently explained or that direct communication and tradition,
of which one immediately thinks, are adequate for the task. Social
psychology is in general little concerned with the manner in which the
required continuity in the psychic life of succeeding generations is
established. A part of the task seems to be performed by the inheritance of
psychic dispositions which, however, need certain incentives in the
individual life in order to become effective. This may be the meaning of the
poet’s words: “Strive to possess yourself of what you have inherited from
your ancestors.” The problem would appear more difficult if we could
admit that there are psychic impulses which can be so completely
suppressed that they leave no traces whatsoever behind them. But that does
not exist. The greatest suppression must leave room for distorted
substitutions and their resulting reactions. But in that case we may assume
that no generation is capable of concealing its more important psychic
processes from the next. For psychoanalysis has taught us that in his
unconscious psychic activity every person possesses an apparatus which

enables him to interpret the reactions of others, that is to say, to straighten
out the distortions which the other person has affected in the expression of
his feelings. By this method of unconscious understanding of all customs,
ceremonies, and laws which the original relation to the primal father had
left behind, later generations may also have succeeded in taking over this
legacy of feelings.
There is another objection which the analytic method of thought itself
might raise.
We have interpreted the first rules of morality and moral restrictions of
primitive society as reactions to a deed which gave the authors of it the
conception of crime. They regretted this deed and decided that it should not
be repeated and that its execution must bring no gain. This creative sense of
guilt has not become extinct with us. We find its asocial effects in neurotics
producing new rules of morality and continued restrictions, in expiation for
misdeeds committed, or as precautions against misdeeds to be
committed[228]. But when we examine these neurotics for the deeds which
have called forth such reactions, we are disappointed. We do not find deeds,
but only impulses and feelings which sought evil but which were restrained
from carrying it out. Only psychic realities and not actual ones are at the
basis of the neurotics’ sense of guilt. It is characteristic of the neurosis to
put a psychic reality above an actual one and to react as seriously to
thoughts as the normal person reacts only towards realities.
May it not be true that the case was somewhat the same with primitive
men? We are justified in ascribing to them an extraordinary over-valuation
of their psychic acts as a partial manifestation of their narcistic
organization[229]. According to this the mere impulses of hostility towards
the father and the existence of the wish phantasy to kill and devour him
may have sufficed to bring about the moral reaction which has created
totemism and taboo. We should thus escape the necessity of tracing back the
beginning of our cultural possession, of which we rightly are so proud, to a
horrible crime which wounds all our feelings. The causal connexion, which
stretches from that beginning to the present time, would not be impaired,
for the psychic reality would be of sufficient importance to account for all
those consequences. It may be agreed that a change has really taken place in
the form of society from the father horde to the brother clan. This is a strong
argument, but it is not conclusive. The change might have been
accomplished in a less violent manner and still have conditioned the

appearance of the moral reaction. As long as the pressure of the primal
father was felt the hostile feelings against him were justified and repentance
at these feelings had to wait for another opportunity. Of as little validity is
the second objection, that everything derived from the ambivalent relation
to the father, namely taboos, and rules of sacrifice, is characterized by the
highest seriousness and by complete reality. The ceremonials and
inhibitions of compulsion neurotics exhibit this characteristic too and yet
they go back to a merely psychic reality, to resolution and not to execution.
We must beware of introducing the contempt for what is merely thought or
wished which characterizes our sober world where there are only material
values, into the world of primitive man and the neurotic, which is full of
inner riches only.
We face a decision here which is really not easy. But let us begin by
acknowledging that the difference which may seem fundamental to others
does not, in our judgment, touch the most important part of the subject. If
wishes and impulses have the full value of fact for primitive man, it is for
us to follow such a conception intelligently instead of correcting it
according to our standard. But in that case we must scrutinize more closely
the prototype of the neurosis itself which is responsible for having raised
this doubt. It is not true that compulsion neurotics, who to-day are under the
pressure of over-morality, defend themselves only against the psychic
reality of temptations and punish themselves for impulses which they have
only felt. A piece of historic reality is also involved; in their childhood these
persons had nothing but evil impulses and as far as their childish impotence
permitted they put them into action. Each of these over-good persons had a
period of badness in his childhood, and a perverse phase as a fore-runner
and a premise of the latter over morality. The analogy between primitive
men and neurotics is therefore much more fundamentally established if we
assume that with the former, too, the psychic reality, concerning whose
structure there is no doubt, originally coincided with the actual reality, and
that primitive men really did what according to all testimony they intended
to do.
But we must not let our judgment about primitive men be influenced too
far by the analogy with neurotics. Differences must also be taken into
account. Of course the sharp division between thinking and doing as we
draw it does not exist either with savages or with neurotics. But the neurotic
is above all inhibited in his actions; with him the thought is a complete

substitute for the deed. Primitive man is not inhibited, the thought is
directly converted into the deed, the deed is for him so to speak rather a
substitute for the thought, and for that reason I think we may well assume in
the case we are discussing, though without vouching for the absolute
certainty of the decision, that “In the beginning was the deed”.
THE END
Printed in Great Britain by Butler & Tanner, Frome and London

FOOTNOTES:
[1] Jung: Wandlungen and Symbole der Libido (Transformations and Symbols of the
Libido) translated by Dr. Beatrice Hinkle under the title The Psychology of the Unconscious,
and Principles of Psychoanalysis, Nervous and Mental Diseases.
[2] The History of the Psychoanalytic Movement, translated by A. A. Brill.
[3] Selected Papers on Hysteria and other Psychoneuroses, translated by A. A. Brill.
[4] The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, translated by A. A. Brill.
[5] Translated by A. A. Brill.
[6] Wit and Its Relations to the Unconscious, translated by A. A. Brill.
[7] Freud: Leonardo Da Vinci, translated by A. A. Brill.
[8] Cf. the works of Abraham, Spielrein, Jung, and Rank.
[9] Frazer, Totemism and Exogamy, Vol. I, p. 53. “The totem bond is stronger than the bond
of blood or family in the modern sense.”
[10] This very brief extract of the totemic system cannot be left without some elucidation
and without discussing its limitations. The name Totem or Totam was first learned from the
North American Indians by the Englishman, J. Long, in 1791. The subject has gradually
acquired great scientific interest and has called forth a copious literature. I refer especially to
Totemism and Exogamy by J. G. Frazer, 4 vols., 1910, and the books and articles of Andrew
Lang (The Secret of Totem, 1905). The credit for having recognized the significance of
totemism for the ancient history of man belongs to the Scotchman, J. Ferguson MacLennan
(Fortnightly Review, 1869-70). Exterior to Australia, totemic institutions were found and are
still observed among North American Indians, as well as among the races of the Polynesian
Islands group, in East India, and in a large part of Africa. Many traces and survivals otherwise
hard to interpret lead to the conclusion that totemism also once existed among the aboriginal
Aryan and Semitic races of Europe, so that many investigators are inclined to recognize in
totemism a necessary phase of human development through which every race has passed.
How then did prehistoric man come to acquire a totem; that is, how did he come to make
his descent from this or that animal foundation of his social duties and, as we shall hear, of his
sexual restrictions as well? Many different theories have been advanced to explain this, a
review of which the reader may find in Wundt’s Voelkerpsychologie (Vol. II: Mythus und
Religion).
I promise soon to make the problem of totemism a subject of special study in which an
effort will be made to solve it by applying the psychoanalytic method. (Cf. The fourth chapter
of this work.)
Not only is the theory of totemism controversial, but the very facts concerning it are hardly
to be expressed in such general statements as were attempted above. There is hardly an
assertion to which one would not have to add exceptions and contradictions. But it must not be
forgotten that even the most primitive and conservative races are, in a certain sense, old, and

have a long period behind them during which whatsoever was aboriginal with them has
undergone much development and distortion. Thus among those races who still evince it, we
find totemism to-day in the most manifold states of decay and disintegration; we observe that
fragments of it have passed over to other social and religious institutions; or it may exist in
fixed forms but far removed from its original nature. The difficulty then consists in the fact that
it is not altogether easy to decide what in the actual conditions is to be taken as a faithful copy
of the significant past and what is to be considered as a secondary distortion of it.
[11] Frazer, l.c., p. 54.
[12] But the father, who is a Kangaroo, is free—at least under this prohibition—to commit
incest with his daughters, who are Emu. In the case of paternal inheritance of the totem the
father would be Kangaroo as well as the children; then incest with the daughters would be
forbidden to the father and incest with the mother would be left open to the son. These
consequences of the totem prohibition seem to indicate that the maternal inheritance is older
than the paternal one, for there are grounds for assuming that the totem prohibitions are
directed first of all against the incestuous desires of the son.
[13] Second edition, 1902.
[14] The Native Tribes of Central Australia (London, 1899).
[15] The number of totems is arbitrarily chosen.
[16] Article Totemism in Encyclopedia Britannica, eleventh edition, 1911 (A. Lang).
[17] Storfer has recently drawn special attention to this point in his monograph: Parricide
as a Special Case. Papers on Applied Psychic Investigation, No. 12 (Vienna, 1911).
[18] R. H. Codrington, The Melanesians, also Frazer Totemism and Exogamy, Vol. I, p. 77.
[19] Frazer, l.c., II, p. 124, according to Kleintischen: The Inhabitants of the Coast of the
Gazelle Peninsula.
[20] Frazer, l.c., II, p. 131, according to P. G. Peckel in Anthropes, 1908.
[21] Frazer, l.c., II, p. 147, according to the Rev. L. Fison.
[22] Frazer, l.c., II. p. 189.
[23] Frazer, l.c., II, p. 388, according to Junod.
[24] Frazer, l.c., II, p. 424.
[25] Frazer, l.c., II, p. 76.
[26] Frazer, l.c., II, p. 113, according to C. Ribbe: Two Years among the Cannibals of the
Solomon Islands, 1905.
[27] Frazer, l.c., II, p. 385.
[28] Frazer, l.c., II, p. 461.
[29] v. Crawley: The Mystic Rose (London, 1902), p. 405.
[30] Crawley, l.c., p. 407.
[31] Crawley, l.c., p. 401, according to Leslie: Among the Zulus and Amatongas, 1875.
[32] Voelkerpsychologie, II. Band: Mythus und Religion, 1906, II, p. 308.
[33] Eleventh Edition; this article also gives the most important references.
[34] This application of the taboo can be omitted as not originally belonging in this
connection.

[35] Voelkerpsychologie, Vol. II: Religion und Mythus, p. 300.
[36] l.c., p. 237.
[37] Comp. Chapter I.
[38] l.c., p. 307.
[39] l.c., p. 313.
[40] Frazer, The Golden Bough, II: Taboo and the Perils of the Soul, 1911, p. 136.
[41] Both the pleasure and the prohibition referred to touching one’s own genitals.
[42] The relation to beloved persons who impose the prohibition.
[43] To use an excellent term coined by Bleuler.
[44] See Chapter IV; Totemism, etc.
[45] Third Edition, Part II: Taboo and the Perils of the Soul, 1911.
[46] Frazer, l.c., p. 166.
[47] Paulitschke, Ethnography of North-east Africa.
[48] Frazer, Adonis, Attis, Osiris, p. 248, 1907. According to Hugh Low, Sarawak (London,
1848).
[49] J. O. Dorsay, see Frazer, Taboo, etc., p. 181.
[50] Frazer, Taboo, pp. 166-174. These ceremonies consist of hitting shields, shouting,
bellowing and making noises with various instruments, etc.
[51] Frazer, Taboo, p. 166, according to S. Mueller, Reisen en Onderzoekingen in den
Indischen Archipel. (Amsterdam, 1857).
[52] For these examples see Frazer, Taboo, p. 165-170, “Manslayers Tabooed.”
[53] Frazer, Taboo, p. 132. “He must not only be guarded, he must also be guarded
against.”
[54] Frazer, The Magic Art, I, p. 368.
[55] Old New Zealand, by a Pakeha Maori (London, 1884), see Frazer, Taboo, p. 135.
[56] W. Brown, New Zealand and Its Aborigines (London, 1845) Frazer, l.c.
[57] Frazer, l.c.
[58] Frazer, Taboo. The Burden of Royalty, p. 7.
[59] l.c., p. 7.
[60] Kaempfer, History of Japan, see in Frazer, l.c., p. 3.
[61] Bastian, The German Expedition to the Coast of Loango (Jena 1874), cited by Frazer,
l.c., p. 5.
[62] Frazer, l.c., p. 13.
[63] Frazer, l.c., p. 11.
[64] A. Bastian, The German Expedition on the Coast of Lonago, cited by Frazer, l.c., p. 18.
[65] l.c., p. 18. According to Zwefel et Monstier, Voyage aux Sources du Niger, 1880.
[66] Frazer, The Magic Art and the Evolution of Kings, 2 vols., 1911 (The Golden Bough).
[67] Frazer, Taboo, p. 148, etc.
[68] W. Mariner, The Natives of the Tonga Islands, 1818; see Frazer, l.c., p. 140.

[69] The same patient whose ‘impossibilities’ I have correlated with taboo (see above, p.
47) acknowledged that she always became indignant when she met anybody on the street who
was dressed in mourning. “Such people should be forbidden to go out!” she said.
[70] Frazer, l.c., p. 353.
[71] Frazer, l.c., p. 352, etc.
[72] Frazer, l.c., p. 357, according to an old Spanish observer 1732.
[73] Frazer, l.c., p. 360.
[74] Stekel, Abraham.
[75] Frazer, l.c., p. 353, cites the Tuaregs of the Sahara as an example of such an
acknowledgment.
[76] Perhaps this condition is to be added: as long as any part of his physical remains exist.
Frazer, l.c., p. 372.
[77] On the Nikobar Islands, Frazer, l.c., p. 382.
[78] Wundt, Religion and Myth, Vol. II, p. 49.
[79] The Origin and Development of Moral Conceptions, see section entitled “Attitude
Towards the Dead,” Vol. II, p. 424. Both the notes and the text show an abundance of
corroborating, and often very characteristic testimony, e.g., the Maori believed that “the nearest
and most beloved relatives changed their nature after death and bore ill-will even to their
former favourites.” The Austral negroes believe that every dead person is for a long time
malevolent; the closer the relationship the greater the fear. The Central Eskimos are dominated
by the idea that the dead come to rest very late and that at first they are to be feared as
mischievous spirits who frequently hover about the village to spread illness, death and other
evils. (Boas.)
[80] R. Kleinpaul: The Living and the Dead in Folklore, Religion and Myth, 1898.
[81] l.c., p. 426.
[82] Cf. Chap. III.
[83] Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams.
[84] Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams.
[85] The projection creations of primitive man resemble the personifications through which
the poet projects his warring impulses out of himself, as separated individuals.
[86] Myth and Religion, p. 129.
[87] In the psychoanalysis of neurotic persons who suffer, or have suffered, in their
childhood from the fear of ghosts, it is often not difficult to expose these ghosts as the parents.
Compare also in this connection the communication of P. Haeberlin, Sexual Ghosts (Sexual
Problems, Feb. 1912), where it is a question of another erotically accentuated person, but
where the father was dead.
[88] Compare my article on Abel’s Gegensinn der Urworte in the Jahrbuch für
Psychoanalytische und Psychopathologische Forschungen, Bd. II, 1910.
[89] It is an interesting parallel that the sense of guilt resulting from the violation of a taboo
is in no way diminished if the violation took place unwittingly (see examples above), and that
even in the Greek myth the guilt of Oedipus is not cancelled by the fact that it was incurred
without his knowledge and will and even against them.

[90] The necessary crowding of the material also compels us to dispense with a thorough
bibliography. Instead of this the reader is referred to the well-known works of Herbert Spencer,
J. G. Frazer, A. Lang, E. B. Tylor and W. Wundt, from which all the statements concerning
animism and magic are taken. The independence of the author can manifest itself only in the
choice of the material and of opinions.
[91] E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture, Vol. I, p. 425, fourth ed., 1903. W. Wundt, Myth and
Religion, Vol. II, p. 173, 1906.
[92] Wundt l.c., Chapter IV: Die Seelenvorstellungen.
[93] Compare, besides Wundt and H. Spencer and the instructive article in the
Encyclopedia Britannica, 1911 (Animism, Mythology, and so forth).
[94] l.c., p. 154.
[95] See Tylor, Primitive Culture, Vol. I, p. 477.
[96] Cultes, Mythes et Religions, T. II: Introduction, p. XV, 1909.
[97] Année Sociologique, Seventh Vol, 1904.
[98] To frighten away a ghost with noise and cries is a form of pure sorcery; to force him to
do something by taking his name is to employ magic against him.
[99] The Magic Art, II. p. 67.
[100] The Biblical prohibition against making an image of anything living hardly sprang
from any fundamental rejection of plastic art, but was probably meant to deprive magic, which
the Hebraic religion proscribed, of one of its instruments. Frazer, l.c., p. 87, note.
[101] The Magic Art, II, p. 98.
[102] An echo of this is to be found in the Oedipus Rex of Sophocles.
[103] The Magic Art, p. 120.
[104] l.c., p. 122.
[105] See preceding chapter, p. 92.
[106] Frazer, The Magic Art, pp. 201-3.
[107] The Magic Art, p. 420.
[108] Compare the article Magic (N. T. W.), in the Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th Ed.
[109] l.c., p. 54.
[110] Formulation of two principles of psychic activity, Jahrb. für Psychoanalyt.
Forschungen, Vol. III, 1912, p. 2.
[111] The King in Hamlet (Act III, Scene 4):

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

[112] Compare Chapter II.
[113] Remarks upon a case of Compulsion Neurosis, Jahrb. für Psychoanalyt. und
Psychopath. Forschungen, Vol. I, 1909.
[114] We seem to attribute the character of the ‘uncanny’ to all such impressions which
seek to confirm the omnipotence of thought and the animistic method of thought in general,
though our judgment has long rejected it.

[115] The following discussions will yield a further motive for this displacement upon a
trivial action.
[116] Monograph Series, 1916.
[117] It is almost an axiom with writers on this subject that a sort of ‘Solipsism or
Berkleianism’ (as Professor Sully terms it as he finds it in the child) operates in the savage to
make him refuse to recognize death as a fact.—Marett, Pre-animistic Religion, Folklore, Vol.
XI, 1900, p. 178.
[118] We merely wish to indicate here that the original narcism of the child is decisive for
the interpretation of its character development and that it precludes the assumption of a
primitive feeling of inferiority for the child.
[119] S. Reinach, L’Art et la Magie, in the collection Cultes, Mythes et Religions, Vol. I, pp.
125-136. Reinach thinks that the primitive artists who have left us the scratched or painted
animal pictures in the caves of France did not want to ‘arouse’ pleasure, but to ‘conjure things’.
He explains this by showing that these drawings are in the darkest and most inaccessible part of
the caves and that representations of feared beasts of prey are absent. “Les modernes parlent
souvent, par hyperbole, de la magie du pinceau ou du ciseau d’un grand artiste et, en général,
de la magie de l’art. Entendu en sense propre, qui est celui d’une constrainte mystique exercée
par la volonté de l’homme sur d’autres volontés ou sur les choses, cette expression n’est plus
admissible; mais nous avons vu qu’elle était autrefois rigouresement, vraie, du moins dans
l’opinion des artistes” (p. 136).
[120] Recognized through so-called endopsychic perceptions.
[121] R. R. Marett, Pre-animistic Religion, Folklore, Vol. XI, No. 2, 1900.—Comp. Wundt,
Myth and Religion, Vol. II, p. 171.
[122] We assume that in this early narcistic stage feelings from libidinous and other sources
of excitement are perhaps still indistinguishably combined with each other.
[123] Schreber, Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken, 1903.—Freud, Psychoanalytic
Observations concerning an autobiographically described case of Paranoia, Jahrbuch für
Psychoanalyt. Forsch. Vol. III, 1911.
[124] Compare the latest communication about the Schreber case, p. 59.
[125] Principles of Sociology, Vol. I.
[126] l.c., p. 179.
[127] Compare my short paper: A Note on the Unconscious in Psychoanalysis, in the
Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, Part LXVI, Vol. XXVI, 1912.
[128] p. 26.
[129] Frazer, Taboo and the Perils of the Soul, p. 158
[130] Frazer, l.c., p. 200.
[131] Frazer, l.c., p. 237.
[132] Freud, Psychopathology of Everyday Life, p. 215, trans. by A. A. Brill.
[133] p. 139.
[134] Revue Scientifique, October, 1900, reprinted in the four volume work of the author,
Cultes, Mythes et Religions, 1908, Tome I, p. 17.
[135] 1910.

[136] But it may be well to show the reader beforehand how difficult it is to establish the
facts in this field.
In the first place those who collect the observations are not identical with those who digest
and discuss them; the first are travellers and missionaries, while the others are scientific men
who perhaps have never seen the objects of their research.—It is not easy to establish an
understanding with savages. Not all the observers were familiar with the languages but had to
use the assistance of interpreters or else had to communicate with the people they questioned in
the auxiliary language of pidgin-English. Savages are not communicative about the most
intimate affairs of their culture and unburden themselves only to those foreigners who have
passed many years in their midst. From various motives they often give wrong or misleading
information, (Compare Frazer, The Beginnings of Religion and Totemism Among the Australian
Aborigines; Fortnightly Review, 1905; Totemism and Exogamy, Vol. I, p. 150).—It must not be
forgotten that primitive races are not young races but really are as old as the most civilized, and
that we have no right to expect that they have preserved their original ideas and institutions for
our information without any evolution or distortion. It is certain, on the contrary, that far-
reaching changes in all directions have taken place among primitive races, so that we can never
unhesitatingly decide which of their present conditions and opinions have preserved the
original past, having remained petrified, as it were, and which represent a distortion and change
of the original. It is due to this that one meets the many disputes among authors as to what
proportion of the peculiarities of a primitive culture is to be taken as a primary, and what as a
later and secondary manifestation. To establish the original conditions, therefore, always
remains a matter of construction. Finally, it is not easy to adapt oneself to the ways of thinking
of primitive races. For like children, we easily misunderstand them, and are always inclined to
interpret their acts and feelings according to our own psychic constellations.
[137] Totemism (Edinburgh, 1887), reprinted in the first volume of his great study,
Totemism and Exogamy.
[138] Compare the chapter on Taboo.
[139] Just as to-day we still have the wolves in a cage at the steps of the Capitol in Rome
and the bears in the pit at Berne.
[140] Like the legend of the white woman in many noble families.
[141] l.c., p. 35.—See the discussion of sacrifice further on.
[142] See Chapter I.
[143] p. 116.
[144] The conclusion which Frazer draws about totemism in his second work on the subject
(The Origin of Totemism; Fortnightly Review, 1899) agrees with this text: “Thus, totemism has
commonly been treated as a primitive system both of religion and of society. As a system of
religion it embraces the mystic union of the savage with his totem; as a system of society it
comprises the relations in which men and women of the same totem stand to each other and to
the members of other totemic groups. And corresponding to these two sides of the system are
two rough-and-ready tests or canons of totemism: first, the rule that a man may not kill or eat
his totem animal or plant, and second, the rule that he may not marry or cohabit with a woman
of the same totem” (p. 101). Frazer then adds something which takes us into the midst of the
discussion about totemism: “Whether the two sides—the religious and the social—have always
coexisted or are essentially independent, is a question which has been variously answered.”
[145] In connexion with such a change of opinion Frazer made this excellent statement:
“That my conclusions on these difficult questions are final, I am not so foolish as to pretend. I
have changed my views repeatedly, and I am resolved to change them again with every change

of the evidence, for like a chameleon the inquirer should shift his colours with the shifting
colours of the ground he treads.” Preface to Vol. I, Totemism and Exogamy, 1910.
[146] “By the nature of the case, as the origin of totemism lies far beyond our powers of
historical examination or of experiment, we must have recourse as regards this matter, to
conjecture,” Andrew Lang, Secret of the Totem, p. 27.—“Nowhere do we see absolutely
primitive man, and a totemic system in the making,” p. 29.
[147] At first probably only animals.
[148] The Worship of Animals and Plants (Fortnightly Review, 1869-1870). Primitive
Marriage, 1865; both works reprinted in Studies in Ancient History, 1876; second edition,
1886.
[149] The Secret of the Totem, 1905, p. 34.
[150] Ibid.
[151] Ibid.
[152] According to Andrew Lang.
[153] Pikler and Somló, The Origin of Totemism, 1901. The authors rightly call their
attempt at explanation a “Contribution to the materialistic theory of History.”
[154] The Origin of Animal Worship (Fortnightly Review, 1870). Principles of Psychology,
Vol. I, §§ 169 to 176.
[155] Kamilaroi and Kurmai, p. 165, 1880 (Lang, Secret of the Totem, etc.).
[156] See the chapter on Taboo, p. 96.
[157] l.c., Vol. I, p. 41.
[158] Address to the Anthropological Section, British Association, Belfast, 1902. According
to Frazer, l.c., Vol. IV, p. 50.
[159] The Native Tribes of Central Australia, by Baldwin Spencer and H. J. Gillen,
London, 1891.
[160] There is nothing vague or mystical about it, nothing of that metaphysical haze which
some writers love to conjure up over the humblest beginnings of human speculation but which
is utterly foreign to the simple, sensuous, and concrete modes of the savage. (Totemism and
Exogamy, I., p. 117.)
[161] l.c., p. 120.
[162] L’année Sociologique, Vol. I, V, VIII, and elsewhere. See especially the chapter, Sur
le Totémisme, Vol. V, 1901.
[163] Social Origins and the Secret of the Totem.
[164] The Golden Bough, II, p. 332.
[165] “It is unlikely that a community of savages should deliberately parcel out the realm
of nature into provinces, assign each province to a particular band of magicians, and bid all the
bands to work their magic and weave their spells for the common good.” Totemism and
Exogamy, Vol. IV, p. 57.
[166] Totemism and Exogamy, Vol. II, p. 89, and IV, p. 59.
[167] Totemism and Exogamy, Vol. IV, p. 63.
[168] “That belief is a philosophy far from primitive”, Andrew Lang, Secret of the Totem,
p. 192.

[169] Frazer, Totemism and Exogamy, Vol. IV, p. 45.
[170] Frazer, l.c., p. 48.
[171] Wundt, Elemente der Völker-Psychologie, p. 190.
[172] L’année Sociologique, 1898-1904.
[173] See Frazer’s Criticism of Durkheim, Totemism and Exogamy, p. 101.
[174] Secret, etc., p. 125.
[175] See Frazer, l.c., Vol. IV, p. 75: “The totemic clan is a totally different social organism
from the exogamous class, and we have good grounds for thinking that it is far older.”
[176] Primitive Marriage, 1865.
[177] Frazer, l.c., p. 73 to 92.
[178] Compare Chapter I.
[179] Morgan, Ancient Society, 1877.—Frazer, Totemism and Exogamy, Vol. IV, p. 105.
[180] Frazer, l.c., p. 106.
[181] Origin and Development of Moral Conceptions, Vol. II: Marriage (1909). See also
there the author’s defence against familiar objections.
[182] l.c., p. 97.
[183] Compare Durkheim, La Prohibition de l’Inceste (L’année Sociologique, I, 1896-7).
[184] Charles Darwin says about savages: “They are not likely to reflect on distant evils to
their progeny.”
[185] See Chapter I.
[186] “Thus the ultimate origin of exogamy and with it the law of incest—since exogamy
was devised to prevent incest—remains a problem nearly as dark as ever.”—Totemism and
Exogamy, I, p. 165.
[187] The Origin of Man, Vol. II, Chap. 20, pp. 603-4.
[188] Primal Law, London, 1903 (with Andrew Lang, Social Origins).
[189] Secret of the Totem, pp. 114, 143.
[190] “If it be granted that exogamy existed in practice, on the lines of Mr. Darwin’s theory,
before the totem beliefs lent to the practice a sacred sanction, our task is relatively easy. The
first practical rule would be that of the jealous sire: ‘No males to touch the females in my
camp,’ with expulsion of adolescent sons. In efflux of time that rule, becoming habitual, would
be, ‘No marriages within the local group.’ Next let the local groups receive names such as
Emus, Crows, Opossums, Snipes, and the rule becomes, ‘No marriage within the local group of
animal name; no Snipe to marry a Snipe.’ But, if the primal groups were not exogamous they
would become so as soon as totemic myths and taboos were developed out of the animal,
vegetable, and other names of small local groups.”—‘Secret of the Totem’, p. 143. (The italics
above are mine).—In his last expression on the subject (Folklore, December, 1911), Andrew
Lang states, however, that he has given up the derivation of exogamy out of the “general
totemic” taboo.
[A] M. Wulff, Contributions to Infantile Sexuality, Zentralbl. f. Psychoanalyze, 1912, II,
No. I, p. 15.
[191] Little Hans, trans. by A. A. Brill (Moffat, Yard & Co., N.Y.).
[192] l.c., p. 41.

[193] ‘The Phantasy of the Giraffe,’ l.c., p. 30.
[194] S. Ferenczi, Contributions to Psychoanalysis, p. 204, translated by Ernest Jones
(Badger, Boston, 1916).
[195] Compare the communications of Reitler, Ferenczi, Rank, and Eder about the
substitution of blindness in the Oedipus myth for castration. Intern. Zeitschrift f. ärtzl.
Psychoanalyze, 1913, I, No. 2.
[196] Ferenczi, l.c., p. 209.
[197] Ferenczi, l.c., p. 212.
[198] Frazer finds that the essence of totemism is in this identification: “Totemism is an
identification of a man with his totem.” Totemism and Exogamy, IV, p. 5.
[199] I am indebted to Otto Rank for the report of a case of dog phobia in an intelligent
young man whose explanation of how he acquired his ailment sounds remarkably like the
totem theory of the Aruntas mentioned above. He had heard from his father that his mother at
one time during her pregnancy had been frightened by a dog.
[200] The Religion of the Semites, Second Edition, London, 1907.
[201] The Religion of the Semites, Second Edition, London, 1907.
[202] “The inference is that the domestication to which totemism leads (when there are any
animals capable of domestication) is fatal to totemism.” Jevons, Introduction to the History of
Religion, 1911, fifth edition, p. 120.
[203] l.c., p. 313.
[204] The Golden Bough, Part V; Spirits of the Corn and of the Wild, 1912, in the chapters:
“Eating the God and Killing the Divine Animal.”
[205] Frazer, Totem and Exogamy, Vol. II, p. 590.
[206] I am not ignorant of the objections to this theory of sacrifice as expressed by
Marillier, Hubert, Mauss and others, but they have not essentially impaired the theories of
Robertson Smith.
[207] Religion of the Semites, 2nd Edition, 1907, p. 412.
[208] For a recent contribution compare The Whole House of the Chilkat, by G. T. Emmons
(American Museum Journal, Vol. XVI, No. 7.) [Translator].
[209] The reader will avoid the erroneous impression which this exposition may call forth
by taking into consideration the concluding sentence of the subsequent chapter.
[210] The seemingly monstrous assumption that the tyrannical father was overcome and
slain by a combination of the expelled sons has also been accepted by Atkinson as a direct
result of the conditions of the Darwinian primal horde. “A youthful band of brothers living
together in forced celibacy, or at most in polyandrous relation with some single female captive.
A horde as yet weak in their impubescence they are, but they would, when strength was gained
with time, inevitably wrench by combined attacks, renewed again and again, both wife and life
from the paternal tyrant” (Primal Law, pp. 220-1). Atkinson, who spent his life in New
Caledonia and had unusual opportunities to study the natives, also refers to the fact that the
conditions of the primal horde which Darwin assumes can easily be observed among herds of
wild cattle and horses and regularly lead to the killing of the father animal. He then assumes
further that a disintegration of the horde took place after the removal of the father through
embittered fighting among the victorious sons, which thus precluded the origin of a new
organization of society; “An ever recurring violent succession to the solitary paternal tyrant by

sons, whose parricidal hands were so soon again clenched in fratricidal strife” (p. 228).
Atkinson, who did not have the suggestions of psychoanalysis at his command and did not
know the studies of Robertson Smith, finds a less violent transition from the primal horde to
the next social stage in which many men live together in peaceful accord. He attributes it to
maternal love that at first only the youngest sons and later others too remain in the horde, who
in return for this toleration acknowledge the sexual prerogative of the father by the restraint
which they practise towards the mother and towards their sisters.
So much for the very remarkable theory of Atkinson, its essential correspondence with the
theory here expounded, and its point of departure which makes it necessary to relinquish so
much else.
I must ascribe the indefiniteness, the disregard of time interval, and the crowding of the
material in the above exposition to a restraint which the nature of the subject demands. It would
be just as meaningless to strive for exactness in this material as it would be unfair to demand
certainty here.
[211] This new emotional attitude must also have been responsible for the fact that the deed
could not bring full satisfaction to any of the perpetrators. In a certain sense it had been in vain.
For none of the sons could carry out his original wish of taking the place of the father. But
failure is, as we know, much more favourable to moral reaction than success.
[212] “Murder and incest, or offences of like kind against the sacred law of blood are in
primitive society the only crimes of which the community as such takes cognizance ...”
Religion of the Semites, p. 419.
[213] Compare Transformations and Symbols of the Libido, by C. G. Jung, in which some
dissenting points of view are represented.
[214] Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, Second Edition, 1907.
[215] See above, p. 128.
[216] “To us moderns, for whom the breach which divides the human and divine has
deepened into an impassable gulf, such mimicry may appear impious, but it was otherwise with
the ancients. To their thinking gods and men were akin, for many families traced their descent
from a divinity, and the deification of a man probably seemed as little extraordinary to them as
the canonization of a saint seems to a modern Catholic.” Frazer, The Golden Bough, I; The
Magic Art and the Evolution of Kings, II, p. 177.
[217] It is known that the overcoming of one generation of gods by another in mythology
represents the historical process of the substitution of one religious system by another, either as
the result of conquest by a strange race or by means of a psychological development. In the
latter case the myth approaches the “functional phenomena” in H. Silberer’s sense. That the
god who kills the animal is a symbol of the libido, as asserted by C. G. Jung (l.c.), presupposes
a different conception of the libido from that hitherto held, and at any rate seems to me
questionable.
[218] Religion of the Semites, pp. 412-413. “The mourning is not a spontaneous expression
of sympathy with the divine tragedy, but obligatory and enforced by fear of supernatural anger.
And a chief object of the mourners is to disclaim responsibility for the god’s death—a point
which has already come before us in connexion with theanthropic sacrifices, such as the ‘ox-
murder at Athens.’”
[219] The fear of castration plays an extraordinarily big rôle in disturbing the relations to
the father in the case of our youthful neurotics. In Ferenczi’s excellent study we have seen how
the boy recognized his totem in the animal which snaps at his little penis. When children learn
about ritual circumcision they identify it with castration. To my knowledge the parallel in the

psychology of races to this attitude of our children has not yet been drawn. The circumcision
which was so frequent in primordial times among primitive races belongs to the period of
initiation in which its meaning is to be found; it has only secondarily been relegated to an
earlier time of life. It is very interesting that among primitive men circumcision is combined
with or replaced by the cutting off of the hair and the drawing of teeth, and that our children,
who cannot know anything about this, really treat these two operations as equivalents to
castration when they display their fear of them.
[220] Reinach, Cultes, Mythes, et Religions, II, p. 75.
[221] “Une sorte de péché proethnique,” l.c., p. 76.
[222] The suicidal impulses of our neurotics regularly prove to be self-punishments for
death wishes directed against others.
[223] Eating the God, p. 51.... Nobody familiar with the literature on this subject will
assume that the tracing back of the Christian communion to the totem feast is an idea of the
author of this book.
[224] Ariel in The Tempest:

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

[225] La Mort d’Orphée, Cultes, Mythes, et Religions, Vol. II, p. 100.
[226] That is to say, the parent complex.
[227] I am used to being misunderstood and therefore do not think it superfluous to state
clearly that in giving these deductions I am by no means oblivious of the complex nature of the
phenomena which give rise to them; the only claim made is that a new factor has been added to
the already known or still unrecognized origins of religion, morality, and society, which was
furnished through psychoanalytic experience. The synthesis of the whole explanation must be
left to another. But it is in the nature of this new contribution that it could play none other than
the central rôle in such a synthesis, although it will be necessary to overcome great affective
resistances before such importance will be conceded to it.
[228] Compare Chapter II.
[229] See Chapter III.

Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:
new pyschological technique=> new psychological technique {pg vi}
the pyschoanalysts=> the psychoanalysts {pg vi}
subjetced to analysis=> subjected to analysis {pg x}
profound anaylsis=> profound analysis {pg x}
Similiar customs=> Similar customs {pg 17}

made us familar=> made us familiar {pg 48}
expiate and similiar=> expiate and similar {pg 51}
anxious excesss=> anxious excess {pg 84}
originally the world taboo=> originally the world taboo {pg 112}
susperstitious motivation=> susperstitious motivation {pg 162}
exercée par la volunté=> exercée par la volonté {pg 151}

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