Freud - Complete Works (441 page)

2637

PREFACE TO BOURKE’S
SCATALOGIC RITES OF ALL NATIONS

(1913)

2638

Intentionally left blank

2639

PREFACE TO BOURKE’S
SCATALOGIC RITES OF ALL NATIONS

While I was living in Paris in 1885 as a pupil
of Charcot, what chiefly attracted me, apart from the great
man’s own lectures, were the demonstrations and addresses
given by Brouardel. He used to show us from post-mortem material at
the morgue how much there was which deserved to be known by doctors
but of which science preferred to take no notice. On one occasion
he was discussing the indications which enabled one to judge the
social rank, character and origin of an unidentified body, and I
heard him say: ‘
Les genoux sales sont le signe d’une
fille honnête
.’ He was using a girl’s dirty
knees as evidence of her virtue!

   The lesson that bodily
cleanliness is far more readily associated with vice than with
virtue often occurred to me later on, when psycho-analytic work
made me acquainted with the way in which civilized men to-day deal
with the problem of their physical nature. They are clearly
embarrassed by anything that reminds them too much of their animal
origin. They are trying to emulate the ‘more perfected
angels’ in the last scene of
Faust
, who complain:

                                                               
Uns bleibt ein Erdenrest

                                                               
zu tragen peinlich,

                                                               
und wär’ er von Asbest,

                                                               
er ist nicht reinlich.
¹

   Since, however, they must
necessarily remain far removed from such perfection, men have
chosen to evade the predicament by so far as possible denying the
very existence of this inconvenient ‘trace of the
Earth’, by concealing it from one another, and by withholding
from it the attention and care which it might claim as an
integrating component of their essential being. The wiser course
would undoubtedly have been to admit its existence and to dignify
it as much as its nature will allow.

  
¹
[Literally: ‘We still have a trace of
the Earth, which is distressing to bear; and though it were of
asbestos it is not cleanly.’]

Preface To Bourke's Scatalogic Rites Of All Nations

2640

   It is far from being a simple
matter to survey or describe the consequences involved in this way
of treating the ‘distressing trace of the Earth’, of
which the sexual and excretory functions may be considered the
nucleus. It will be enough to mention a single one of these
consequences, the one with which we are most concerned here: the
fact that science is prohibited from dealing with these proscribed
aspects of human life, so that anyone who studies such things is
regarded as scarcely less ‘improper’ than someone who
actually
does
improper things.

   Nevertheless, psycho-analysis and
folklore have not allowed themselves to be deterred from
transgressing these prohibitions and have been able as a result to
teach us all kinds of things that are indispensable for an
understanding of human nature. If we limit ourselves here to what
has been learnt about the excretory functions, it may be said that
the chief finding from psycho-analytic research has been the fact
that the human infant is obliged to recapitulate during the early
part of his development the changes in the attitude of the human
race towards excremental matters which probably had their start
when
homo sapiens
first raised himself off Mother Earth. In
the earliest years of infancy there is as yet no trace of shame
about the excretory functions or of disgust at excreta. Small
children show great interest in these, just as they do in others of
their bodily secretions; they like occupying themselves with them
and can derive many kinds of pleasure from doing so. Excreta,
regarded as parts of a child’s own body and as products of
his own organism, have a share in the esteem - the narcissistic
esteem, as we should call it - with which he regards everything
relating to his self. Children are, indeed, proud of their own
excretions and make use of them to help in asserting themselves
against adults. Under the influence of its upbringing, the
child’s coprophilic instincts and inclinations gradually
succumb to repression; it learns to keep them secret, to be ashamed
of them and to feel disgust at their objects. Strictly speaking,
however, the disgust never goes so far as to apply to a
child’s own excretions, but is content with repudiating them
when they are the products of other people. The interest which has
hitherto been attached to excrement is carried over on to other
objects - for instance, from faeces on to money, which is, of
course, late in acquiring significance for children. Important
constituents in the formation of character are developed, or
strengthened, from the repression of coprophilic inclinations.

Preface To Bourke's Scatalogic Rites Of All Nations

2641

   Psycho-analysis further shows
that, to begin with, excremental and sexual instincts are not
distinct from each other in children. The divorce between them only
occurs later and it remains incomplete. Their original affinity,
which is established by the anatomy of the human body, still makes
itself felt in many ways in normal adults. Finally, it should not
be forgotten that these developments can no more be expected to
yield a perfect result than any others. Some portion of the old
preferences persist, some part of the coprophilic inclinations
continue to operate in later life and are expressed in the
neuroses, perversions and bad habits of adults.

   Folklore has adopted a quite
different method of research, and yet it has reached the same
results as psycho-analysis. It shows us how incompletely the
repression of coprophilic inclinations has been carried out among
various peoples at various times and how closely at other cultural
levels the treatment of excretory substances approximates to that
practised by children. It also demonstrates the persistent and
indeed ineradicable nature of coprophilic interests, by displaying
to our astonished gaze the multiplicity of applications - in
magical ritual, in tribal customs, in observances of religious
cults and in the art of healing - by which the old esteem for human
excretions has found new expression. The connection, too, with
sexual life seems to be fully preserved.

   This expansion of our knowledge
clearly involves no risk to our morality. The major part of what is
known of the role played by excretions in human life has been
brought together in J. G. Bourke’s
Scatalogic Rites of All
Nations
. To make it accessible to German readers is therefore
not only a courageous but also a meritorious undertaking.

2642

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SEQUENCES OF VOWELS

(1911)

Objections have no doubt often been raised to
the assertion made by Stekel that in dreams and associations names
which have to be concealed seem to be replaced by others that
resemble them only in containing the same sequence of vowels. A
striking analogy is, however, provided from the history of
religion. Among the ancient Hebrews the name of God was taboo; it
might neither be spoken aloud nor written down. (This is far from
being an isolated example of the special significance of names in
archaic civilizations.) This prohibition was so implicitly obeyed
that to this very day the vocalization of the four consonants in
God’s name (
) remains unknown. It was,
however, pronounced ‘Jehovah’, being supplied with the
vowels of the word ‘Adonai’ (‘Lord’),
against which there was no such prohibition. (Reinach, 1905-12, 1,
1.)

2643

‘GREAT IS DIANA OF THE EPHESIANS’

(1911)

The ancient Greek city of Ephesus in Asia
Minor, for the exploration of whose ruins, incidentally, our
Austrian archaeology has to be thanked, was especially celebrated
in antiquity for its splendid temple dedicated to Artemis (Diana).
Ionic invaders - perhaps in the eighth century before Christ -
conquered the city, which had long been inhabited by people of
Asiatic race, and found in it the cult of an ancient mother goddess
who possibly bore the name of Oupis, and identified her with
Artemis, a deity of their home land. The evidence of excavations
shows that in the course of centuries several temples were erected
on the same site in honour of the goddess. It was the fourth of
these temples that was destroyed by a fire started by the crazy
Herostratus in the year 356, during the night in which Alexander
the Great was born. It was rebuilt, more magnificent than ever.
With its concourse of priests, magicians and pilgrims, and with its
shops in which amulets, mementoes and oblations were offered for
sale, the commercial metropolis of Ephesus might be compared to a
modern Lourdes.

   In about A.D. 54, the apostle
Paul spent several years at Ephesus. He preached, performed
miracles, and found a large following among the people. He was
persecuted and accused by the Jews; and he separated from them and
founded an independent Christian community. In consequence of the
spread of his doctrine, there was a falling-off in the trade of the
goldsmiths, who used to make mementoes of the holy place - small
figures of Artemis and models of the temple - for the faithful and
the pilgrims who came from all over the world.¹ Paul was much
too strict a Jew to allow the old deity to survive under another
name, to re-baptize her, as the Ionic conquerors had done with the
goddess Oupis. So it was that the pious artisans and artists of the
city became uneasy about their goddess as well as about their
earnings. They revolted, and, with endlessly repeated cries of
‘Great is Diana of the Ephesians’, streamed through the
main street, called ‘Arcadian’, to the theatre, where
their leader, Demetrius, delivered an incendiary speech against the
Jews and against Paul. The authorities succeeded with difficulty in
quelling the tumult by the assurance that the majesty of the
goddess was unassailable and out of reach of any attack.²

   ¹ See also
Goethe’s poem (
Sophienausgabe
,
2
, 195).

   ²
Acts
,
xix.

'Great Is Diana Of The Ephesians'

2644

   The church founded by Paul at
Ephesus did not long remain faithful to him. It came under the
influence of a man named John, whose personality has set the
critics some hard problems. He may have been the author of the
Apocalypse, which teems with invectives against the apostle Paul.
Tradition identifies him with the apostle John, to whom the fourth
gospel is attributed. According to that gospel, when Jesus was on
the cross he called out to his favourite disciple, pointing to
Mary: ‘Behold thy mother!’ And from that moment John
took Mary to him. So when John went to Ephesus, Mary accompanied
him. Accordingly, alongside of the church of the apostle in
Ephesus, there was built the first basilica in honour of the new
mother-goddess of the Christians. Its existence is attested as
early as in the fourth century. Now once again the city had its
great goddess, and, apart from her name, there was little change.
The goldsmiths, too, recovered their work of making models of the
temple and images of the goddess for the new pilgrims. The function
of Artemis expressed by the attribute of
Κουροτρό
f
ος
,¹
however, was handed over to a St. Artemidorus, who took on the care
of women in labour.

   Then came the conquest of the
city by Islam, and finally its ruin and abandonment owing to the
river on which it stood becoming choked with sand. But even then
the great goddess of Ephesus had not abandoned her claims. In our
own days she appeared as a saintly virgin to a pious German girl,
Katharina Emmerich, at Dülmen. She described to her her
journey to Ephesus, the furnishings of the house in which she had
lived there and in which she had died, the shape of her bed, and so
on. And both the house and the bed were in fact found exactly as
the virgin had described them, and they are once more the goal of
the pilgrimages of the faithful.

  
¹
[‘Rearer of boys.’]