Freud - Complete Works (442 page)

2645

PREFACE TO MAXIM STEINER’S

THE PSYCHICAL DISORDERS OF MALE POTENCY

(1913)

The author of this little monograph, which
deals with the pathology and treatment of psychical impotence in
males, is one of the small band of physicians who early recognized
the importance of psycho-analysis for their special branch of
medicine and who have never since ceased to perfect themselves in
its theory and technique. We are aware that only a small part of
neurotic ailments - which we have now come to know as the outcome
of disturbances of the sexual function - are dealt with in
neuropathology itself. The greater number of them find a place
among the disorders of the particular organ which is the victim of
a neurotic disturbance. It is therefore expedient and proper that
the treatment of these symptoms or syndromes should also be the
business of the specialist, who is alone capable of making a
differential diagnosis between a neurotic and an organic illness,
who can draw the line, in the case of mixed forms, between their
organic and neurotic elements, and who can in general give us
information on the way in which the two factors in the disease
mutually reinforce each other. But if ‘nervous’ organic
diseases are not to fall into neglect as being mere appendages of
the material disorders of the same organ - a neglect which, from
their frequency and practical importance, they are far from
meriting - the specialist, whether he is concerned with the
stomach, the heart or the urogenitary system, must, in addition to
his general medical knowledge and his specialized attainments, also
be able to make use, for his own field of work, of the lines of
approach, the discoveries and the techniques of the nerve
specialist.

   A great therapeutic advance will
have been made when specialists no longer dismiss a patient
suffering from a nervous ailment in an organ with a pronouncement
such as: ‘There’s nothing wrong with you; it’s
simply nerves’, or with the not much better further advice:
‘Go to a nerve specialist; he’ll order you a light
course of cold-water treatment.’ No doubt, too, we shall
require the specialist in any organ to be capable of understanding
and treating nervous disorders in his field, rather than expect the
nerve-specialist to be trained into being a universal specialist in
every organ in which neuroses produce symptoms. And it may
accordingly be anticipated that only neuroses with mainly psychical
symptoms will remain in the sphere of the nerve specialist.

   We may hope, therefore, that the
time is not far distant when it will be generally recognized that
no sort of nervous disturbance can be understood and treated
without the help of the line of approach and often of the technique
of psycho-analysis. Such an assertion may sound to-day like a piece
of presumptuous exaggeration; but I venture to prophesy that it is
destined to become a platitude. It will, however, always be to the
credit of the author of the present work that he has not waited for
this to happen before admitting psycho-analysis as a treatment of
the nervous ailments within his own specialized branch of
medicine.

VIENNA
,
March
1913.

2646

TOTEM AND TABOO

Some
Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics

(1913 [1912-13])

2647

Intentionally left blank

Totem And Taboo

2648

PREFACE

The four essays that follow were originally
published (under a heading which serves as the present book’s
sub-title) in the first two volumes of
Imago
, a periodical
issued under my direction. They represent a first attempt on my
part at applying the point of view and the findings of
psycho-analysis to some unsolved problems of social psychology
[
Völkerpsychologie
]. Thus they offer a methodological
contrast on the one hand to Wilhelm Wundt’s extensive work,
which applies the hypotheses and working methods of
non
-analytic psychology to the same purposes, and on the
other hand to the writings of the Zurich school of psycho-analysis,
which endeavour, on the contrary, to solve the problems of
individual psychology with the help of material derived from social
psychology. (Cf. Jung, 1912 and 1913.) I readily confess that it
was from these two sources that I received the first stimulus for
my own essays.

   I am fully conscious of the
deficiencies of these studies. I need not mention those which are
necessarily characteristic of pioneering work; but others require a
word of explanation. The four essays collected in these pages aim
at arousing the interest of a fairly wide circle of educated
readers, but they cannot in fact be understood and appreciated
except by those few who are no longer strangers to the essential
nature of psycho-analysis. They seek to bridge the gap between
students of such subjects as social anthropology, philology and
folklore on the one hand, and psycho-analysts on the other. Yet
they cannot offer to either side what each lacks - to the former an
adequate initiation into the new psychological technique or to the
latter a sufficient grasp of the material that awaits treatment.
They must therefore rest content with attracting the attention of
the two parties and with encouraging a belief that occasional
co-operation between them could not fail to be of benefit to
research.

   It will be found that the two
principal themes from which the title of this little book is
derived - totems and taboos - have not received the same treatment.
The analysis of taboos is put forward as an assured and exhaustive
attempt at the solution of the problem. The investigation of
totemism does no more than declare that ‘here is what
psycho-analysis can at the moment contribute towards elucidating
the problem of the totem’. The difference is related to the
fact that taboos still exist among us. Though expressed in a
negative form and directed towards another subject-matter, they do
not differ in their psychological nature from Kant’s
‘categorical imperative’, which operates in a
compulsive fashion and rejects any conscious motives. Totemism, on
the contrary, is something alien to our contemporary feelings - a
religio-social institution which has been long abandoned as an
actuality and replaced by newer forms. It has left only the
slightest traces behind it in the religions, manners and customs of
the civilized peoples of to-day and has been subject to
far-reaching modifications even among the races over which it still
holds sway. The social and technical advances in human history have
affected taboos far less than the totem.

   An attempt is made in this volume
to deduce the original meaning of totemism from the vestiges
remaining of it in childhood from the hints of it which emerge in
the course of the growth of our own children. The close connection
between totems and taboos carries us a step further along the path
towards the hypothesis presented in these pages; and if in the end
that hypothesis bears a highly improbable appearance, that need be
no argument against the possibility of its approximating more or
less closely to the reality which it is so hard to reconstruct.

ROME
,
September
1913

Totem And Taboo

2649

PREFACE TO THE HEBREW TRANSLATION

No reader of this book will find it easy to
put himself in the emotional position of an author who is ignorant
of the language of holy writ, who is completely estranged from the
religion of his fathers - as well as from every other religion -
and who cannot take a share in nationalist ideals, but who has yet
never repudiated his people, who feels that he is in his essential
nature a Jew and who has no desire to alter that nature. If the
question were put to him: ‘Since you have abandoned all these
common characteristics of your countrymen, what is there left to
you that is Jewish?’ he would reply: ‘A very great
deal, and probably its very essence.’ He could not now
express that essence clearly in words; but some day, no doubt, it
will become accessible to the scientific mind.

   Thus it is an experience of a
quite special kind for such an author when a book of his is
translated into the Hebrew language and put into the hands of
readers for whom that historic idiom is a living tongue: a book,
moreover, which deals with the origin of religion and morality,
though it adopts no Jewish standpoint and makes no exceptions in
favour of Jewry. The author hopes, however, that he will be at one
with his readers in the conviction that unprejudiced science cannot
remain a stranger to the spirit of the new Jewry.

VIENNA
,
December
1930

2650

TOTEM AND TABOO

I

THE
HORROR OF INCEST

Prehistoric man, in the various stages of his
development, is known to us through the inanimate monuments and
implements which he has left behind, through the information about
his art, his religion and his attitude towards life which has come
to us either directly or by way of tradition handed down in
legends, myths and fairy tales, and through the relics of his mode
of thought which survive in our own manners and customs. But apart
from this, in a certain sense he is still our contemporary. There
are men still living who, as we believe, stand very near to
primitive man, far nearer than we do, and whom we therefore regard
as his direct heirs and representatives. Such is our view of those
whom we describe as savages or half-savages; and their mental life
must have a peculiar interest for us if we are right in seeing in
it a well-preserved picture of an early stage of our own
development.

   If that supposition is correct, a
comparison between the psychology of primitive peoples, as it is
taught by social anthropology, and the psychology of neurotics, as
it has been revealed by psycho-analysis, will be bound to show
numerous points of agreement and will throw new light upon familiar
facts in both sciences.

   For external as well as for
internal reasons, I shall select as the basis of this comparison
the tribes which have been described by anthropologists as the most
backward and miserable of savages, the aborigines of Australia, the
youngest continent, in whose fauna, too, we can still observe much
that is archaic and that has perished elsewhere.

   The Australian aborigines are
regarded as a distinct race, showing neither physical nor
linguistic relationship with their nearest neighbours, the
Melanesian, Polynesian and Malayan peoples. They do not build
houses or permanent shelters; they do not cultivate the soil; they
keep no domesticated animals except the dog; they are not even
acquainted with the art of making pottery. They live entirely upon
the flesh of all kinds of animals which they hunt, and upon roots
which they dig. Kings or chiefs are unknown among them; communal
affairs are decided by a council of elders. It is highly doubtful
whether any religion, in the shape of a worship of higher beings,
can be attributed to them. The tribes in the interior of the
continent, who have to struggle against the hardest conditions of
existence as a result of the scarcity of water, appear to be more
primitive in all respects than those living near the coast.

Totem And Taboo

2651

   We should certainly not expect
that the sexual life of these poor naked cannibals would be moral
in our sense or that their sexual instincts would be subjected to
any great degree of restriction. Yet we find that they set before
themselves with the most scrupulous care and the most painful
severity the aim of avoiding incestuous sexual relations. Indeed,
their whole social organization seems to serve that purpose or to
have been brought into relation with its attainment.

   Among the Australians the place
of all the religious and social institutions which they lack is
taken by the system of ‘totemism’. Australian tribes
fall into smaller divisions, or clans, each of which is named after
its totem. What is a totem? It is as a rule an animal (whether
edible and harmless or dangerous and feared) and more rarely a
plant or a natural phenomenon (such as rain or water), which stands
in a peculiar relation to the whole clan. In the first place, the
totem is the common ancestor of the clan; at the same time it is
their guardian spirit and helper, which sends them oracles and, if
dangerous to others, recognizes and spares its own children.
Conversely, the clansmen are under a sacred obligation (subject to
automatic sanctions) not to kill of destroy their totem and to
avoid eating its flesh (or deriving benefit from it in other ways).
The totemic character is inherent, not in some individual animal or
entity, but in all the individuals of a given class. From time to
time festivals are celebrated at which the clansmen represent or
imitate the motions and attributes of their totem in ceremonial
dances.

Totem And Taboo

2652

   The totem may be inherited either
through the female or through the male line. It is possible that
originally the former method of descent prevailed everywhere and
was only subsequently replaced by the latter. An Australian’s
relation to his totem is the basis of all his social obligations:
it overrides on the one hand his tribal membership and on the other
hand his blood relationships.¹

   The totem is not attached to one
particular place. The clansmen are distributed in different
localities and live peacefully side by side with members of other
totem clans.²

  
¹
‘The Totem bond is stronger than the
bond of blood or family in the modern sense.’ (Frazer, 1910,
1
, 53.)

  
²
This highly condensed summary of the
totemic system must necessarily be subject to further comments and
qualifications. The word ‘totem’ was first introduced
in 1791 (in the form ‘totam’) from the North American
Indians by an Englishman, J. Long. The subject itself has gradually
attracted great scientific interest and has produced a copious
literature, from which I may select as works of capital importance
J. G. Frazer’s four-volume
Totemism and Exogamy
(1910)
and the writings of Andrew Lang, e.g.
The Secret of the
Totem
(1905). The merit of having been the first to recognize
the importance of totemism for human prehistory lies with a
Scotsman, John Ferguson McLennan (1869-70). Totemic institutions
were, or still are, to be observed in operation, not only among the
Australians, but also among the North American Indians, among the
peoples of Oceania, in the East Indies and in a large part of
Africa. It may also be inferred from certain vestigial remains, for
which it is otherwise hard to account, that totemism existed at one
time among the Aryan and Semitic aboriginal races of Europe and
Asia. Many investigators are therefore inclined to regard it as a
necessary phase of human development which has been passed through
universally.

   How
did prehistoric men come to adopt totems? How, that is, did they
come to make the fact of their being descended from one animal or
another the basis of their social obligations and, as we shall see
presently, of their sexual restrictions? There are numerous
theories on the subject - of which Wundt (1906) has given an
epitome for German readers - but no agreement. It is my intention
to devote a special study before long to the problem of totemism,
in which I shall attempt to solve it by the help of a
psycho-analytic line of approach. (See the fourth essay in this
work.)

   Not
only, however, is the
theory
of totemism a matter of
dispute; the facts themselves are scarcely capable of being
expressed in general terms as I have tried to do in the text above.
There is scarcely a statement which does not call for exceptions or
contradictions. But it must not be forgotten that even the most
primitive and conservative races are in some sense
ancient
races and have a long past history behind them during which their
original conditions of life have been subject to much development
and distortion. So it comes about that in those races in which
totemism exists to-day, we may find it in various stages of decay
and disintegration or in the process of transition to other social
and religious institutions, or again in a stationary condition
which may differ greatly from the original one. The difficulty in
this last case is to decide whether we should regard the present
state of things as a true picture of the significant features of
the past or as a secondary distortion of them.