Freud - Complete Works (444 page)

  
¹
Storfer (1911) has quite recently insisted
on this point.

Totem And Taboo

2658

   But the horror of incest shown by
these peoples is not satisfied by the erection of the institutions
which I have described and which seem to be directed principally
against group incest. We must add to them a number of
‘customs’ which regulate the dealings of individuals
with their near relatives in our sense of the term, customs which
are enforced literally with religious strictness and the purpose of
which can scarcely be doubted. These customs or customary
prohibitions have been termed ‘avoidances’. They extend
far beyond the totemic races of Australia; but once again I must
ask my readers to be content with a fragmentary extract from the
copious material.

   In Melanesia restrictive
prohibitions of this sort govern a boy’s intercourse with his
mother and sisters. Thus, for instance, in Lepers’ Island,
one of the New Hebrides, when a boy has reached a certain age he no
longer lives at home, but takes up his quarters in the
‘club-house’, where he now regularly eats and sleeps.
It is true that he may still go to his father’s house to ask
for food, but if his sister is at home he must go away before
eating; if no sister is there he may sit down near the door and
eat. If by chance a brother and sister meet in the open, she must
run away or hide. If a boy knows that certain footprints in the
road are his sister’s, he will not follow them, nor will she
follow his. Indeed, he will not even utter her name, and will avoid
the use of a common word if it forms part of her name. This
avoidance begins with the puberty ceremonies and is maintained
throughout life. The reserve between a son and his mother increases
as the boy grows up and is much more on her side than on his. If
his mother brings him food, she does not give it him but puts it
down for him to take. In speaking to him she does not
tutoyer
him, but uses the more distant plural
forms.¹

   Similar customs prevail in New
Caledonia. If a brother and sister happen to meet on a path, the
sister will throw herself into the bushes and he will pass on
without turning his head.

   Among the natives of the Gazelle
Peninsula in New Britain a sister, after her marriage, is not
allowed to converse with her brother; she never utters his name,
but designates him by another word.²

  
¹
Frazer (1910,
2
, 77 f.), quoting
Codrington (1891).

  
²
Frazer (1910,
2
, 124).

Totem And Taboo

2659

   In New Mecklenburg cousins of one
kind are subject to similar restrictions, as are brothers and
sisters. They may not come near each other, may not shake hands and
may not give each other presents; but they are allowed to speak to
each other at a distance of some paces. The penalty for incest with
a sister is death by hanging.¹

   In Fiji these avoidance rules are
particularly strict; they affect not only blood sisters but tribal
sisters as well. It must strike us as all the more puzzling to hear
that these same savages practise sacred orgies, in which precisely
these forbidden degrees of kinship seek sexual intercourse -
puzzling, that is, unless we prefer to regard the contrast as an
explanation of the prohibition.²

   Among the Battas of Sumatra the
rules of avoidance apply to all near relations. ‘A Batta, for
example, would think it shocking were a brother to escort his
sister to an evening party. Even in the presence of others a Batta
brother and sister feel embarrassed. If one of them comes into the
house, the other will go away. Further, a father may never be alone
in the house with his daughter, nor a mother with her
son. . . . The Dutch missionary who reports these
customs adds that he is sorry to say that from what he knows of the
Battas he believes the maintenance of most of these rules to be
very necessary.’ These people assume as a matter of course
that a solitary meeting between a man and a woman will lead to an
improper intimacy between them. And since they believe that
intercourse between near relations will lead to punishments and
calamities of all sorts, they are right to avoid any temptation to
transgress these prohibitions.³

   Curiously enough, among the
Barongo of Delagoa Bay, in South Africa, the strictest rules affect
a man’s relations with his sister-in-law, the wife of his
wife’s brother. If he meets this formidable person anywhere,
he carefully avoids her. He does not eat out of the same dish with
her, he speaks to her with embarrassment, does not venture into her
hut and greets her in a trembling voice.
⁴

  
¹
Frazer (1910,
2
, 130 f.), quoting
Peckel (1908).

  
²
Frazer (1910,
2
, 146 ff.), quoting
Fison.

  
³
Frazer (1910,
2
, 189).

  
⁴
Frazer (1910,
2
, 388), quoting
Junod.

Totem And Taboo

2660

   A rule of avoidance with which
one would have expected to meet more frequently operates among the
A-kamba (or Wa kamba) of British East Africa. A girl has to avoid
her father between the age of puberty and the time of her marriage.
If they meet in the road, she hides while he passes, and she may
never go and sit near him. This holds good until the moment of her
betrothal. After her marriage she does not avoid her father in any
way.¹

   By far the most widespread and
strictest avoidance (and the most interesting from the point of
view of civilized races) is that which restricts a man’s
intercourse with his mother-in-law. It is quite general in
Australia and also extends over Melanesia, Polynesia and the Negro
races of Africa, wherever traces of totemism and the classificatory
system of relationship are found and probably still further. In
some of these places there are similar prohibitions against a woman
having innocent intercourse with her father-in-law; but they are
far less usual and severe. In a few isolated cases both
parents-in-law are subject to avoidance. Since we are less
concerned with the ethnographical extent of this avoidance than
with its substance and purpose, I shall once again restrict myself
to quoting a few examples.

   Among the Melanesians of the
Banks’ Islands ‘these rules of avoidance are very
strict and minute. A man will not come near his wife’s mother
and she will not come near him. If the two chance to meet in a
path, the woman will step out of it and stand with her back turned
till he has gone by, or perhaps, if it be more convenient, he will
move out of the way. At Vanua Lava, in Port Patteson, a man would
not even follow his mother-in-law along the beach until the rising
tide had washed her foot prints from the sand. Yet a man and his
mother-in-law may talk to each other at a distance; but a woman
will on no account mention the name of her daughter’s
husband, nor will he name hers.²

   In the Solomon Islands, after his
marriage a man may neither see nor converse with his mother-in-law.
If he meets her, he may not recognize her, but must make off and
hide himself as fast as he can.³

  
¹
Frazer (1910,
2
, 424).

  
²
Frazer (1910,
2
, 76)

  
³
Frazer (1910,
2
, 117), quoting Ribbe
(1903).

Totem And Taboo

2661

   Among the Eastern Bantu
‘custom requires that a man should "be ashamed of"
his wife’s mother, that is to say, he must studiously shun
her society. He may not enter the same hut with her, and if by
chance they meet on a path, one or other turns aside, she perhaps
hiding behind a bush, while he screens his face with a shield. If
they cannot thus avoid each other, and the mother-in-law has
nothing else to cover herself with, she will tie a wisp of grass
round her head as a token of ceremonial avoidance. All
correspondence between the two has to be carried on either through
a third party or by shouting to each other at a distance with some
barrier, such as the kraal fence, interposed between them. They may
not even pronounce each other’s proper name.’ (Frazer,
1910,
2
, 385.)

   Among the Basoga, a Bantu people
who live in the region of the sources of the Nile, a man may only
speak to his mother-in-law when she is in another room and out of
sight. Incidentally, these people have such a horror of incest that
they punish it even when it occurs among their domestic animals.
(Frazer, 1910,
2
, 461.)

   While there can be no doubt as to
the purpose and significance of the other avoidances between near
relations, and they are universally regarded as protective measures
against incest, the prohibitions affecting a man’s
intercourse with his mother-in law-have received another
interpretation in some quarters. It was with justice regarded as
incomprehensible that all these different peoples should feel such
great fear of the temptation presented to a man by an elderly
woman, who might have been, but in fact was not, his mother.
(Crawley, 1902, 405.)

   This objection was also raised
against the view put forward by Fison. He pointed out that certain
systems of marriage-classes had gaps in them, as a result of which
marriage between a man and his mother-in-law was not theoretically
impossible. For that reason, he suggested, a special guarantee
against that possibility became necessary.

   Sir John Lubbock (1870) traced
back the attitude of a mother-in-law to her son-in-law to the
institution of ‘marriage by capture’. ‘When the
capture was a reality’, he writes, ‘the indignation of
the parents would also be real; when it became a mere symbol, the
parental anger would be symbolized also, and would be continued
even after its origin was forgotten.’ Crawley has no
difficulty in showing how insufficiently this attempted explanation
covers the details of the observed facts.

Totem And Taboo

2662

   Tylor believes that the treatment
given to a son-in-law by his mother-in-law is merely a form of
‘cutting’ or non-recognition by the wife’s
family: the man is regarded as an ‘outsider’ until the
first child is born. In the first place, however, the prohibition
is not always brought to an end when this occurs. But, apart from
this, it may be objected that this explanation throws no light on
the fact that the prohibition centres particularly on the
mother
-in-law - that the explanation overlooks the factor of
sex. Moreover, it takes no account of the attitude of religious
horror expressed in the prohibition. (Crawley, 1902, 407.)

   A Zulu woman, questioned as to
the basis of the prohibition, gave the sensitive reply: ‘It
is not right that he should see the breasts which suckled his
wife.’¹

   As we know, the relation between
son-in-law and mother-in-law is also one of the delicate points of
family organization in
civilized
communities. That relation
is no longer subject to rules of avoidance in the social system of
the white peoples of Europe and America; but many disputes and much
unpleasantness could often be eliminated if the avoidance still
existed as a custom and did not have to be re-erected by
individuals. It may be regarded by some Europeans as an act of high
wisdom on the part of these savage races that by their rules of
avoidance they entirely precluded any contact between two persons
brought into this close relationship to each other. There is
scarcely room for doubt that something in the psychological
relation of a mother-in-law to a son-in-law breeds hostility
between them and makes it hard for them to live together. But the
fact that in civilized societies mothers-in-law are such a
favourite subject for jokes seems to me to suggest that the
emotional relation involved includes sharply contrasted components.
I believe, that is, that this relation is in fact an
‘ambivalent’ one, composed of conflicting affectionate
and hostile impulses.

  
¹
Crawley (1902, 401), quoting Leslie
(1875).

Totem And Taboo

2663

   Some of those impulses are
obvious enough. On the side of the mother-in-law there is
reluctance to give up the possession of her daughter, distrust of
the stranger to whom she is to be handed over, an impulse to retain
the dominating position which she has occupied in her own house. On
the man’s side there is a determination not to submit any
longer to someone else’s will, jealousy of anyone who
possessed his wife’s affection before he did, and, last but
not least, an unwillingness to allow anything to interfere with the
illusory overvaluation bred of his sexual feelings. The figure of
his mother-in-law usually causes such an interference, for she has
many features which remind him of her daughter and yet lacks all
the charms of youth, beauty and spiritual freshness which endear
his wife to him.

   But we are able to bring forward
other motives than these, thanks to the knowledge of concealed
mental impulses which we have acquired from the psycho-analytic
examination of individual human beings. A woman whose psychosexual
needs should find satisfaction in her marriage and her family life
is often threatened with the danger of being left unsatisfied,
because her marriage relation has come to a premature end and
because of the uneventfulness of her emotional life. A mother, as
she grows older, saves herself from this by putting herself in her
children’s place, by identifying herself with them; and this
she does by making their emotional experiences her own. Parents are
said to stay young with their children, and that is indeed one of
the most precious psychological gains that parents derive from
their children. Where a marriage is childless, the wife has lost
one of the things which might be of most help to her in tolerating
the resignation that her own marriage demands from her. A
mother’s sympathetic identification with her daughter can
easily go so far that she herself falls in love with the man her
daughter loves; and in glaring instances this may lead to severe
forms of neurotic illness as a result of her violent mental
struggles against this emotional situation. In any case, it very
frequently happens that a mother-in-law is subject to an
impulse
to fall in love in this way, and this impulse itself
or an opposing trend are added to the tumult of conflicting forces
in her mind. And very often the unkind, sadistic components of her
love are directed on to her son-in-law in order that the forbidden,
affectionate ones may be the more severely suppressed.