Freud - Complete Works (446 page)

Totem And Taboo

2670

   The word ‘taboo’
denotes everything, whether a person or a place or a thing or a
transitory condition, which is the vehicle or source of this
mysterious attribute. It also denotes the prohibitions arising from
the same attribute. And, finally, it has a connotation which
includes alike ‘sacred’ and ‘above the
ordinary’, as well as ‘dangerous’,
‘unclean’ and ‘uncanny’.

   This word and the system denoted
by it give expression to a group of mental attitudes and ideas
which seem remote indeed from our understanding. In particular,
there would seem to be no possibility of our coming into closer
contact with them without examining the belief in ghosts and
spirits which is characteristic of these low levels of culture.

   Why, it may be asked at this
point, should we concern ourselves at all with this riddle of
taboo? Not only, I think, because it is worth while trying to solve
any
psychological problem for its own sake, but for other
reasons as well. It may begin to dawn on us that the taboos of the
savage Polynesians are after all not so remote from us as we were
inclined to think at first, that the moral and conventional
prohibitions by which we ourselves are governed may have some
essential relationship with these primitive taboos and that an
explanation of taboo might throw a light upon the obscure origin of
our own ‘categorical imperative’.

   Accordingly, we shall be
particularly interested to hear the views of so notable an
investigator as Wilhelm Wundt on the subject of taboo, especially
as he promises ‘to trace back the concept of taboo to its
earliest roots’ (1906, 301).

Totem And Taboo

2671

   Wundt writes of that concept that
‘it comprises all of the usages in which is expressed a dread
of certain objects related to cult ideas or of actions connected
with them’. (Ibid., 237.) And, in another passage: ‘If
we understand by it, in accordance with the general meaning of the
word, every prohibition (whether laid down in usage or custom or in
explicitly formulated laws) against touching an object or making
use of it for one’s own purposes or against using certain
proscribed words . . .’ then, he goes on,
there can be no race and no level of culture which has escaped the
ill-effects of taboo.

   Wundt next proceeds to explain
why it seems to him advisable to study the nature of taboo in the
primitive conditions of the Australian savages rather than in the
higher culture of the Polynesian peoples. He divides the taboo
prohibition is among the Australians into three classes, according
as they affect animals, human beings or other objects. The taboos
on animals, which consist essentially of prohibitions against
killing and eating them, constitute the nucleus of
Totemism
.¹ The second class of taboos, those directed
towards human beings, are of an entirely different kind. They are
restricted in the first instance to circumstances in which the
person on whom the taboo is imposed finds himself in an unusual
situation. Thus young men are taboo at their initiation ceremonies,
women are taboo during menstruation and immediately after giving
birth; so too new-born babies, sick persons and, above all, the
dead are taboo. A man’s property which is in his constant use
is permanently taboo to all other men: his clothing, for instance,
his tools and weapons. Included in a man’s most personal
property, in Australia, is the new name which he received when he
was a boy at his initiation. It is taboo and must be kept secret.
The third class of taboos, which are imposed on trees, plants,
houses and localities, are less stable. They appear to follow a
rule that anything that is uncanny or provokes dread for any reason
becomes subject to taboo.

   The modifications shown by taboo
in the richer culture of Polynesia and the Malay Archipelago are,
as Wundt himself is obliged to admit, not very profound. The more
marked social differences among these peoples find expression in
the fact that chiefs, kings and priests exercise a specially
effective taboo and are themselves subject to a taboo of the
greatest force.

  
¹
Cf. the first and fourth essays in this
work.

Totem And Taboo

2672

   But, adds Wundt, the true sources
of taboo lie deeper than in the interests of the privileged
classes: ‘they have their origin in the source of the most
primitive and at the same time most lasting of human instincts - in
fear of "demonic" powers.’ (Ibid., 307.)
‘Taboo is originally nothing other than the objectified fear
of the "demonic" power which is believed to lie hidden in
a tabooed object. The taboo prohibits anything that may provoke
that power and commands that, if it has been injured, whether
wittingly or unwittingly, the demon’s vengeance must be
averted.’

   Little by little, we are told,
taboo then grows into a force with a basis of its own, independent
of the belief in demons. It develops into the rule of custom and
tradition and finally of law. ‘But the unspoken command
underlying all the prohibitions of taboo, with their numberless
variations according to the time and place, is originally one and
one only: "Beware of the wrath of demons!"‘

   Wundt informs us, then, that
taboo is an expression and derivative of the belief of primitive
peoples in ‘demonic’ power. Later, he tells us, it
freed itself from this root and remained a power simply because it
was
a power - from a kind of mental conservatism. And
thereafter it itself became the root of our moral precepts and of
our laws. Though the first of these assertions may provoke little
contradiction, I believe I shall be expressing the thoughts of many
readers when I say that Wundt’s explanation comes as
something of a disappointment. This is surely not tracing back the
concept of taboo to its sources or revealing its earliest roots.
Neither fear nor demons can be regarded by psychology as
‘earliest’ things, impervious to any attempt at
discovering their antecedents. It would be another matter if demons
really existed. But we know that, like gods, they are creations of
the human mind: they were made by something and out of
something.

   Wundt has important views on the
double significance of taboo, though these are not very clearly
expressed. According to him, the distinction between
‘sacred’ and ‘unclean’ did not exist in the
primitive beginnings of taboo. For that very reason those concepts
were at that stage without the peculiar significance which they
could only acquire when they became opposed to each other. Animals,
human beings or localities on which a taboo was imposed were
‘demonic’, not ‘sacred’, nor, therefore, in
the sense which was later acquired, ‘unclean’. It is
precisely this neutral and intermediate meaning -
‘demonic’ or ‘what may not be touched’ -
that is appropriately expressed by the word ‘taboo’,
since it stresses a characteristic which remains common for all
time both to what is sacred and to what is unclean: the dread of
contact with it. The persistence, however, of this important common
characteristic is at the same time evidence that the ground covered
by the two was originally one and that it was only as a result of
further influences that it be came differentiated and eventually
developed into opposites.

Totem And Taboo

2673

   According to Wundt, this original
characteristic of taboo - the belief in a ‘demonic’
power which lies hidden in an object and which, if the object is
touched or used unlawfully, takes its vengeance by casting a spell
over the wrong-doer - is still wholly and solely ‘objectified
fear’. That fear has not yet split up into the two forms into
which it later develops: veneration and horror.

   But how did this split take
place? Through the transplanting, so Wundt tells us, of the taboo
ordinances from the sphere of demons into the sphere of belief in
gods. The contrast between ‘sacred’ and
‘unclean’ coincides with a succession of two stages of
mythology. The earlier of these stages did not completely disappear
when the second one was reached but persisted in what was regarded
as an inferior and eventually a contemptible form. It is, he says,
a general law of mythology that a stage which has been passed, for
the very reason that it has been overcome and driven under by a
superior stage, persists in an inferior form alongside the later
one, so that the objects of its veneration turn into objects of
horror.

   The remainder of Wundt’s
discussion deals with the relation of the concept of taboo to
purification and sacrifice.

Totem And Taboo

2674

(2)

   Anyone approaching the problem of
taboo from the angle of psycho-analysis, that is to say, of the
investigation of the unconscious portion of the individual mind,
will recognize, after a moment’s reflection, that these
phenomena are far from unfamiliar to him. He has come across people
who have created for themselves individual taboo prohibitions of
this very kind and who obey them just as strictly as savages obey
the communal taboos of their tribe or society. If he were not
already accustomed to describing such people as
‘obsessional’ patients, he would find ‘taboo
sickness’ a most appropriate name for their condition. Having
learnt so much, however, about this obsessional sickness from
psycho-analytic examination - its clinical aetiology and the
essence of its psychical mechanism - he can scarcely refrain from
applying the knowledge he has thus acquired to the parallel
sociological phenomenon.

   A warning must be uttered at this
point. The similarity between taboo and obsessional sickness may be
no more than a matter of externals; it may apply only to the
forms
in which they are manifested and not extend to their
essential character. Nature delights in making use of the same
forms in the most various biological connections: as it does, for
instance, in the appearance of branch-like structures both in coral
and in plants, and indeed in some forms of crystal and in certain
chemical precipitates. It would obviously be hasty and unprofitable
to infer the existence of any internal relationship from such
points of agreement as these, which merely derive from the
operation of the same mechanical causes. We shall bear this warning
in mind, but we need not be deterred by it from proceeding with our
comparison.

   The most obvious and striking
point of agreement between the obsessional prohibitions of
neurotics and taboos is that these prohibitions are equally lacking
in motive and equally puzzling in their origin. Having made their
appearance at some unspecified moment, they are forcibly maintained
by an irresistible fear. No external threat of punishment is
required, for there is an internal certainty, a moral conviction,
that any violation will lead to intolerable disaster. The most that
an obsessional patient can say on this point is that he has an
undefined feeling that some particular person in his environment
will be injured as result of the violation. Nothing is known of the
nature of the injury; and indeed even this wretchedly small amount
of information is more often obtained in connection with the
expiatory and defensive actions which we shall have to discuss
later than with the prohibitions themselves.

Totem And Taboo

2675

   As in the case of taboo, the
principal prohibition, the nucleus of the neurosis, is against
touching; and thence it is sometimes known as ‘touching
phobia’ or ‘
délire du toucher
’. The
prohibition does not merely apply to immediate physical contact but
has an extent as wide as the metaphorical use of the phrase
‘to come in contact with’. Anything that directs the
patient’s thoughts to the forbidden object, anything that
brings him into intellectual contact with it, is just as much
prohibited as direct physical contact. This same extension also
occurs in the case of taboo.

   The purpose of some of the
prohibitions is immediately obvious. Others, on the contrary,
strike us as incomprehensible, senseless and silly, and
prohibitions of this latter sort are described as
‘ceremonial’. This distinction, too, is found in the
observances of taboo.

   Obsessional prohibitions are
extremely liable to displacement. They extend from one object to
another along whatever paths the context may provide, and this new
object then becomes, to use the apt expression of one of my women
patients, ‘impossible’ - till at last the whole world
lies under an embargo of ‘impossibility’. Obsessional
patients behave as though the ‘impossible’ persons and
things were carriers of a dangerous infection liable to be spread
by contact on to everything in their neighbourhood. I have already
drawn attention to the same characteristic capacity for contagion
and transference in my description of taboo. We know, too, that
anyone who violates a taboo by coming into contact with something
that is taboo becomes taboo himself and that then no one may come
into contact with
him
.

   I will now put side by side two
instances of the transference (or, as it is better to say, the
displacement
) of a prohibition. One of these is taken from
the life of the Maoris and the other from an observation of my own
on a female obsessional patient.

Totem And Taboo

2676

   ‘A Maori chief would not
blow a fire with his mouth; for his sacred breath would communicate
its sanctity to the fire, which would pass it on to the pot on 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 chief’s breath conveyed through these
intermediaries, would surely die.’¹