Freud - Complete Works (447 page)

   My patient’s husband
purchased a household article of some kind and brought it home with
him. She insisted that it should be removed or it would make the
room she lived in ‘impossible’. For she had heard that
the article had been bought in a shop situated in, let us say,
‘Smith’ Street.² ‘Smith’, however, was
the married name of a woman friend of hers who lived in a distant
town and whom she had known in her youth under her maiden name.
This friend of hers was at the moment ‘impossible’ or
taboo. Consequently the article that had been purchased here in
Vienna was as taboo as the friend herself with whom she must not
come into contact.

   Obsessional prohibitions involve
just as extensive renunciations and restrictions in the lives of
those who are subject to them as do taboo prohibitions; but some of
them can be lifted if certain actions are performed. Thereafter,
these actions
must
be performed: they become compulsive or
obsessive acts, and there can be no doubt that they are in the
nature of expiation, penance, defensive measures and purification.
The commonest of these obsessive acts is washing in water
(‘washing mania’). Some taboo prohibitions can be
replaced in just the same way; or rather their violation can be
made good by a similar ‘ceremonial’; and here again
lustration with water is the preferred method.

   Let us now summarize the points
in which agreement between taboo usages and obsessional symptoms is
most clearly shown: (1) the fact that the prohibitions lack any
assignable motive; (2) the fact that they are maintained by an
internal necessity; (3) the fact that they are easily displaceable
and that there is a risk of infection from the prohibited object;
and (4) the fact that they give rise to injunctions for the
performance of ceremonial acts.

  
¹
Frazer (1911
b
, 136).

  
²
[’
Hirschengasse
’ and
‘
Hirsch
’ in the original.]

Totem And Taboo

2677

   Now both the clinical history and
the psychical mechanism of obsessional neurosis have become known
to us through psycho-analysis. The clinical history of a typical
case of ‘touching phobia’ is as follows. Right at the
beginning, in very early childhood, the patient shows a strong
desire
to touch, the aim of which is of a far more
specialized kind that one would have been inclined to expect. This
desire is promptly met by an
external
prohibition against
carrying out that particular kind of touching.¹ The
prohibition is accepted, since it finds support from powerful
internal
forces,² and proves stronger than the instinct
which is seeking to express itself in the touching. In consequence,
however, of the child’s primitive psychical constitution, the
prohibition does not succeed in
abolishing
the instinct. Its
only result is to
repress
the instinct (the desire to touch)
and banish it into the unconscious. Both the prohibition and the
instinct persist: the instinct because it has only been repressed
and not abolished, and the prohibition because, if it ceased, the
instinct would force its way through into consciousness and into
actual operation. A situation is created which remains undealt with
- a psychical fixation - and everything else follows from the
continuing conflict between the prohibition and the instinct.

   The principal characteristic of
the psychological constellation which becomes fixed in this way is
what might be described as the subject’s
ambivalent
³ attitude towards a single object, or rather
towards one act in connection with that object. He is constantly
wishing to perform this act (the touching), and detests it as well.
The conflict between these two currents cannot be promptly settled
because - there is no other way of putting it - they are localized
in the subject’s mind in such a manner that they cannot come
up against each other. The prohibition is noisily conscious, while
the persistent desire to touch is unconscious and the subject knows
nothing of it. If it were not for this psychological factor, an
ambivalence like this could neither last so long nor lead to such
consequences.

  
¹
Both the desire and the prohibition relate
to the child’s touching his own genitals.

  
²
That is, from the child’s loving
relation to the authors of the prohibition.

  
³
To borrow the apt term coined by
Bleuler.

Totem And Taboo

2678

   In our clinical history of a case
we have insisted that the imposition of the prohibition in very
early childhood is the determining point; a similar importance
attaches in the subsequent developments to the mechanism of
repression at the same early age. As a result of the repression
which has been enforced and which involves a loss of memory - an
amnesia - the motives for the prohibition (which is conscious)
remain unknown; and all attempts at disposing of it by intellectual
processes must fail, since they cannot find any base of attack. The
prohibition owes its strength and its obsessive character precisely
to its unconscious opponent, the concealed and undiminished desire
- that is to say, to an internal necessity inaccessible to
conscious inspection. The ease with which the prohibition can be
transferred and extended reflects a process which falls in with the
unconscious desire and is greatly facilitated by the psychological
conditions that prevail in the unconscious. The instinctual desire
is constantly shifting in order to escape from the
impasse
and endeavours to find substitutes - substitute objects and
substitute acts - in place of the prohibited ones. In consequence
of this, the prohibition itself shifts about as well, and extends
to any new aims which the forbidden impulse may adopt. Any fresh
advance made by the repressed libido is answered by a fresh
sharpening of the prohibition. The mutual inhibition of the two
conflicting forces produces a need for discharge, for reducing the
prevailing tension; and to this may be attributed the reason for
the performance of obsessive acts. In the case of a neurosis these
are clearly compromise actions: from one point of view they are
evidences of remorse, efforts at expiation, and so on, while on the
other hand they are at the same time substitutive acts to
compensate the instinct for what has been prohibited. It is a law
of neurotic illness that these obsessive acts fall more and more
under the sway of the instinct and approach nearer and nearer to
the activity which was originally prohibited.

Totem And Taboo

2679

   Let us now make the experiment of
treating taboo as though it were of the same nature as an
obsessional prohibition in one of our patients. We must make it
clear beforehand, however, that many of the taboo prohibitions that
come under our notice are of a secondary, displaced and distorted
kind, and that we shall have to be satisfied if we can throw only a
little light on the most fundamental and significant taboos.
Moreover, the differences between the situation of a savage and of
a neurotic are no doubt of sufficient importance to make any exact
agreement impossible and to prevent our carrying the comparison to
the point of identity in every detail.

   In the first place, then, it must
be said that there is no sense in asking savages to tell us the
real reason for their prohibitions - the origin of taboo. It
follows from our postulates that they cannot answer, since their
real reason must be ‘unconscious’. We can, however,
reconstruct the history of taboo as follows on the model of
obsessional prohibitions. Taboos, we must suppose, are prohibitions
of primaeval antiquity which were at some time externally imposed
upon a generation of primitive men; they must, that is to say, no
doubt have been impressed on them violently by the previous
generation. These prohibitions must have concerned activities
towards which there was a strong inclination. They must then have
persisted from generation to generation, perhaps merely as a result
of tradition transmitted through parental and social authority.
Possibly, however, in later generations they may have become
‘organized’ as an inherited psychical endowment. Who
can decide whether such things as ‘innate ideas’ exist,
or whether in the present instance they have operated, either alone
or in conjunction with education, to bring about the permanent
fixing of taboos? But one thing would certainly follow from the
persistence of the taboo, namely that the original desire to do the
prohibited thing must also still persist among the tribes
concerned. They must therefore have an ambivalent attitude towards
their taboos. In their unconscious there is nothing they would like
more than to violate them, but they are afraid to do so; they are
afraid precisely because they would like to, and the fear is
stronger than the desire. The desire is unconscious, however, in
every individual member of the tribe just as it is in
neurotics.

Totem And Taboo

2680

   The most ancient and important
taboo prohibitions are the two basic laws of totemism: not to kill
the totem animal and to avoid sexual intercourse with members of
the totem clan of the opposite sex.

   These, then, must be the oldest
and most powerful of human desires. We cannot hope to understand
this or test our hypothesis on these two examples, so long as we
are totally ignorant of the meaning and origin of the totemic
system. But the wording of these two taboos and the fact of their
concurrence will remind anyone acquainted with the findings of
psycho-analytic investigations on individuals of something quite
definite, which psycho-analysts regard as the centre-point of
childhood wishes and as the nucleus of neuroses.¹

   The multiplicity of the
manifestations of taboo, which have led to the attempts at
classification that I have already mentioned, are reduced to a
single unity by our thesis: the basis of taboo is a prohibited
action, for performing which a strong inclination exists in the
unconscious.

    We have heard, though
without understanding it, that anyone who does what is forbidden,
that is, who violates a taboo, becomes taboo himself. How is this
to be brought into line with the fact that taboo attaches not only
to a person who has done what is forbidden but also to persons in
particular states, to the states themselves, as well as to
impersonal objects? What can the dangerous attribute be which
remains the same under all these different conditions? There is
only one thing it can be: the quality of exciting men’s
ambivalence and
tempting
them to transgress the
prohibition.

   Anyone who has violated a taboo
becomes taboo himself because he possesses the dangerous quality of
tempting others to follow his example: why should
he
be
allowed to do what is forbidden to others? Thus he is truly
contagious in that every example encourages imitation, and for that
reason he himself must be shunned.

   But a person who has not violated
any taboo may yet be permanently or temporarily taboo because he is
in a state which possesses the quality of arousing forbidden
desires in others and of awakening a conflict of ambivalence in
them. The majority of exceptional positions and exceptional states
are of this kind and possess this dangerous power. The king or
chief arouses envy on account of his privileges: everyone, perhaps,
would like to be a king. Dead men, new-born babies and women
menstruating or in labour stimulate desires by their special
helplessness; a man who has just reached maturity stimulates them
by the promise of new enjoyment. For that reason all of these
persons and all of these states are taboo, since temptation must be
resisted.

  
¹
Cf. my forthcoming study upon totemism, to
which I have referred more than once in these pages (the fourth
essay in this work).

Totem And Taboo

2681

   Now, too, we can understand why
the amounts of
mana
possessed by different persons can be
subtracted from one another and can to some extent cancel one
another out. A king’s taboo is too strong for one of his
subjects because the social difference between them is too great.
But a minister may without any harm serve as an intermediary
between them. If we translate this from the language of taboo into
that of normal psychology, it means something like this. A subject,
who dreads the great temptation presented to him by contact with
the king, can perhaps tolerate dealings with an official whom he
does not need to envy so much and whose position may even seem
attainable to him. A minister, again, can mitigate his envy of the
king by reflecting on the power which he himself wields. So it
comes about that smaller differences between the amounts of the
tempting magical force possessed by two people are less to be
feared than greater ones.

   It is equally clear why it is
that the violation of certain taboo prohibitions constitutes a
social danger which must be punished or atoned for by
all
the members of the community if they are not all to suffer injury.
If we replace the unconscious desires by conscious impulses we
shall see that the danger is a real one. It lies in the risk of
imitation, which would quickly lead to the dissolution of the
community. If the violation were not avenged by the other members
they would become aware that they wanted to act in the same way as
the transgressor. We cannot be surprised at the fact that, in the
restrictions of taboo, touching plays a part similar to the one
which it plays in ‘touching phobias’, though the secret
meaning of the prohibition cannot be of such a specialized nature
in taboo as it is in the neurosis. Touching is the first step
towards obtaining any sort of control over, or attempting to make
use of, a person or object.