Freud - Complete Works (452 page)

   The most obvious explanation
would point to horror roused by dead bodies and by the changes
which quickly become visible in them. Some part must also be played
in the matter by mourning for the dead person, since it must be a
motive force in everything relating to him. But horror at the
corpse clearly does not account for all the details of the taboo
observances, and mourning cannot explain why the uttering of the
dead man’s name is an insult to his survivors. Mourning, on
the contrary, tends to be preoccupied with the dead man, to dwell
upon his memory and to preserve it as long as possible. Something
other than mourning must be held responsible for the peculiarities
of the taboo usages, something which has very different purposes in
view. It is precisely the taboo upon names that gives us the clue
to this unknown motive; and if the usages alone did not tell us, we
should learn it from what the mourning savages say to us
themselves.

   For they make no disguise of the
fact that they are
afraid
of the presence or of the return
of the dead person’s ghost; and they perform a great number
of ceremonies to keep him at a distance or drive him off.¹
They feel that to utter his name is equivalent to invoking him and
will quickly be followed by his presence.² And accordingly
they do everything they can to avoid any such evocation. They
disguise themselves so that the ghost shall not recognize
them,³ or they change his name or their own; they are furious
with reckless strangers who by uttering the ghost’s name
incite him against the survivors. It is impossible to escape the
conclusion that, in the words of Wundt (1906, 49), they are victims
to a fear of ‘the dead man’s soul which has become a
demon’. Here, then, we seem to have found a confirmation of
Wundt’s view, which, as we have already seen (
p. 2672
), considers that the essence of
taboo is a fear of demons.

  
¹
Frazer (1911
b
, 353) mentions the
Tuaregs of the Sahara as an example of this explanation being given
by the savages themselves.

  
²
Subject, perhaps, to the condition that
some of his bodily remains are still in existence. (Ibid.,
372.)

  
³
In the Nicobar Islands. (Ibid.,
358.)

Totem And Taboo

2702

   This theory is based on a
supposition so extraordinary that it seems at first sight
incredible: the supposition, namely, that a dearly loved relative
at the moment of his death changes into a demon, from whom his
survivors can expect nothing but hostility and against whose evil
desires they must protect themselves by every possible means.
Nevertheless, almost all the authorities are at one in attributing
these views to primitive peoples. Westermarck, who, in my opinion,
takes far too little notice of taboo in his book on
The Origin
and Development of the Moral Ideas
, actually writes in his
chapter on ‘Regard for the Dead’: ‘Generally
speaking, my collection of facts has led me to the conclusion that
the dead are more commonly regarded as enemies than friends, and
that Professor Jevons and Mr. Grant Allen are mistaken in their
assertion that, according to early beliefs, the malevolence of the
dead is for the most part directed against strangers only, whereas
they exercise a fatherly care over the lives and fortunes of their
descendants and fellow clansmen.’¹

  
¹
Westermarck (1906-8,
2
, 532 ff.). In
his footnotes and in the section of the text which follows, the
author gives copious confirmatory evidence, often of an extremely
pertinent sort. For instance: ‘Among the Maoris the nearest
and most beloved relatives were supposed to have their natures
changed by death, and to become malignant, even towards those they
formerly loved. . . . Australian natives believed
that a deceased person is malevolent for a long time after death,
and the more nearly related the more he is feared.
. . . According to ideas prevalent among the Central
Eskimo, the dead are at first malevolent spirits who frequently
roam around the villages, causing sickness and mischief and killing
men by their touch; but subsequently they are supposed to attain
rest and are no longer feared.’

Totem And Taboo

2703

   In an interesting volume, Rudolf
Kleinpaul (1898) has used the remnants among civilized races of the
ancient belief in spirits to throw light on the relation between
the living and the dead. He, too, reaches the final conclusion that
the dead, filled with a lust for murder, sought to drag the living
in their train. The dead slew; and the skeleton which we use to-day
to picture the dead stands for the fact that they themselves were
slayers. The living did not feel safe from the attacks of the dead
till there was a sheet of water between them. That is why men liked
to bury the dead on islands or on the farther side of rivers; and
that, in turn, is the origin of such phrases as ‘Here and in
the Beyond’. Later, the malignity of the dead diminished and
was restricted to special categories which had a particular right
to feel resentment - such as murdered men, for instance, who in the
form of evil spirits went in pursuit of their murderers, or brides
who had died with their desires unsatisfied. But originally, says
Kleinpaul,
all
of the dead were vampires, all of them had a
grudge against the living and sought to injure them and rob them of
their lives. It was from corpses that the concept of evil spirits
first arose.

   The hypothesis that after their
death those most beloved were transformed into demons clearly
raises further questions. What was it that induced primitive men to
attribute such a change of feeling to those who had been dear to
them? Why did they make them into demons? Westermarck (1906-8,
2
, 534 f.) is of the opinion that these questions can be
answered easily. ‘Death is commonly regarded as the gravest
of all misfortunes; hence the dead are believed to be exceedingly
dissatisfied with their fate. According to primitive ideas a person
only dies if he is killed - by magic if not by force - and such a
death naturally tends to make the soul revengeful and ill-tempered.
It is envious of the living and is longing for the company of its
old friends; no wonder, then, that it sends them diseases to cause
their death. . . . But the notion that the
disembodied soul is on the whole a malicious
being . . . is also, no doubt, intimately connected
with the instinctive fear of the dead, which is in its turn the
outcome of the fear of death.’

   The study of psychoneurotic
disorders suggests a more comprehensive explanation, which at the
same time covers that put forward by Westermarck

Totem And Taboo

2704

   When a wife has lost her husband
or a daughter her mother, it not infrequently happens that the
survivor is overwhelmed by tormenting doubts (to which we give the
name of ‘obsessive self-reproaches’) as to whether she
may not herself have been responsible for the death of this
cherished being through some act of carelessness or neglect. No
amount of recollection of the care she lavished on the sufferer, no
amount of objective disproof of the accusation, serves to bring the
torment to an end. It may be regarded as a pathological form of
mourning, and with the passage of time it gradually dies away. The
psycho-analytic investigation of such cases has revealed the secret
motives of the disorder. We find that in a certain sense these
obsessive self-reproaches are justified, and that this is why they
are proof against contradictions and protests. It is not that the
mourner was really responsible for the death or was really guilty
of neglect, as the self-reproaches declare to be the case. None the
less there was something in her - a wish that was unconscious to
herself - which would not have been dissatisfied by the occurrence
of death and which might actually have brought it about if it had
had the power. And after death
has
occurred, it is against
this unconscious wish that the reproaches are a reaction. In almost
every case where there is an intense emotional attachment to a
particular person we find that behind the tender love there is a
concealed hostility in the unconscious. This is the classical
example, the prototype, of the ambivalence of human emotions. This
ambivalence is present to a greater or less amount in the innate
disposition of everyone; normally, there is not so much of it as to
produce the obsessive self-reproaches we are considering. Where,
however, it is copiously present in the disposition, it will
manifest itself precisely in the subject’s relation to those
of whom he is most fond, in the place, in fact, where one would
least expect to find it. It must be supposed that the presence of a
particularly large amount of this original emotional ambivalence is
characteristic of the disposition of obsessional neurotics - whom I
have so often brought up for comparison in this discussion upon
taboo.

Totem And Taboo

2705

   We have now discovered a motive
which can explain the idea that the souls of those who have just
died are transformed into demons and the necessity felt by
survivors to protect themselves by taboos against their hostility.
Let us suppose that the emotional life of primitive peoples is
characterized by an amount of ambivalence as great as that which we
are led by the findings of psycho-analysis to attribute to
obsessional patients. It then becomes easy to understand how after
a painful bereavement savages should be obliged to produce a
reaction against the hostility latent in their unconscious similar
to that expressed as obsessive self-reproach in the case of
neurotics. But this hostility, distressingly felt in the
unconscious as satisfaction over the death, is differently dealt
with among primitive peoples. The defence against it takes the form
of displacing it on to the object of the hostility, on to the dead
themselves. This defensive procedure, which is a common one both in
normal and in pathological mental life, is known as a
‘
projection
’. The survivor thus denies that he
has ever harboured any hostile feelings against the dead loved one;
the soul of the dead harbours them instead and seeks to put them
into action during the whole period of mourning. In spite of the
successful defence which the survivor achieves by means of
projection, his emotional reaction shows the characteristics of
punishment and remorse, for he is the subject of fears and submits
to renunciations and restrictions, though these are in part
disguised as measures of protection against the hostile demon. Once
again, therefore, we find that the taboo has grown up on the basis
of an ambivalent emotional attitude. The taboo upon the dead
arises, like the others, from the contrast between conscious pain
and unconscious satisfaction over the death that has occurred.
Since such is the origin of the ghost’s resentment, it
follows naturally that the survivors who have the most to fear will
be those who were formerly its nearest and dearest.

   In this respect taboo
observances, like neurotic symptoms, have a double sense. On the
one hand, in their restrictive character, they are expressions of
mourning; but on the other hand they clearly betray - what they
seek to conceal - hostility against the dead disguised as
self-defence. We have already learned that certain taboos arise out
of fear of temptation. The fact that a dead man is helpless is
bound to act as an encouragement to the survivor to give free rein
to his hostile passions, and that temptation must be countered by a
prohibition.

Totem And Taboo

2706

   Westermarck is right in insisting
that savages draw no distinction between violent and natural death.
In the view of unconscious thinking, a man who has died a natural
death is a murdered man: evil wishes have killed him.¹ Anyone
who investigates the origin and significance of dreams of the death
of loved relatives (of parents or brothers or sisters) will be able
to convince himself that dreamers, children and savages are at one
in their attitude towards the dead - an attitude based upon
emotional ambivalence.

   At the beginning of this essay
disagreement was expressed with Wundt’s opinion that the
essence of taboo was a fear of demons. Yet we have now assented to
an explanation that derives the taboo upon the dead from a fear of
the soul of the dead person transformed into a demon. The apparent
contradiction can easily be resolved. It is true that we have
accepted the presence of demons, but not as something ultimate and
psychologically unanalysable. We have succeeded, as it were, in
getting behind the demons, for we have explained them as
projections of hostile feelings harboured by the survivors against
the dead.

   Both of the two sets of feelings
(the affectionate and the hostile), which, as we have good reason
to believe, exist towards the dead person, seek to take effect at
the time of the bereavement, as mourning and as satisfaction. There
is bound to be a conflict between these two contrary feelings; and,
since one of the two, the hostility, is wholly or for the greater
part unconscious, the outcome of the conflict cannot be to
subtract, as it were, the feeling with the lesser intensity from
that with the greater and to establish the remainder in
consciousness - as occurs, for instance, when one forgives a slight
that one has received from someone of whom one is fond. The process
is dealt with instead by the special psychical mechanism known in
psycho-analysis, as I have said, by the name of
‘projection’. The hostility, of which the survivors
know nothing and moreover wish to know nothing, is ejected from
internal perception into the external world, and thus detached from
them and pushed on to someone else. It is ho longer true that they
are rejoicing to be rid of the dead man; on the contrary, they are
mourning for him; but, strange to say,
he
has turned into a
wicked demon ready to gloat over their misfortunes and eager to
kill them. It then becomes necessary for them, the survivors, to
defend themselves against this evil enemy; they are relieved of
pressure from within, but have only exchanged it for oppression
from without.