Freud - Complete Works (454 page)

Totem And Taboo

2713

   In the second place, we cannot
help being struck by the fact that a sense of guilt has about it
much of the nature of anxiety: we could describe it without any
misgivings as ‘dread of conscience’. But the anxiety
points to unconscious sources. The psychology of the neuroses has
taught us that, if wishful impulses are repressed, their libido is
transformed into anxiety. And this reminds us that there is
something unknown and unconscious in connection with the sense of
guilt, namely the reasons for the act of repudiation. The character
of anxiety that is inherent in the sense of guilt corresponds to
this unknown factor.

   Since taboos are mainly expressed
in prohibitions, the underlying presence of a
positive
current of desire may occur to us as something quite obvious and
calling for no lengthy proofs based on the analogy of the neuroses.
For, after all, there is no need to prohibit something that no one
desires to do, and a thing that is forbidden with the greatest
emphasis must be a thing that is desired. If we were to apply this
plausible thesis to our primitive peoples, we should be led to the
conclusion that some of their strongest temptations were to kill
their kings and priests, to commit incest, to maltreat the dead,
and so on - which seems scarcely probable. And we should be met
with the most positive contradiction if we were to apply the same
thesis to instances in which we ourselves seem most clearly to hear
the voice of conscience. We should maintain with the most absolute
certainty that we feel not the slightest temptation to violate any
of these prohibitions - the commandment to ‘do no
murder’, for instance - and that we feel nothing but horror
at the notion of violating them.

   If, however, we were to admit the
claims thus asserted by our conscience, it would follow, on the one
hand, that these prohibitions would be superfluous - both taboo and
our own moral prohibitions - and, on the other hand, the fact of
conscience would remain unexplained and no place would be left for
the relations between conscience, taboo and neurosis. In other
words, we should be back in the state of knowledge we were in
before we approached the problem from the psycho-analytic
angle.

Totem And Taboo

2714

   Suppose, on the other hand, that
we were to take into account the finding arrived at by
psycho-analysis from the dreams of normal people, to the effect
that we ourselves are subject, more strongly and more often than we
suspect, to a temptation to kill someone and that that temptation
produces psychical effects even though it remains out of sight of
our consciousness. Suppose, again, that we were to recognize the
compulsive observances of certain neurotics as being guarantees
against an intensified impulse to murder or as being
self-punishments on account of it. In that case we should have to
attach still greater importance to our thesis that where there is a
prohibition there must be an underlying desire. We should have to
suppose that the desire to murder is actually present in the
unconscious and that neither taboos nor moral prohibitions are
psychologically superfluous but that on the contrary they are
explained and justified by the existence of an ambivalent attitude
towards the impulse to murder.

   One of the characteristics of
this ambivalent relation which I have repeatedly stressed as
fundamental - the fact that the positive current of desire is an
unconscious one - opens the way to further considerations and to
further possible explanations. Psychical processes in the
unconscious are not in every respect identical with those with
which our conscious mind is familiar; they enjoy some remarkable
liberties that are forbidden to the latter. An unconscious impulse
need not have arisen at the point where it makes its appearance; it
may arise from some quite other region and have applied originally
to quite other persons and connections; it may have reached the
place at which it attracts our attention though the mechanism of
‘displacement’. Owing, moreover, to the
indestructibility and insusceptibility to correction which are
attributes of unconscious processes, it may have survived from very
early times to which it was appropriate into later times and
circumstances in which its manifestations are bound to seem
strange. These are no more than hints, but if they were attentively
developed their importance for our understanding of the growth of
civilization would become apparent.

Totem And Taboo

2715

   Before I conclude this
discussion, a further point must not be overlooked which will pave
the way for later inquiries. In maintaining the essential
similarity between taboo prohibitions and moral prohibitions, I
have not sought to dispute the fact that there must be a
psychological difference between them. The only possible reason why
the prohibitions no longer take the form of taboos must be some
change in the circumstances governing the ambivalence underlying
them.

   In our analytical examination of
the problems of taboo we have hitherto allowed ourselves to be led
by the points of agreement that we have been able to show between
it and obsessional neurosis. But after all taboo is not a neurosis
but a social institution. We are therefore faced with the task of
explaining what difference there is in principle between a neurosis
and a cultural creation such as taboo.

   Once again I will take a single
fact as my starting-point. It is feared among primitive peoples
that the violation of a taboo will be followed by a punishment, as
a rule by some serious illness or by death. The punishment
threatens to fall on whoever was responsible for violating the
taboo. In obsessional neuroses the case is different. What the
patient fears if he performs some forbidden action is that a
punishment will fall not on himself but on someone else. This
person’s identity is as a rule left unstated, but can usually
be shown without difficulty by analysis to be one of those closest
and most dear to the patient. Here, then, the neurotic seems to be
behaving altruistically and the primitive man egoistically. Only if
the violation of a taboo is not automatically avenged upon the
wrong-doer does a collective feeling arise among savages that they
are all threatened by the outrage; and they thereupon hasten to
carry out the omitted punishment themselves. There is no difficulty
in explaining the mechanism of this solidarity. What is in question
is fear of an infectious example, of the temptation to imitate -
that is, of the contagious character of taboo. If one person
succeeds in gratifying the repressed desire, the same desire is
bound to be kindled in all the other members of the community. In
order to keep the temptation down, the envied transgressor must be
deprived of the fruit of his enterprise; and the punishment will
not infrequently give those who carry it out an opportunity of
committing the same outrage under colour of an act of expiation.
This is indeed one of the foundations of the human penal system and
it is based, no doubt correctly, on the assumption that the
prohibited impulses are present alike in the criminal and in the
avenging community. In this, psycho-analysis is no more than
confirming the habitual pronouncement of the pious: we are all
miserable sinners.

Totem And Taboo

2716

   How, then, are we to account for
the unexpected nobility of mind of the neurotic, who fears nothing
on his own account but everything for someone he loves? Analytical
inquiry shows that this attitude is not primary. Originally, that
is to say at the beginning of the illness, the threat of punishment
applied, as in the case of savages, to the patient himself; he was
invariably in fear for his own life; it was not until later that
the mortal fear was displaced on to another and a loved person. The
process is a little complicated, but we can follow it perfectly. At
the root of the prohibition there is invariably a hostile impulse
against someone the patient loves - a wish that that person should
die. This impulse is repressed by a prohibition and the prohibition
is attached to some particular act, which, by displacement,
represents, it may be, a hostile act against the loved person.
There is a threat of death if this act is performed. But the
process goes further, and the original
wish
that the loved
person may die is replaced by
fear
that he may die. So that
when the neurosis appears to be so tenderly altruistic, it is
merely
compensating
for an underlying contrary attitude of
brutal egoism. We may describe as ‘social’ the emotions
which are determined by showing consideration for another person
without taking him as a sexual object. The receding into the
background of these social factors may be stressed as a fundamental
characteristic of the neurosis, though one which is later disguised
by overcompensation.

   I do not propose to linger over
the origin of these social impulses and their relation to the other
basic human instincts but shall proceed to illustrate the second
main characteristic of the neurosis by means of another example. In
the forms which it assumes, taboo very closely resembles the
neurotic’s fear of touching, his ‘touching
phobia’. Now, in the case of the neurosis the prohibition
invariably relates to touching of a
sexual
kind, and
psycho-analysis has shown that it is in general true that the
instinctual forces that are diverted and displaced in neuroses have
a sexual origin. In the case of taboo the prohibited touching is
obviously not to be understood in an exclusively sexual sense but
in the more general sense of attacking, of getting control, and of
asserting oneself. If there is a prohibition against touching a
chief or anything that has been in contact with him, this means
that an inhibition is to be laid on the same impulse which
expresses itself on other occasions in keeping a suspicious watch
upon the chief or even in ill-treating him physically before his
coronation. (See above.)
Thus the fact which is characteristic
of the neurosis is the preponderance of the sexual over the social
instinctual elements
. The social instincts, however, are
themselves derived from a combination of egoistic and erotic
components into wholes of a special kind.

Totem And Taboo

2717

   This single comparison between
taboo and obsessional neurosis is enough to enable us to gather the
nature of the relation between the different forms of neurosis and
cultural institutions, and to see how it is that the study of the
psychology of the neuroses is important for an understanding of the
growth of civilization.

   The neuroses exhibit on the one
hand striking and far-reaching points of agreement with those great
social institutions, art, religion and philosophy. But on the other
hand they seem like distortions of them. It might be maintained
that a case of hysteria is a caricature of a work of art, that an
obsessional neurosis is a caricature of a religion and that a
paranoic delusion is a caricature of a philosophical system. The
divergence resolves itself ultimately into the fact that the
neuroses are asocial structures; they endeavour to achieve by
private means what is effected in society by collective effort. If
we analyse the instincts at work in the neuroses, we find that the
determining influence in them is exercised by instinctual forces of
sexual origin; the corresponding cultural formations, on the other
hand, are based upon social instincts, originating from the
combination of egoistic and erotic elements. Sexual needs are not
capable of uniting men in the same way as are the demands of
self-preservation. Sexual satisfaction is essentially the private
affair of each individual.

   The asocial nature of neuroses
has its genetic origin in their most fundamental purpose, which is
to take flight from an unsatisfying reality into a more pleasurable
world of phantasy. The real world, which is avoided in this way by
neurotics, is under the sway of human society and of the
institutions collectively created by it. To turn away from reality
is at the same time to withdraw from the community of man.

Totem And Taboo

2718

III

ANIMISM, MAGIC AND THE OMNIPOTENCE OF THOUGHTS

(1)

Writings that seek to apply the findings of
psycho-analysis to topics in the field of the mental sciences have
the inevitable defect of offering too little to readers of both
classes. Such writings can only be in the nature of an instigation:
they put before the specialist certain suggestions for him to take
into account in his own work. This defect is bound to be extremely
evident in an essay which will attempt to deal with the immense
domain of what is known as ‘
animism
’.¹

   Animism is, in its narrower
sense, the doctrine of souls, and, in its wider sense, the doctrine
of spiritual beings in general. The term ‘animatism’
has also been used to denote the theory of the living character of
what appear to us to be inanimate objects, and the terms
‘animalism’ and ‘manism’ occur as well in
this connection. The word ‘animism’, originally used to
describe a particular philosophical system, seems to have been
given its present meaning by Tylor.²

  
¹
The necessity for a concise treatment of
the material involves the omission of any elaborate bibliography.
Instead, I will merely refer to the standard works of Herbert
Spencer, J. G. Frazer, Andrew Lang, E. B. Tylor and Wilhelm Wundt,
from which all that I have to say about animism and magic is
derived. My own contribution is visible only in my selection both
of material and of opinions.