Freud - Complete Works (457 page)

Totem And Taboo

2730

   The primary obsessive acts of
these neurotics are of an entirely magical character. If they are
not charms, they are at all events counter-charms, designed to ward
off the expectations of disaster with which the neurosis usually
starts. Whenever I have succeeded in penetrating the mystery, I
have found that the expected disaster was death. Schopenhauer has
said that the problem of death stands at the outset of every
philosophy; and we have already seen that the origin of the belief
in souls and in demons, which is the essence of animism, goes back
to the impression which is made upon men by death. It is difficult
to judge whether the obsessive or protective acts performed by
obsessional neurotics follow the law of similarity (or, as the case
may be, of contrast); for as a rule, owing to the prevailing
conditions of the neurosis, they have been distorted by being
displaced on to something very small, some action in itself of the
greatest triviality.¹ The protective formulas of obsessional
neuroses, too, have their counterpart in the formulas of magic. It
is possible, however, to describe the course of development of
obsessive acts: we can show how they begin by being as remote as
possible from anything sexual - magical defences against evil
wishes - and how they end by being substitutes for the forbidden
sexual act and the closest possible imitations of it.

  
¹
A further motive for such displacement on
to a very small action will appear in what follows.

Totem And Taboo

2731

   If we are prepared to accept the
account given above of the evolution of human views of the universe
- an animistic phase followed by a religious phase and this in turn
by a scientific one - it will not be difficult to follow the
vicissitudes of the ‘omnipotence of thoughts’ through
these different phases. At the animistic stage men ascribe
omnipotence to
themselves
. At the religious stage they
transfer it to the gods but do not seriously abandon it themselves,
for they reserve the power of influencing the gods in a variety of
ways according to their wishes. The scientific view of the universe
no longer affords any room for human omnipotence; men have
acknowledged their smallness and submitted resignedly to death and
to the other necessities of nature. None the less some of the
primitive belief in omnipotence still survives in men’s faith
in the power of the human mind, which grapples with the laws of
reality.

   If we trace back the development
of libidinal trends as we find them in the individual from their
adult forms to the first beginnings in childhood, an important
distinction emerges, which I have described in my
Three Essays
on the Theory of Sexuality
(1905
d
). Manifestations of
the sexual instincts can be observed from the very first, but to
begin with they are not yet directed towards any external object.
The separate instinctual components of sexuality work independently
of one another to obtain pleasure and find satisfaction in the
subject’s own body. This stage is known as that of
auto-erotism and it is succeeded by one in which an object is
chosen.

   Further study has shown that it
is expedient and indeed indispensable to insert a third stage
between these two, or, putting it in another way, to divide the
first stage, that of auto-erotism, into two. At this intermediate
stage, the importance of which is being made more and more evident
by research, the hitherto isolated sexual instincts have already
come together into a single whole and have also found an object.
But this object is not an external one, extraneous to the subject,
but it is his own ego, which has been constituted at about this
same time. Bearing in mind pathological fixations of this new
stage, which become observable later, we have given it the name of
‘narcissism’. The subject behaves as though he were in
love with himself; his egoistic instincts and his libidinal wishes
are not yet separable under our analysis.

Totem And Taboo

2732

   Although we are not yet in a
position to describe with sufficient accuracy the characteristics
of this narcissistic stage, at which the hitherto dissociated
sexual instincts come together into a single unity and cathect the
ego as an object, we suspect already that this narcissistic
organization is never wholly abandoned. A human being remains to
some extent narcissistic even after he has found external objects
for his libido. The cathexes of objects which he effects are as it
were emanations of the libido that still remains in his ego and can
be drawn back into it once more. The state of being in love, which
is psychologically so remarkable and is the normal prototype of the
psychoses, shows these emanations at their maximum compared to the
level of self-love.

   Primitive men and neurotics, as
we have seen, attach a high valuation - in our eyes an
over
-valuation - to psychical acts. This attitude may
plausibly be brought into relation with narcissism and regarded as
an essential component of it. It may be said that in primitive men
the process of thinking is still to a great extent sexualized. This
is the origin of their belief in the omnipotence of thoughts, their
unshakable confidence in the possibility of controlling the world
and their inaccessibility to the experiences, so easily obtainable,
which could teach them man’s true position in the universe.
As regards neurotics, we find that on the one hand a considerable
part of this primitive attitude has survived in their constitution,
and on the other hand that the sexual repression that has occurred
in them has brought about a further sexualization of their thinking
processes. The psychological results must be the same in both
cases, whether the libidinal hypercathexis of thinking is an
original one or has been produced by regression: intellectual
narcissism and the omnipotence of thoughts.¹

  
¹
‘It is almost an axiom with writers
on this subject, that a sort of Solipsism, or Berkleianism (as
Professor Sully terms it as he finds it in the Child), operates in
the savage to make him refuse to recognize death as a fact.’
(Marett, 1900, 178.)

Totem And Taboo

2733

   If we may regard the existence
among primitive races of the omnipotence of thoughts as evidence in
favour of narcissism, we are encouraged to attempt a comparison
between the phases in the development of men’s view of the
universe and the stages of an individual’s libidinal
development. The animistic phase would correspond to narcissism
both chronologically and in its content; the religious phase would
correspond to the stage of object-choice of which the
characteristic is a child’s attachment to his parents; while
the scientific phase would have an exact counterpart in the stage
at which an individual has reached maturity, has renounced the
pleasure principle, adjusted himself to reality and turned to the
external world for the object of his desires.¹

   In only a single field of our
civilization has the omnipotence of thoughts been retained, and
that is in the field of art. Only in art does it still happen that
a man who is consumed by desires performs something resembling the
accomplishment of those desires and that what he does in play
produces emotional effects - thanks to artistic illusion - just as
though it were something real. People speak with justice of the
‘magic of art’ and compare artists to magicians. But
the comparison is perhaps more significant than it claims to be.
There can be no doubt that art did not begin as art for art’s
sake. It worked originally in the service of impulses which are for
the most part extinct to-day. And among them we may suspect the
presence of many magical purposes.²

  
¹
I will only briefly allude here to the fact
that the original narcissism of children has a decisive influence
upon our view of the development of their character and excludes
the possibility of their having any primary sense of
inferiority.

  
²
Cf. Reinach, ‘L’art et la
magie’ (1905-12,
1
, 125-36). In Reinach’s
opinion the primitive artists who left behind the carvings and
paintings of animals in the French caves, did not desire to
‘please’ but to ‘evoke’ or conjure up. He
thus explains why it is that these pictures are situated in the
darkest and most inaccessible parts of the caves and that dangerous
beasts of prey do not appear among them. ‘Les modernes
parlent souvent, par hyperbole, de la magie du pinceau ou du ciseau
d’un grand artiste et, en général, de la magie
de l’art. Entendu au sens propre, qui est celui d’une
contrainte mystique exercée par la volonté de
l’homme sur d’autres volontés ou sur les choses,
cette expression n’est plus admissible; mais nous avons vu
qu’elle était autrefois rigoureusement vraie, du moins
dans l’opinion des artistes.’ (Ibid., 136.) [‘In
modern times people often speak metaphorically of the magic of a
great artist’s brush or chisel, or more generally of the
magic of art. This expression is no longer permissible in its
proper sense of a mystical force brought to bear by the human will
upon other wills or upon objects; but, as we have seen, there was a
time when it was literally true - at least in the artists’
opinion.’]

Totem And Taboo

2734

(4)

   Thus the first picture which man
formed of the world - animism - was a psychological one. It needed
no scientific basis as yet, since science only begins after it has
been realized that the world is unknown and that means must
therefore be sought for getting to know it. Animism came to
primitive man naturally and as a matter of course. He knew what
things were like in the world, namely just as he felt himself to
be. We are thus prepared to find that primitive man transposed the
structural conditions of his own mind¹ into the external
world; and we may attempt to reverse the process and put back into
the human mind what animism teaches as to the nature of things.

   The technique of animism, magic,
reveals in the clearest and most unmistakable way an intention to
impose the laws governing mental life upon real things; in this,
spirits need not as yet play any part, though spirits may be taken
as objects of magical treatment. Thus the assumptions of magic are
more fundamental and older than the doctrine of spirits, which
forms the kernel of animism. Our psycho-analytic point of view
coincides here with a theory put forward by R. R. Marett (1900),
who postulates a pre-animistic stage before animism, the character
of which is best indicated by the term ‘animatism’, the
doctrine of the universality of life. Experience has little light
to throw on pre-animism, since no race has yet been discovered
which is without the concept of spirits. (Cf. Wundt, 1906, 171
ff.)

   Whereas magic still reserves
omnipotence solely for thoughts, animism hands some of it over to
spirits and so prepares the way for the construction of a religion.
What, we may ask, can have induced a primitive man to make this
first act of renunciation? It can scarcely have been a recognition
of the falseness of his premises, for he continued to practise the
magical technique.

  
¹
Which he was aware of by what is known as
endopsychic perception.

Totem And Taboo

2735

   Spirits and demons, as I have
shown in the last essay, are only projections of man’s own
emotional impulses.¹ He turns his emotional cathexes into
persons, he peoples the world with them and meets his internal
mental processes again outside himself - in just the same way as
that intelligent paranoic, Schreber, found a reflection of the
attachments and detachments of his libido in the vicissitudes of
his confabulated ‘rays of God’.²

   I propose to avoid (as I have
already done elsewhere³) entering into the general problem of
the origin of the tendency to project mental processes into the
outside. It is, however, safe to assume that that tendency will be
intensified when projection promises to bring with it the advantage
of mental relief. Such an advantage may be expected with certainty
where a conflict has arisen between different impulses all of which
are striving towards omnipotence - for they clearly cannot
all
become omnipotent. The pathological process in paranoia
in fact makes use of the mechanism of projection in order to deal
with mental conflicts of this kind. The typical case of such a
conflict is one between the two members of a pair of opposites -
the case of an ambivalent attitude, which we have examined in
detail as it appears in someone mourning the death of a loved
relative. This kind of case must seem particularly likely to
provide a motive for the creation of projections. Here again we are
in agreement with the writers who maintain that the first born
spirits were evil spirits, and who derive the idea of a soul from
the impression made by death upon the survivors. The only
difference is that
we
do not lay stress on the
intellectual
problem with which death confronts the living;
in our view the force which gives the impetus to research is rather
to be attributed to the
emotional
conflict into which the
survivors are plunged.

   Thus man’s first
theoretical achievement - the creation of spirits - seems to have
arisen from the same source as the first moral restrictions to
which he was subjected - the observances of taboo. The fact that
they had the same origin need not imply, however, that they arose
simultaneously. If the survivors’ position in relation to the
dead was really what first caused primitive man to reflect, and
compelled him to hand over some of his omnipotence to the spirits
and to sacrifice some of his freedom of action, then these cultural
products would constitute a first acknowledgement of
’
Ανάγκη
[Necessity], which opposes human narcissism. Primitive man would
thus be submitting to the supremacy of death with the same gesture
with which he seemed to be denying it.