Freud - Complete Works (463 page)

   ‘It is not easy to see why
any deep human instinct should need to be reinforced by law. There
is no law commanding men to eat and drink or forbidding them to put
their hands in the fire. Men eat and drink and keep their hands out
of the fire instinctively for fear of natural not legal penalties,
which would be entailed by violence done to these instincts. The
law only forbids men to do what their instincts incline them to do;
what nature itself prohibits and punishes, it would be superfluous
for the law to prohibit and punish. Accordingly we may always
safely assume that crimes forbidden by law are crimes which many
men have a natural propensity to commit. If there was no such
propensity there would be no such crimes, and if no such crimes
were committed what need to forbid them? Instead of assuming,
therefore, from the legal prohibition of incest that there is a
natural aversion to incest, we ought rather to assume that there is
a natural instinct in favour of it, and that if the law represses
it, as it represses other natural instincts, it does so because
civilized men have come to the conclusion that the satisfaction of
these natural instincts is detrimental to the general interests of
society.’ (Frazer, 1910,
4
, 97 f.)

   I may add to these excellent
arguments of Frazer’s that the findings of psycho-analysis
make the hypothesis of an innate aversion to incestuous intercourse
totally untenable. They have shown, on the contrary, that the
earliest sexual excitations of youthful human beings are invariably
of an incestuous character and that such impulses when repressed
play a part that can scarcely be over-estimated as motive forces of
neuroses in later life.

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2765

   Thus the view which explains the
horror of incest as an innate instinct must be abandoned. Nor can
anything more favourable be said of another, widely held
explanation of the law against incest, according to which primitive
peoples noticed at an early date the dangers with which their race
was threatened by inbreeding and for that reason deliberately
adopted the prohibition. There are a host of objections to this
theory. (Cf. Durkheim, 1898.) Not only must the prohibition against
incest be older than any domestication of animals which might have
enabled men to observe the effects of inbreeding upon racial
characters, but even to-day the detrimental results of inbreeding
are not established with certainty and cannot easily be
demonstrated in man. Moreover, everything that we know of
contemporary savages makes it highly improbable that their most
remote ancestors were already concerned with the question of
preserving their later progeny from injury. Indeed it is almost
absurd to attribute to such improvident creatures motives of
hygiene and eugenics to which consideration is scarcely paid in our
own present-day civilization.¹

   Lastly, account must be taken of
the fact that a prohibition against inbreeding, based upon
practical motives of hygiene, on the ground of its tending to
racial enfeeblement, seems quite inadequate to explain the profound
abhorrence shown towards incest in our society. As I have shown
elsewhere,² this feeling seems to be even more active and
intense among contemporary primitive peoples than among civilized
ones.

   It might have been expected that
here again we should have before us a choice between sociological,
biological and psychological explanations. (In this connection the
psychological motives should perhaps be regarded as representing
biological forces.) Nevertheless, at the end of our inquiry, we can
only subscribe to Frazer’s resigned conclusion. We are
ignorant of the origin of the horror of incest and cannot even tell
in what direction to look for it. None of the solutions of the
enigma that have been proposed seems satisfactory.³

  
¹
Darwin writes of savages that they
‘are not likely to reflect on distant evils to their
progeny’.

  
²
See the first essay in this
work.

  
³
‘Thus the ultimate origin of exogamy,
and with it of the law of incest - since exogamy was devised to
prevent incest - remains a problem nearly as dark as ever.’
(Frazer, 1910,
1
, 165.)

Totem And Taboo

2766

   I must, however, mention one
other attempt at solving it. It is of a kind quite different from
any that we have so far considered, and might be described as
‘historical’.

   This attempt is based upon a
hypothesis of Charles Darwin’s upon the social state of
primitive men. Darwin deduced from the habits of the higher apes
that men, too, originally lived in comparatively small groups or
hordes within which the jealousy of the oldest and strongest male
prevented sexual promiscuity. ‘We may indeed conclude from
what we know of the jealousy of all male quadrupeds, armed, as many
of them are, with special weapons for battling with their rivals,
that promiscuous intercourse in a state of nature is extremely
improbable. . . . Therefore, if we look far enough
back in the stream of time, . . . judging from the
social habits of man as he now exists . . . the most
probable view is that primaeval man aboriginally lived in small
communities, each with as many wives as he could support and
obtain, whom he would have jealously guarded against all other men.
Or he may have lived with several wives by himself, like the
Gorilla; for all the natives "agree that but one adult male is
seen in a band; when the young male grows up, a contest takes place
for mastery, and the strongest, by killing and driving out the
others, establishes himself as the head of the community".
(Dr. Savage, in
Boston Journal of Nat. Hist
., vol. v,
1845-7, p. 423.) The younger males, being thus expelled and
wandering about, would, when at last successful in finding a
partner, prevent too close interbreeding within the limits of the
same family.’ (Darwin, 1871,
2
, 362 f.)

   Atkinson (1903) seems to have
been the first to realize that the practical consequence of the
conditions obtaining in Darwin’s primal horde must be exogamy
for the young males. Each of them might, after being driven out,
establish a similar horde, in which the same prohibition upon
sexual intercourse would rule owing to its leader’s jealousy.
In course of time this would produce what grew into a conscious
law: ‘No sexual relations between those who share a common
home.’ After the establishment of totemism this regulation
would assume another form and would run: ‘No sexual relations
within the totem.’

   Andrew Lang (1905, 114 and 143)
accepted this explanation of exogamy. In the same volume, however,
he supports the other theory (held by Durkheim), according to which
exogamy was a resultant of the totemic laws. It is a little
difficult to bring these two points of view into harmony: according
to the first theory exogamy would have originated before totemism,
while according to the second it would have been derived from
it.¹

  
¹
‘If it be granted that exogamy
existed in practice, on the lines of Mr. Darwin’s theory,
before the totem beliefs lent to the practice a
sacred
sanction, our task is relatively easy. The first practical rule
would be that of the jealous Sire, "No males to touch the
females in my camp", with expulsion of adolescent sons.
In
efflux of time that rule, become habitual
, would be, "No
marriage within the local group". Next, let the local groups
receive names, such as Emus, Crows, Opossums, Snipes, and the rule
becomes, "No marriage within the local group of animal name;
no Snipe to marry Snipe". But, if the primal groups were not
exogamous, they would become so, as soon as totemic myths and tabus
were developed out of the animal, vegetable, and other names of
local groups.’ (Lang, 1905, 143.) (The italics in the middle
of this passage are mine.) In his last discussion of this subject,
moreover, Lang (1911) states that he has ‘abandoned the idea
that exogamy is a consequence of the general totemic
taboo’.

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2767

(3)

   Into this obscurity one single
ray of light is thrown by psycho-analytic observation.

   There is a great deal of
resemblance between the relations of children and of primitive men
towards animals. Children show no trace of the arrogance which
urges adult civilized men to draw a hard-and-fast line between
their own nature and that of all other animals. Children have no
scruples over allowing animals to rank as their full equals.
Uninhibited as they are in the avowal of their bodily needs, they
no doubt feel themselves more akin to animals than to their elders,
who may well be a puzzle to them.

   Not infrequently, however, a
strange rift occurs in the excellent relations between children and
animals. A child will suddenly begin to be frightened of some
particular species of animal and to avoid touching or seeing any
individual of that species. The clinical picture of an animal
phobia emerges - a very common, and perhaps the earliest, form of
psychoneurotic illness occurring in childhood. As a rule the phobia
is attached to animals in which the child has hitherto shown a
specially lively interest and it has nothing to do with any
particular individual animal. There is no large choice of animals
that may become objects of a phobia in the case of children living
in towns: horses, dogs, cats, less often birds, and with striking
frequency very small creatures such as beetles and butterflies. The
senseless and immoderate fear shown in these phobias is sometimes
attached to animals only known to the child from picture books and
fairy tales. On a few rare occasions it is possible to discover
what has led to an unusual choice of this kind; and I have to thank
Karl Abraham for telling me of a case in which the child himself
explained that his fear of wasps was due to their colour and
stripes reminding him of tigers, which from all accounts were
beasts to be feared.

   No detailed analytic examination
has yet been made of children’s animal phobias, though they
would greatly repay study. This neglect has no doubt been due to
the difficulty of analysing children of such a tender age. It
cannot therefore be claimed that we know the general meaning of
these disorders and I myself am of the opinion that this may not
turn out to be of a uniform nature. But a few cases of phobias of
this kind directed towards the larger animals have proved
accessible to analysis and have thus yielded their secret to the
investigator. It was the same in every case: where the children
concerned were boys, their fear related at bottom to their father
and had merely been displaced on to the animal.

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2768

   Everyone with psycho-analytic
experience will no doubt have come across cases of the sort and
have derived the same impression from them. Yet I can quote only a
few detailed publications on the subject. This paucity of
literature is an accidental circumstance and it must not be
supposed that our conclusions are based on a few scattered
observations. I may mention, for instance, a writer who has studied
the neuroses of childhood with great understanding - Dr. M. Wulff,
of Odessa. In the course of a case history of a nine-year-old boy
he reports that at the age of four the patient had suffered from a
dog-phobia. ‘When he saw a dog running past in the street, he
would weep and call out: "Dear doggie, don’t bite me!
I’II be good!" By "being good" he meant
"not playing on the fiddle" - not masturbating. (Wulff,
1912, 15.) ‘The boy’s dog-phobia’, the author
explains, ‘was in reality his fear of his father displaced on
to dogs; for his curious exclamation "Doggie, I’II be
good!" - that is, "I won’t masturbate" - was
directed to his father, who had forbidden him to masturbate.’
Wulff adds a footnote which is in complete agreement with my views
and at the same time bears witness to the frequent occurrence of
such experiences: ‘Phobias of this type (phobias of horses,
dogs, cats, fowls and other domestic animals) are, in my opinion,
at least as common in childhood as
pavor nocturnus
; and in
analysis they almost invariably turn out to be a displacement on to
the animals of the child’s fear of one of his parents. I
should not be prepared to maintain that the same mechanism applies
to the widespread phobias of rats and mice.’

   I recently published
(1909
b
) an ‘Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old
Boy’, the material of which was supplied to me by the little
patient’s father. The boy had a phobia of horses, and as a
result he refused to go out in the street. He expressed a fear that
the horse would come into the room and bite him; and it turned out
that this must be the punishment for a wish that the horse might
fall down (that is, die). After the boy’s fear of his father
had been removed by reassurances, it became evident that he was
struggling against wishes which had as their subject the idea of
his father being absent (going away on a journey, dying). He
regarded his father (as he made all too clear) as a competitor for
the favours of his mother, towards whom the obscure foreshadowings
of his budding sexual wishes were aimed. Thus he was situated in
the typical attitude of a male child towards his parents to which
we have given the name of the ‘Oedipus complex’ and
which we regard in general as the nuclear complex of the neuroses.
The new fact that we have learnt from the analysis of ‘little
Hans’ - a fact with an important bearing upon totemism - is
that in such circumstances children displace some of their feelings
from their father on to an animal.