Freud - Complete Works (464 page)

Totem And Taboo

2769

   Analysis is able to trace the
associative paths along which this displacement passes - both the
fortuitous paths and those with a significant content. Analysis
also enables us to discover the
motives
for the
displacement. The hatred of his father that arises in a boy from
rivalry for his mother is not able to achieve uninhibited sway over
his mind; it has to contend against his old-established affection
and admiration for the very same person. The child finds relief
from the conflict arising out of this double-sided, this ambivalent
emotional attitude towards his father by displacing his hostile and
fearful feelings on to a
substitute
for his father. The
displacement cannot, however, bring the conflict to an end, it
cannot effect a clear-cut severance between the affectionate and
the hostile feelings. On the contrary, the conflict is resumed in
relation to the object on to which the displacement has been made:
the ambivalence is extended to
it
. There could be no doubt
that little Hans was not only
frightened
of horses; he also
approached them with admiration and interest. As soon as his
anxiety began to diminish, he identified himself with the dreaded
creature: he began to jump about like a horse and in his turn bit
his father.¹ At another stage in the resolution of his phobia
he did not hesitate to identify his parents with some other large
animals.²

  
¹
Freud (1909
b
).

  
²
In his giraffe phantasy.

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   It may fairly be said that in
these children’s phobias some of the features of totemism
reappear, but reversed into their negative. We are, however,
indebted to Ferenczi (1913
a
) for an interesting history of a
single case which can only be described as an instance of
positive
totemism in a child. It is true that in the case of
little Árpád (the subject of Ferenczi’s report)
his totemic interests did not arise in direct relation with his
Oedipus complex but on the basis of its narcissistic precondition,
the fear of castration. But any attentive reader of the story of
little Hans will find abundant evidence that he, too, admired his
father as possessing a big penis and feared him as threatening his
own. The same part is played by the father alike in the Oedipus and
the castration complexes - the part of a dreaded enemy to the
sexual interests of childhood. The punishment which he threatens is
castration, or its substitute, blinding.¹

   When little Árpád
was two and a half years old, he had once, while he was on a summer
holiday, tried to micturate into the fowl-house and a fowl had
pecked, or pecked
at
his penis. A year later, when he was
back in the same place, he himself turned into a fowl; his one
interest was in the fowl-house and in what went on there and he
abandoned human speech in favour of cackling and crowing. At the
time at which the observation was made (when he was five years old)
he had recovered his speech, but his interests and his talk were
entirely concerned with chickens and other kinds of poultry. They
were his only toys and he only sang songs that had some mention of
fowls in them. His attitude towards his totem animal was
superlatively ambivalent: he showed both hatred and love to an
extravagant degree. His favourite game was playing slaughtering
fowls. ‘The slaughtering of poultry was a regular festival
for him. He would dance round the animals’ bodies for hours
at a time in a state of intense excitement.’ But afterwards
he would kiss and stroke the slaughtered animal or would clean and
caress the toy fowls that he had himself ill-treated.

   Little Árpád
himself saw to it that the meaning of his strange behaviour should
not remain hidden. From time to time he translated his wishes from
the totemic language into that of everyday life. ‘My
father’s the cock’, he said on one occasion, and
another time: ‘Now I’m small, now I’m a chicken.
When I get bigger I’lI be a fowl. When I’m bigger still
I’II be a cock.’ On another occasion he suddenly said
he would like to eat some ‘fricassee of mother’ (on the
analogy of fricassee of chicken). He was very generous in
threatening other people with castration, just as he himself had
been threatened with it for his masturbatory activities.

  
¹
For the substitution of blinding for
castration - a substitution that occurs, too, in the myth of
Oedipus - see Reitler (1913), Ferenczi (1913
b
), Rank (1913)
and Eder (1913).

Totem And Taboo

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   There was no doubt, according to
Ferenczi, as to the sources of Árpád’s interest
in events in the poultry-yard: ‘the continual sexual activity
between the cock and hens, the laying of eggs and the hatching out
of the young brood’ gratified his sexual curiosity, the real
object of which was
human
family-life. He showed that he had
formed his own choice of sexual objects on the model of life in the
hen-run, for he said one day to the neighbour’s wife:
‘I’II marry you and your sister and my three cousins
and the cook; no, not the cook, I’II marry my mother
instead.’

   Later on we shall be able to
assess the worth of this observation more completely. At the moment
I will only emphasize two features in it which offer valuable
points of agreement with totemism: the boy’s complete
identification with his totem animal¹ and his ambivalent
emotional attitude to it. These observations justify us, in my
opinion, in substituting the father for the totem animal in the
formula for totemism (in the case of males). It will be observed
that there is nothing new or particularly daring in this step
forward. Indeed, primitive men say the very same thing themselves,
and, where the totemic system is still in force to-day, they
describe the totem as their common ancestor and primal father. All
we have done is to take at its literal value an expression used by
these people, of which the anthropologists have been able to make
very little and which they have therefore been glad to keep in the
background. Psycho-analysis, on the contrary, leads us to put
special stress upon this same point and to take it as the
starting-point of our attempt at explaining totemism.²

  
¹
This, according to Frazer (1910,
4
,
5), constitutes ‘the whole essence of totemism’:
‘totemism is an identification of a man with his
totem.’

  
²
I have to thank Otto Rank for bringing to
my notice a dog-phobia in an intelligent young man. His explanation
of the way in which he acquired his illness sounds markedly like
the totemic theory of the Arunta which I mentioned on
page 2755
: he thought he had heard from
his father that his mother had had a severe fright from a dog
during her pregnancy.

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2772

   The first consequence of our
substitution is most remarkable. If the totem animal is the father,
then the two principal ordinances of totemism, the two taboo
prohibitions which constitute its core - not to kill the totem and
not to have sexual relations with a woman of the same totem -
coincide in their content with the two crimes of Oedipus, who
killed his father and married his mother, as well as with the two
primal wishes of children, the insufficient repression or the
re-awakening of which forms the nucleus of perhaps every
psychoneurosis. If this equation is anything more than a misleading
trick of chance, it must enable us to throw a light upon the origin
of totemism in the inconceivably remote past. In other words, it
would enable us to make it probable that the totemic system - like
little Hans’s animal phobia and little
Árpád’s poultry perversion - was a product of
the conditions involved in the Oedipus complex. In order to pursue
this possibility, we shall have, in the following pages, to study a
feature of the totemic system (or, as we might say, of the totemic
religion) which I have hitherto scarcely found an opportunity of
mentioning.

(4)

   William Robertson Smith, who died
in 1894 - physicist, philologist, Bible critic and archaeologist -
was a man of many-sided interests, clear-sighted and
liberal-minded. In his book on the
Religion of the Semites
(first published in 1889) he put forward the hypothesis that a
peculiar ceremony known as the ‘totem meal’ had from
the very first formed an integral part of the totemic system. At
that time he had only a single piece of evidence in support of his
theory: an account of a procedure of the kind dating from the fifth
century A.D. But by an analysis of the nature of sacrifice among
the ancient Semites he was able to lend his hypothesis a high
degree of probability. Since sacrifice implies a divinity, it was a
question of arguing back from a comparatively high phase of
religious ritual to the lowest one, that is, to totemism.

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   I will now attempt to extract
from Robertson Smith’s admirable work those of his statements
on the origin and meaning of the ritual of sacrifice which are of
decisive interest for us. In so doing I must omit all the details,
often so fascinating, and neglect all the later developments. It is
quite impossible for an abstract such as this to give my readers
any notion of the lucidity and convincing force of the
original.

   Robertson Smith explains that
sacrifice at the altar was the essential feature in the ritual of
ancient religions. It plays the same part in all religions, so that
its origin must be traced back to very general causes, operating
everywhere in the same manner. Sacrifice - the sacred act
par
excellence
(
sacrificium
,
ίερουργία
)
- originally had a somewhat different meaning, however, from its
later one of making an offering to the deity in order to propitiate
him or gain his favour. (The non-religious usage of the word
followed from this subsidiary sense of ‘renunciation’.)
It can be shown that, to begin with, sacrifice was nothing other
than ‘an act of fellowship between the deity and his
worshippers’.

   The materials offered for
sacrifice were things that can be eaten or drunk; men sacrificed to
their deity the things on which they themselves lived: flesh,
cereals, fruit, wine and oil. Only in the case of flesh were there
limitations and exceptions. The god shared the animal sacrifices
with his worshippers, the vegetable offerings were for him alone.
There is no doubt that animal sacrifices were the older and were
originally the only ones. Vegetable sacrifices arose from the
offering of first-fruits and were in the nature of a tribute to the
lord of the earth and of the land; but animal sacrifices are more
ancient than agriculture.

   Linguistic survivals make it
certain that the portion of the sacrifice allotted to the god was
originally regarded as being literally his food. As the nature of
gods grew progressively less material, this conception became a
stumbling-block. It was avoided by assigning to the deity only the
liquid
part of the meal. Later, the use of fire, which
caused the flesh of the sacrifice upon the altar to rise in smoke,
afforded a method of dealing with human food more appropriate to
the divine nature. The drink-offering consisted originally of the
blood of the animal victim. This was later replaced by wine. In
ancient times wine was regarded as ‘the blood of the
grape’, and it has been so described by modern poets.

Totem And Taboo

2774

   The oldest form of sacrifice,
then, older than the use of fire or the knowledge of agriculture,
was the sacrifice of animals, whose flesh and blood were enjoyed in
common by the god and his worshippers. It was essential that each
one of the participants should have his share of the meal.

   A sacrifice of this kind was a
public ceremony, a festival celebrated by the whole clan. Religion
in general was an affair of the community and religious duty was a
part of social obligation. Everywhere a sacrifice involves a feast
and a feast cannot be celebrated without a sacrifice. The
sacrificial feast was an occasion on which individuals rose
joyously above their own interests and stressed the mutual
dependence existing between one another and their god.

   The ethical force of the public
sacrificial meal rested upon very ancient ideas of the significance
of eating and drinking together. Eating and drinking with a man was
a symbol and a confirmation of fellowship and mutual social
obligations. What was
directly
expressed by the sacrificial
meal was only the fact that the god and his worshippers were
‘commensals’, but every other point in their mutual
relations was included in this. Customs still in force among the
Arabs of the desert show that what is binding in a common meal is
not a religious factor but the act of eating itself. Anyone who has
eaten the smallest morsel of food with one of these Bedouin or has
swallowed a mouthful of his milk need no longer fear him as an
enemy but may feel secure in his protection and help. Not, however,
for an unlimited time; strictly speaking, only so long as the food
which has been eaten in common remains in the body. Such was the
realistic view of the bond of union. It needed repetition in order
to be confirmed and made permanent.

Totem And Taboo

2775