Freud - Complete Works (466 page)

   What are we to make, though, of
the prelude to this festive joy - the mourning over the death of
the animal? If the clansmen rejoice over the killing of the totem -
a normally forbidden act - why do they mourn over it as well?

   As we have seen, the clansmen
acquire sanctity by consuming the totem: they reinforce their
identification with it and with one another. Their festive feelings
and all that follows from them might well be explained by the fact
that they have taken into themselves the sacred life of which the
substance of the totem is the vehicle.

Totem And Taboo

2781

   Psycho-analysis has revealed that
the totem animal is in reality a substitute for the father; and
this tallies with the contradictory fact that, though the killing
of the animal is as a rule forbidden, yet its killing is a festive
occasion - with the fact that it is killed and yet mourned. The
ambivalent emotional attitude, which to this day characterizes the
father-complex in our children and which often persists into adult
life, seems to extend to the totem animal in its capacity as
substitute for the father.

   If, now, we bring together the
psycho-analytic translation of the totem with the fact of the totem
meal and with Darwin’s theories of the earliest state of
human society, the possibility of a deeper understanding emerges -
a glimpse of a hypothesis which may seem fantastic but which offers
the advantage of establishing an unsuspected correlation between
groups of phenomena that have hitherto been disconnected.

   There is, of course, no place for
the beginnings of totemism in Darwin’s primal horde. All that
we find there is a violent and jealous father who keeps all the
females for himself and drives away his sons as they grow up. This
earliest state of society has never been an object of observation.
The most primitive kind of organization that we actually come
across - and one that is in force to this day in certain tribes -
consists of bands of males; these bands are composed of members
with equal rights and are subject to the restrictions of the
totemic system, including inheritance through the mother. Can this
form of organization have developed out of the other one? and if so
along what lines?

Totem And Taboo

2782

   If we call the celebration of the
totem meal to our help, we shall be able to find an answer. One
day¹ the brothers who had been driven out came together,
killed and devoured their father and so made an end of the
patriarchal horde. United, they had the courage to do and succeeded
in doing what would have been impossible for them individually.
(Some cultural advance, perhaps, command over some new weapon, had
given them a sense of superior strength.) Cannibal savages as they
were, it goes without saying that they devoured their victim as
well as killing him. The violent primal father had doubtless been
the feared and envied model of each one of the company of brothers:
and in the act of devouring him they accomplished their
identification with him, and each one of them acquired a portion of
his strength. The totem meal, which is perhaps mankind’s
earliest festival, would thus be a repetition and a commemoration
of this memorable and criminal deed, which was the beginning of so
many things - of social organization, of moral restrictions and of
religion.¹

  
¹
To avoid possible misunderstanding, I must
ask the reader to take into account the final sentences of the
following footnote as a corrective to this description.

  
²
This hypothesis, which has such a monstrous
air, of the tyrannical father being overwhelmed and killed by a
combination of his exiled sons, was also arrived at by Atkinson
(1903, 220 f.) as a direct implication of the state of affairs in
Darwin’s primal horde: ‘The patriarch had only one
enemy whom he should dread . . . a youthful band of
brothers living together in forced celibacy, or at most in
polyandrous relation with some single female captive. A horde as
yet weak in their impubescence they are, but they would, when
strength was gained with time, inevitably wrench by combined
attacks, renewed again and again, both wife and life from the
paternal tyrant.’ Atkinson, who incidentally passed his whole
life in New Caledonia and had unusual opportunities for studying
the natives, also pointed out that the conditions which Darwin
assumed to prevail in the primal horde may easily be observed in
herds of wild oxen and horses and regularly lead to the killing of
the father of the herd. He further supposed that, after the father
had been disposed of, the horde would be disintegrated by a bitter
struggle between the victorious sons. Thus any new organization of
society would be precluded: there would be ‘an ever-recurring
violent succession to the solitary paternal tyrant, by sons whose
parricidal hands were so soon again clenched in fratricidal
strife.’ (Ibid., 228.) Atkinson, who had no psycho-analytic
hints to help him and who was ignorant of Robertson Smith’s
studies, found a less violent transition from the primal horde to
the next social stage, at which numbers of males live together in a
peaceable community. He believed that through the intervention of
maternal love the sons - to begin with only the youngest, but later
others as well - were allowed to remain with the horde, and that in
return for this toleration the sons acknowledged their
father’s sexual privilege by renouncing all claim to their
mother and sisters.

  
Such is the highly remarkable theory put forward by Atkinson. In
its essential feature it is in agreement with my own; but its
divergence results in its failing to effect a correlation with many
other issues.

   The
lack of precision in what I have written in the text above, its
abbreviation of the time factor and its compression of the whole
subject matter, may be attributed to the reserve necessitated by
the nature of the topic. It would be as foolish to aim at
exactitude in such questions as it would be unfair to insist upon
certainty.

Totem And Taboo

2783

   In order that these latter
consequences may seem plausible, leaving their premises on one
side, we need only suppose that the tumultuous mob of brothers were
filled with the same contradictory feelings which we can see at
work in the ambivalent father-complexes of our children and of our
neurotic patients. They hated their father, who presented such a
formidable obstacle to their craving for power and their sexual
desires; but they loved and admired him too. After they had got rid
of him, had satisfied their hatred and had put into effect their
wish to identify themselves with him, the affection which had all
this time been pushed under was bound to make itself felt.¹ It
did so in the form of remorse. A sense of guilt made its
appearance, which in this instance coincided with the remorse felt
by the whole group. The dead father became stronger than the living
one had been - for events took the course we so often see them
follow in human affairs to this day. What had up to then been
prevented by his actual existence was thenceforward prohibited by
the sons themselves, in accordance with the psychological procedure
so familiar to us in psycho-analyses under the name of
‘deferred obedience’. They revoked their deed by
forbidding the killing of the totem, the substitute for their
father; and they renounced its fruits by resigning their claim to
the women who had now been set free. They thus created out of their
filial sense of guilt the two fundamental taboos of totemism, which
for that very reason inevitably corresponded to the two repressed
wishes of the Oedipus complex. Whoever contravened those taboos be
came guilty of the only two crimes with which primitive society
concerned itself.²

  
¹
This fresh emotional attitude must also
have been assisted by the fact that the deed cannot have given
complete satisfaction to those who did it. From one point of view
it had been done in vain. Not one of the sons had in fact been able
to put his original wish - of taking his father’s place -
into effect. And, as we know, failure is far more propitious for a
moral reaction than satisfaction.

  
²
‘Murder and incest, or offences of a
like kind against the sacred laws of blood, are in primitive
society the only crimes of which the community as such takes
cognizance.’ (Smith, 1894, 419.)

Totem And Taboo

2784

   The two taboos of totemism with
which human morality has its beginning are not on a par
psychologically. The first of them, the law protecting the totem
animal, is founded wholly on emotional motives: the father had
actually been eliminated, and in no real sense could the deed be
undone. But the second rule, the prohibition of incest, has a
powerful practical basis as well. Sexual desires do not unite men
but divide them. Though the brothers had banded together in order
to overcome their father, they were all one another’s rivals
in regard to the women. Each of them would have wished, like his
father, to have all the women to himself. The new organization
would have collapsed in a struggle of all against all, for none of
them was of such over-mastering strength as to be able to take on
his father’s part with success. Thus the brothers had no
alternative, if they were to live together, but - not, perhaps,
until they had passed through many dangerous crises - to institute
the law against incest, by which they all alike renounced the women
whom they desired and who had been their chief motive for
despatching their father. In this way they rescued the organization
which had made them strong - and which may have been based on
homosexual feelings and acts, originating perhaps during the period
of their expulsion from the horde. Here, too, may perhaps have been
the germ of the institution of matriarchy, described by Bachofen,
which was in turn replaced by the patriarchal organization of the
family.

   On the other hand, the claim of
totemism to be regarded as a first attempt at a religion is based
on the first of these two taboos - that upon taking the life of the
totem animal. The animal struck the sons as a natural and obvious
substitute for their father; but the treatment of it which they
found imposed on themselves expressed more than the need to exhibit
their remorse. They could attempt, in their relation to this
surrogate father, to allay their burning sense of guilt, to bring
about a kind of reconciliation with their father. The totemic
system was, as it were, a covenant with their father, in which he
promised them everything that a childish imagination may expect
from a father - protection, care and indulgence - while on their
side they undertook to respect his life, that is to say, not to
repeat the deed which had brought destruction on their real father.
Totemism, moreover, contained an attempt at self-justification:
‘If our father had treated us in the way the totem does, we
should never have felt tempted to kill him.’ In this fashion
totemism helped to smooth things over and to make it possible to
forget the event to which it owed its origin.

Totem And Taboo

2785

   Features were thus brought into
existence which continued thenceforward to have a determining
influence on the nature of religion. Totemic religion arose from
the filial sense of guilt, in an attempt to allay that feeling and
to appease the father by deferred obedience to him. All later
religions are seen to be attempts at solving the same problem. They
vary according to the stage of civilization at which they arise and
according to the methods which they adopt; but all have the same
end in view and are reactions to the same great event with which
civilization began and which, since it occurred, has not allowed
mankind a moment’s rest.

   There is another feature which
was already present in totemism and which has been preserved
unaltered in religion. The tension of ambivalence was evidently too
great for any contrivance to be able to counteract it; or it is
possible that psychological conditions in general are unfavourable
to getting rid of these antithetical emotions. However that may be,
we find that the ambivalence implicit in the father-complex
persists in totemism and in religions generally. Totemic religion
not only comprised expressions of remorse and attempts at
atonement, it also served as a remembrance of the triumph over the
father. Satisfaction over that triumph led to the institution of
the memorial festival of the totem meal, in which the restrictions
of deferred obedience no longer held. Thus it became a duty to
repeat the crime of parricide again and again in the sacrifice of
the totem animal, whenever, as a result of the changing conditions
of life, the cherished fruit of the crime - appropriation of the
paternal attributes - threatened to disappear. We shall not be
surprised to find that the element of filial rebelliousness also
emerges, in the
later
products of religion, often in the
strangest disguises and transformations.

Totem And Taboo

2786

   Hitherto we have followed the
developments of the
affectionate
current of feeling towards
the father, transformed into remorse, as we find them in religion
and in moral ordinances (which are not sharply distinguished in
totemism). But we must not overlook the fact that it was in the
main with the impulses that led to parricide that the victory lay.
For a long time afterwards, the social fraternal feelings, which
were the basis of the whole transformation, continued to exercise a
profound influence on the development of society. They found
expression in the sanctification of the blood tie, in the emphasis
upon the solidarity of all life within the same clan. In thus
guaranteeing one another’s lives, the brothers were declaring
that no one of them must be treated by another as their father was
treated by them all jointly. They were precluding the possibility
of a repetition of their father’s fate. To the
religiously-based prohibition against killing the totem was now
added the socially-based prohibition against fratricide. It was not
until long afterwards that the prohibition ceased to be limited to
members of the clan and assumed the simple form: ‘Thou shalt
do no murder.’ The patriarchal horde was replaced in the
first instance by the fraternal clan, whose existence was assured
by the blood tie. Society was now based on complicity in the common
crime; religion was based on the sense of guilt and the remorse
attaching to it; while morality was based partly on the exigencies
of this society and partly on the penance demanded by the sense of
guilt.