Freud - Complete Works (689 page)

   I myself set a higher value on my
contributions to the psychology of religion, which began with the
establishment of a remarkable similarity between obsessive actions
and religious practices or ritual (1907
b
). Without as yet
understanding the deeper connections, I described the obsessional
neurosis as a distorted private religion and religion as a kind of
universal obsessional neurosis. Later on, in 1912, Jung’s
forcible indication of the far-reaching analogies between the
mental products of neurotics and of primitive peoples led me to
turn my attention to that subject. In four essays, which were
collected into a book with the title of
Totem and Taboo
, I
showed that the horror of incest was even more marked among
primitive than among civilized races and had given rise to very
special measures of defence against it. I examined the relations
between taboo-prohibitions (the earliest form in which moral
restrictions make their appearance) and emotional ambivalence; and
I discovered under the primitive scheme of the universe known as
‘animism’ the principle of the over-estimation of the
importance of psychical reality - the belief in ‘the
omnipotence of thoughts’ - which lies at the root of magic as
well. I developed the comparison with the obsessional neurosis at
every point, and showed how many of the postulates of primitive
mental life are still in force in that remarkable illness. Above
all, however, I was attracted by totemism, the first system of
organization in primitive tribes, a system in which the beginnings
of social order are united with a rudimentary religion and the
implacable domination of a small number of taboo-prohibitions. The
being that is revered is ultimately always an animal, from which
the clan also claims to be descended. Many indications pointed to
the conclusion that every race, even the most highly developed, had
once passed through the stage of totemism.

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   The chief literary sources of my
studies in this field were the well-known works of J. G. Frazer
(
Totemism and Exogamy
and
The Golden Bough
), a mine
of valuable facts and opinions. But Frazer effected little towards
elucidating the problems of totemism; he had several times
fundamentally altered his views on the subject, and the other
ethnologists and prehistorians seemed in equal uncertainty and
disagreement. My starting-point was the striking correspondence
between the two taboo-ordinances of totemism (not to kill the totem
and not to have sexual relations with any woman of the same
totem-clan) and the two elements of the Oedipus complex (getting
rid of the father and taking the mother to wife). I was therefore
tempted to equate the totem-animal with the father; and in fact
primitive peoples themselves do this explicitly, by honouring it as
the forefather of the clan. There next came to my help two facts
from psycho-analysis, a lucky observation of a child made by
Ferenczi, which enabled me to speak of an ‘infantile return
of totemism’, and the analysis of early animal-phobias in
children, which so often showed that the animal was a substitute
for the father, a substitute on to which the fear of the father
derived from the Oedipus complex had been displaced. Not much was
lacking to enable me to recognize the killing of the father as the
nucleus of totemism and the starting-point in the formation of
religion.

   This missing element was supplied
when I became acquainted with W. Robertson Smith’s work,
The Religion of the Semites
. Its author (a man of genius who
was both a physicist and an expert in biblical researches)
introduced the so-called ‘totem meal’ as an essential
part of the totemic religion. Once a year the totem animal, which
was at other times regarded as sacred, was solemnly killed in the
presence of all the members of the clan, was devoured and was then
mourned over. The mourning was followed by a great festival. When I
further took into account Darwin’s conjecture that men
originally lived in hordes, each under the domination of a single
powerful, violent and jealous male, there rose before me out of all
these components the following hypothesis, or, I would rather say,
vision. The father of the primal horde, since he was an unlimited
despot, had seized all the women for himself; his sons, being
dangerous to him as rivals, had been killed or driven away. One
day, however, the sons came together and united to overwhelm, kill,
and devour their father, who had been their enemy but also their
ideal. After the deed they were unable to take over their heritage
since they stood in one another’s way. Under the influence of
failure and remorse they learned to come to an agreement among
themselves; they banded themselves into a clan of brothers by the
help of the ordinances of totemism, which aimed at preventing a
repetition of such a deed, and they jointly undertook to forgo the
possession of the women on whose account they had killed their
father. They were then driven to finding strange women, and this
was the origin of the exogamy which is so closely bound up with
totemism. The totem meal was the festival commemorating the fearful
deed from which sprang man’s sense of guilt (or
‘original sin’) and which was the beginning at once of
social organization, of religion and of ethical restrictions.

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4241

   Now whether we suppose that such
a possibility was a historical event or not, it brings the
formation of religion within the circle of the father-complex and
bases it upon the ambivalence which dominates that complex. After
the totem animal had ceased to serve as a substitute for him, the
primal father, at once feared and hated, revered and envied, became
the prototype of God himself. The son’s rebelliousness and
his affection for his father struggled against each other through a
constant succession of compromises, which sought on the one hand to
atone for the act of parricide and on the other to consolidate the
advantages it had brought. This view of religion throws a
particularly clear light upon the psychological basis of
Christianity, in which, as we know, the ceremony of the totem meal
still survives with but little distortion, in the form of
Communion. I should like explicitly to mention that this last
observation was not made by me but is to be found in the works of
Robertson Smith and Frazer.

   Theodor Reik and G.
Róheim, the ethnologist, have taken up the line of thought
which I developed in
Totem and Taboo
and, in a series of
important works, have extended it, deepened it, or corrected it. I
myself have since returned to it more than once, in the course of
my investigations into the ‘unconscious sense of guilt’
(which also plays such an important part among the motives of
neurotic suffering) and in my attempts at forming a closer
connection between social psychology and the psychology of the
individual.¹ I have moreover made use of the idea of an
archaic heritage from the ‘primal horde’ epoch of
mankind’s development in explaining susceptibility to
hypnosis.

  
¹
The Ego and the Id
and
Group
Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego
.

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4242

   I have taken but little direct
part in certain other applications of psycho-analysis, though they
are none the less of general interest. It is only a step from the
phantasies of individual neurotics to the imaginative creations of
groups and peoples as we find them in myths, legends, and fairy
tales. Mythology became the special province of Otto Rank; the
interpretation of myths, the tracing of them back to the familiar
unconscious complexes of early childhood, the replacing of astral
explanations by a discovery of human motives, all of this is to a
large extent due to his analytic efforts. The subject of symbolism,
too, has found many students among my followers. Symbolism has
brought psycho-analysis many enemies; many enquirers with unduly
prosaic minds have never been able to forgive it the recognition of
symbolism, which followed from the interpretation of dreams. But
analysis is guiltless of the discovery of symbolism, for it had
long been known in other regions of thought (such as folklore,
legends, and myths) and plays an even larger part in them than in
the ‘language of dreams’.

   I myself have contributed nothing
to the application of analysis to education. It was natural,
however, that the analytic discoveries about the sexual life and
mental development of children should attract the attention of
educators and make them see their problems in a new light. Dr.
Oskar Pfister, a protestant pastor at Zurich, led the way as a
tireless pioneer along these lines, nor did he find the practice of
analysis incompatible with the retention of his religion, though it
is true that this was of a sublimated kind. Among the many others
who worked alongside of him I may mention Frau Dr. Hug-Hellmuth and
Dr. S. Bernfeld, both of Vienna.¹ The application of analysis
to the prophylactic upbringing of healthy children and to the
correcting of those who, though not actually neurotic, have
deviated from the normal course of development has led to one
consequence which is of practical importance. It is no longer
possible to restrict the practice of psycho-analysis to doctors and
to exclude laymen from it. In fact, a doctor who has not been
through a special training is, in spite of his diploma, a layman in
analysis, and a non-doctor who has been suitably trained can, with
occasional reference to a doctor, carry out the analytic treatment
not only of children but also of neurotics.

  
¹
(
Footnote added
1935:) Since these
words were written child analysis in particular has gained a
powerful momentum owing to the work of Mrs. Melanie Klein and of my
daughter, Anna Freud.

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   By a process of development
against which it would have been useless to struggle, the word
‘psycho-analysis’ has itself become ambiguous. While it
was originally the name of a particular therapeutic method, it has
now also become the name of a science - the science of unconscious
mental processes. By itself this science is seldom able to deal
with a problem completely, but it seems destined to give valuable
contributory help in the most varied regions of knowledge. The
sphere of application of psycho-analysis extends as far as that of
psychology, to which it forms a complement of the greatest
moment.

   Looking back, then, over the
patchwork of my life’s labours, I can say that I have made
many beginnings and thrown out many suggestions. Something will
come of them in the future, though I cannot myself tell whether it
will be much or little. I can, however, express a hope that I have
opened up a pathway for an important advance in our knowledge.

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4244

POSTSCRIPT

(1935)

The editor of this series of autobiographical
studies did not, so far as I know, consider the possibility that
after a certain lapse of time a sequel might be written to any of
them; and it may be that such an event has occurred only in the
present instance. I am undertaking the task since my American
publisher desires to issue the little work in a new edition. It
first appeared in America in 1927 (published by Brentano) under the
title of
An Autobiographical Study
, but it was injudiciously
brought out in the same volume as another essay of mine which gave
its title,
The Problem of Lay-Analyses
, to the whole book
and so obscured the present work.

   Two themes run through these
pages: the story of my life and the history of psycho-analysis.
They are intimately interwoven. This
Autobiographical Study
shows how psycho-analysis came to be the whole content of my life
and rightly assumes that no personal experiences of mine are of any
interest in comparison to my relations with that science.

   Shortly before I wrote this study
it seemed as though my life would soon be brought to an end by the
recurrence of a malignant disease; but surgical skill saved me in
1923 and I was able to continue my life and my work, though no
longer in freedom from pain. In the period of more than ten years
that has passed since then, I have never ceased my analytic work
nor my writing - as is proved by the completion of the twelfth
volume of the German edition of my collected works. But I myself
find that a significant change has come about. Threads which in the
course of my development had become intertangled have now begun to
separate; interests which I had acquired in the later part of my
life have receded, while the older and original ones become
prominent once more. It is true that in this last decade I have
carried out some important pieces of analytic work, such as the
revision of the problem of anxiety in my book
Inhibitions,
Symptoms and Anxiety
(1926
d
) or the simple explanation
of sexual ‘fetishism’ which I was able to make a year
later (1927
e
). Nevertheless it would be true to say that,
since I put forward my hypothesis of the existence of two classes
of instinct (Eros and the death instinct) and since I proposed a
division of the mental personality into an ego, a super-ego, and an
id (1923
b
), I have made no further decisive contributions to
psycho-analysis: what I have written on the subject since then has
been either unessential or would soon have been supplied by someone
else. This circumstance is connected with an alteration in myself,
with what might be described as a phase of regressive development.
My interest, after making a lifelong
détour
through
the natural sciences, medicine and psychotherapy, returned to the
cultural problems which had fascinated me long before, when I was a
youth scarcely old enough for thinking. At the very climax of my
psycho-analytic work, in 1912, I had already attempted in
Totem
and Taboo
to make use of the newly discovered findings of
analysis in order to investigate the origins of religion and
morality. I now carried this work a stage further in two later
essays,
The Future of an Illusion
(1927
c
) and
Civilization and its Discontents
(1930
a
). I perceived
ever more clearly that the events of human history, the
interactions between human nature, cultural development and the
precipitates of primaeval experiences (the most prominent example
of which is religion) are no more than a reflection of the dynamic
conflicts between the ego, the id and the super-ego, which
psycho-analysis studies in the individual - are the very same
processes repeated upon a wider stage. In
The Future of an
Illusion
I expressed an essentially negative valuation of
religion. Later, I found a formula which did better justice to it:
while granting that its power lies in the truth which it contains,
I showed that that truth was not a material but a historical
truth.