The psychical disorders of male potency 6 страница

In this respect taboo observances, like neurotic symptoms, have a double sense. On the one hand, in their restrictive character, they are expressions of mourning; but on the other hand they clearly betray - what they seek to conceal - hostility against the dead disguised as self-defence. We have already learned that certain taboos arise out of fear of temptation. The fact that a dead man is helpless is bound to act as an encouragement to the survivor to give free rein to his hostile passions, and that temptation must be countered by a prohibition.

Westermarck is right in insisting that savages draw no distinction between violent and natural death. In the view of unconscious thinking, a man who has died a natural death is a murdered man: evil wishes have killed him.¹ Anyone who investigates the origin and significance of dreams of the death of loved relatives (of parents or brothers or sisters) will be able to convince himself that dreamers, children and savages are at one in their attitude towards the dead - an attitude based upon emotional ambivalence.

At the beginning of this essay disagreement was expressed with Wundt’s opinion that the essence of taboo was a fear of demons. Yet we have now assented to an explanation that derives the taboo upon the dead from a fear of the soul of the dead person transformed into a demon. The apparent contradiction can easily be resolved. It is true that we have accepted the presence of demons, but not as something ultimate and psychologically unanalysable. We have succeeded, as it were, in getting behind the demons, for we have explained them as projections of hostile feelings harboured by the survivors against the dead.

Both of the two sets of feelings (the affectionate and the hostile), which, as we have good reason to believe, exist towards the dead person, seek to take effect at the time of the bereavement, as mourning and as satisfaction. There is bound to be a conflict between these two contrary feelings; and, since one of the two, the hostility, is wholly or for the greater part unconscious, the outcome of the conflict cannot be to subtract, as it were, the feeling with the lesser intensity from that with the greater and to establish the remainder in consciousness - as occurs, for instance, when one forgives a slight that one has received from someone of whom one is fond. The process is dealt with instead by the special psychical mechanism known in psycho-analysis, as I have said, by the name of ‘projection’. The hostility, of which the survivors know nothing and moreover wish to know nothing, is ejected from internal perception into the external world, and thus detached from them and pushed on to someone else. It is ho longer true that they are rejoicing to be rid of the dead man; on the contrary, they are mourning for him; but, strange to say, he has turned into a wicked demon ready to gloat over their misfortunes and eager to kill them. It then becomes necessary for them, the survivors, to defend themselves against this evil enemy; they are relieved of pressure from within, but have only exchanged it for oppression from without.

¹ Cf. the next essay in this volume.7

It cannot be disputed that this process of projection, which turns a dead man into a malignant enemy, is able to find support in any real acts of hostility on his part that may be recollected and felt as a grudge against him: his severity, his love of power, his unfairness, or whatever else may form the background of even the tenderest of human relationships. But it cannot be such a simple matter as that. This factor alone cannot explain the creation of demons by projection. The faults of the dead no doubt provide a part of the explanation of the survivors’ hostility; but they would not operate in this way unless the survivors had first developed hostility on their own account. The moment of death, moreover, would certainly seem to be a most inappropriate occasion for recalling any justifiable grounds of complaint that might exist. It is impossible to escape the fact that the true determining factor is invariably unconscious hostility. A hostile current of feeling such as this against a person’s nearest and dearest relatives may remain latent during their lifetime, that is, its existence may not be betrayed to consciousness either directly or through some substitute. But when they die this is no longer possible and the conflict becomes acute. The mourning which derives from an intensification of the affectionate feelings becomes on the one hand more impatient of the latent hostility and, on the other hand, will not allow it to give rise to any sense of satisfaction. Accordingly, there follow the repression of the unconscious hostility by the method of projection and the construction of the ceremonial which gives expression to the fear of being punished by the demons. When in course of time the mourning runs its course, the conflict grows less acute, so that the taboo upon the dead is able to diminish in severity or sink into oblivion.

(4)

Having thus explained the basis of the exceedingly instructive taboo upon the dead, we must not omit to add a few remarks that may help to increase our understanding of taboo in general.

The projection of unconscious hostility on to demons in the case of the taboo upon the dead is only a single instance of a number of processes to which the greatest influence must be attributed in the shaping of the primitive mind. In the case we have been dealing with, projection served the purpose of dealing with an emotional conflict; and it is employed in the same way in a large number of psychical situations that lead to neuroses. But projection was not created for the purpose of defence; it also occurs where there is no conflict. The projection outwards of internal perceptions is a primitive mechanism, to which, for instance, our sense perceptions are subject, and which therefore normally plays a very large part in determining the form taken by our external world. Under conditions whose nature has not yet been sufficiently established, internal perceptions of emotional and thought processes can be projected outwards in the same way as sense perceptions; they are thus employed for building up the external world, though they should by rights remain part of the internal world. This may have some genetic connection with the fact that the function of attention was originally directed not towards the internal world but towards the stimuli that stream in from the external world, and that that function’s only information upon endopsychic processes was received from feelings of pleasure and unpleasure. It was not until a language of abstract thought had been developed, that is to say, not until the sensory residues of verbal presentations had been linked to the internal processes, that the latter themselves gradually became capable of being perceived. Before that, owing to the projection outwards of internal perceptions, primitive men arrived at a picture of the external world which we, with our intensified conscious perception, have now to translate back into psychology.

The projection of their own evil impulses into demons is only one portion of a system which constituted the Weltanschauung of primitive peoples, and which we shall come to know as ‘animism’ in the following essay. There we shall have to investigate that system’s psychological characteristics, and we shall do so once again by reference to the similar systems which we find constructed by neurotics. For the moment I will only say that the prototype of all such systems is what we have termed the ‘secondary revision’ of the content of dreams. And we must not forget that, at and after the stage at which systems are constructed, two sets of reasons can be assigned for every psychical event that is consciously judged - one set belonging to the system and the other set real but unconscious.¹

Wundt (1906, 129) remarks that ‘among the activities attributed by myths all over the world to demons, the harmful predominate, so that in popular belief bad demons are clearly older than good ones’. It is quite possible that the whole concept of demons was derived from the important relation of the living to the dead. The ambivalence inherent in that relation was expressed in the subsequent course of human development by the fact that, from the same root, it gave rise to two completely opposed psychical structures: on the one hand fear of demons and ghosts and on the other hand veneration of ancestors.² The fact that demons are always regarded as the spirits of those who have died recently shows better than anything the influence of mourning on the origin of the belief in demons. Mourning has a quite specific psychical task to perform: its function is to detach the survivors’ memories and hopes from the dead. When this has been achieved, the pain grows less and with it the remorse and self-reproaches and consequently the fear of the demon as well. And the same spirits who to begin with were feared as demons may now expect to meet with friendlier treatment; they are revered as ancestors and appeals are made to them for help.

¹ The projected creations of primitive men resemble the personifications constructed by creative writers; for the latter externalize in the form of separate individuals the opposing instinctual impulses struggling within them.

² In the course of psycho-analyses of neurotics who suffer (or who suffered in their childhood) from fear of ghosts, it is often possible to show without much difficulty that the ghosts are disguises for the patient’s parents. Cf. in this connection a paper upon ‘Sexual Ghosts’ by Haeberlin (1912). Here the person concerned was not the subject’s parent (who was dead) but someone else of erotic significance to him.

0 If we follow the changing relations between survivors and the dead through the course of ages, it becomes obvious that there has been an extraordinary diminution in ambivalence. It is now quite easy to keep down the unconscious hostility to the dead (though its existence can still be traced) without any particular expenditure of psychical energy. Where, in earlier times, satisfied hatred and pained affection fought each other, we now find that a kind of scar has been formed in the shape of piety, which declares ‘de mortuis nil nisi bonum’. It is only neurotics whose mourning for the loss of those dear to them is still troubled by obsessive self-reproaches - the secret of which is revealed by psycho-analysis as the old emotional ambivalence. We need not discuss here how this alteration came about or how much share in it is due to a constitutional modification and how much to a real improvement in family relations. But this example suggests the probability that the psychical impulses of primitive peoples were characterized by a higher amount of ambivalence than is to be found in modern civilized man. It is to be supposed that as this ambivalence diminished, taboo (a symptom of the ambivalence and a compromise between two conflicting impulses) slowly disappeared Neurotics, who are obliged to reproduce the struggle and the taboo resulting from it, may be said to have inherited an archaic constitution as an atavistic vestige; the need to compensate for this at the behest of civilization is what drives them to their immense expenditure of mental energy.

And here we may recall the obscure and puzzling statement by Wundt on the double meaning of the word taboo: ‘sacred’ and ‘unclean’. (See above.) Originally, according to him, the word did not possess these two meanings, but described ‘what is demonic’, ‘what may not be touched’, thus stressing an important characteristic common to both the extreme concepts. The persistence, however (he added), of this common characteristic was evidence that the ground covered by the two - the sacred and the unclean - was originally one and did not become differentiated until later.

Our discussions, on the contrary, lead us to the simple conclusion that the word ‘taboo’ had a double meaning from the very first and that it was used to designate a particular kind of ambivalence and whatever arose from it. ‘Taboo’ is itself an ambivalent word; and one feels on looking back that the well-attested meaning of the word should alone have made it possible to infer - what has actually been arrived at as a result of extensive researches - that the prohibitions of taboo are to be understood as consequences of an emotional ambivalence. Study of the earliest languages has taught us that there were once many such words, which expressed contrary ideas and in a sense (though not in quite the same sense as the word ‘taboo’) were ambivalent.¹ Slight modifications in the pronunciation of the antithetical ‘primal word’ made it possible subsequently to give separate verbal expression to the two contrary ideas which were originally combined in it.

The word ‘taboo’ met with a different fate. As the importance of the ambivalence denoted by it diminished, the word itself, or rather the words analogous to it, fell out of use. I hope to be able, in a later connection, to make it probable that a definite historical chain of events is concealed behind the fate of this concept: that the word was at first attached to certain quite specific human relations which were characterized by great emotional ambivalence, and that its use then spread on to other analogous relations.

If I am not mistaken, the explanation of taboo also throws light on the nature and origin of conscience. It is possible, without any stretching of the sense of the terms, to speak of a taboo conscience or, after a taboo has been violated, of a taboo sense of guilt. Taboo conscience is probably the earliest form in which the phenomenon of conscience is met with.

For what is ‘conscience’? On the evidence of language it is related to that of which one is ‘most certainly conscious’. Indeed, in some languages the words for ‘conscience’ and ‘consciousness’ can scarcely be distinguished.

¹ Cf. my review of Abel’s ‘Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words’.2

Conscience is the internal perception of the rejection of a particular wish operating within us. The stress, however, is upon the fact that this rejection has no need to appeal to anything else for support, that it is quite ‘certain of itself’. This is even clearer in the case of consciousness of guilt - the perception of the internal condemnation of an act by which we have carried out a particular wish. To put forward any reason for this would seem superfluous: anyone who has a conscience must feel within him the justification for the condemnation, must feel the self-reproach for the act that has been carried out. This same characteristic is to be seen in the savage’s attitude towards taboo. It is a command issued by conscience; any violation of it produces a fearful sense of guilt which follows as a matter of course and of which the origin is unknown.¹

Thus it seems probable that conscience too arose, on a basis of emotional ambivalence, from quite specific human relations to which this ambivalence was attached; and that it arose under the conditions which we have shown to apply in the case of taboo and of obsessional neurosis - namely, that one of the opposing feelings involved shall be unconscious and kept under repression by the compulsive domination of the other one. This conclusion is supported by several things we have learnt from the analysis of neuroses.

In the first place, we have found that a feature in the character of obsessional neurotics is a scrupulous conscientiousness which is a symptom reacting against the temptation lurking in their unconscious. If their illness becomes more acute, they develop a sense of guilt of the most intense degree. In fact, one may venture to say that if we cannot trace the origin of the sense of guilt in obsessional neurotics, there can be no hope of our ever tracing it. This task can be directly achieved in the case of individual neurotic patients, and we may rely upon reaching a similar solution by inference in the case of primitive peoples.

¹ The sense of guilt in the case of taboos is not in the least diminished if the violation occurs unwittingly. (Cf. the instances above.) An interesting parallel is found in Greek mythology: the guilt of Oedipus was not palliated by the fact that he incurred it without his knowledge and even against his intention.3

In the second place, we cannot help being struck by the fact that a sense of guilt has about it much of the nature of anxiety: we could describe it without any misgivings as ‘dread of conscience’. But the anxiety points to unconscious sources. The psychology of the neuroses has taught us that, if wishful impulses are repressed, their libido is transformed into anxiety. And this reminds us that there is something unknown and unconscious in connection with the sense of guilt, namely the reasons for the act of repudiation. The character of anxiety that is inherent in the sense of guilt corresponds to this unknown factor.

Since taboos are mainly expressed in prohibitions, the underlying presence of a positive current of desire may occur to us as something quite obvious and calling for no lengthy proofs based on the analogy of the neuroses. For, after all, there is no need to prohibit something that no one desires to do, and a thing that is forbidden with the greatest emphasis must be a thing that is desired. If we were to apply this plausible thesis to our primitive peoples, we should be led to the conclusion that some of their strongest temptations were to kill their kings and priests, to commit incest, to maltreat the dead, and so on - which seems scarcely probable. And we should be met with the most positive contradiction if we were to apply the same thesis to instances in which we ourselves seem most clearly to hear the voice of conscience. We should maintain with the most absolute certainty that we feel not the slightest temptation to violate any of these prohibitions - the commandment to ‘do no murder’, for instance - and that we feel nothing but horror at the notion of violating them.

If, however, we were to admit the claims thus asserted by our conscience, it would follow, on the one hand, that these prohibitions would be superfluous - both taboo and our own moral prohibitions - and, on the other hand, the fact of conscience would remain unexplained and no place would be left for the relations between conscience, taboo and neurosis. In other words, we should be back in the state of knowledge we were in before we approached the problem from the psycho-analytic angle.

Suppose, on the other hand, that we were to take into account the finding arrived at by psycho-analysis from the dreams of normal people, to the effect that we ourselves are subject, more strongly and more often than we suspect, to a temptation to kill someone and that that temptation produces psychical effects even though it remains out of sight of our consciousness. Suppose, again, that we were to recognize the compulsive observances of certain neurotics as being guarantees against an intensified impulse to murder or as being self-punishments on account of it. In that case we should have to attach still greater importance to our thesis that where there is a prohibition there must be an underlying desire. We should have to suppose that the desire to murder is actually present in the unconscious and that neither taboos nor moral prohibitions are psychologically superfluous but that on the contrary they are explained and justified by the existence of an ambivalent attitude towards the impulse to murder.

One of the characteristics of this ambivalent relation which I have repeatedly stressed as fundamental - the fact that the positive current of desire is an unconscious one - opens the way to further considerations and to further possible explanations. Psychical processes in the unconscious are not in every respect identical with those with which our conscious mind is familiar; they enjoy some remarkable liberties that are forbidden to the latter. An unconscious impulse need not have arisen at the point where it makes its appearance; it may arise from some quite other region and have applied originally to quite other persons and connections; it may have reached the place at which it attracts our attention though the mechanism of ‘displacement’. Owing, moreover, to the indestructibility and insusceptibility to correction which are attributes of unconscious processes, it may have survived from very early times to which it was appropriate into later times and circumstances in which its manifestations are bound to seem strange. These are no more than hints, but if they were attentively developed their importance for our understanding of the growth of civilization would become apparent.

5 Before I conclude this discussion, a further point must not be overlooked which will pave the way for later inquiries. In maintaining the essential similarity between taboo prohibitions and moral prohibitions, I have not sought to dispute the fact that there must be a psychological difference between them. The only possible reason why the prohibitions no longer take the form of taboos must be some change in the circumstances governing the ambivalence underlying them.

In our analytical examination of the problems of taboo we have hitherto allowed ourselves to be led by the points of agreement that we have been able to show between it and obsessional neurosis. But after all taboo is not a neurosis but a social institution. We are therefore faced with the task of explaining what difference there is in principle between a neurosis and a cultural creation such as taboo.

Once again I will take a single fact as my starting-point. It is feared among primitive peoples that the violation of a taboo will be followed by a punishment, as a rule by some serious illness or by death. The punishment threatens to fall on whoever was responsible for violating the taboo. In obsessional neuroses the case is different. What the patient fears if he performs some forbidden action is that a punishment will fall not on himself but on someone else. This person’s identity is as a rule left unstated, but can usually be shown without difficulty by analysis to be one of those closest and most dear to the patient. Here, then, the neurotic seems to be behaving altruistically and the primitive man egoistically. Only if the violation of a taboo is not automatically avenged upon the wrong-doer does a collective feeling arise among savages that they are all threatened by the outrage; and they thereupon hasten to carry out the omitted punishment themselves. There is no difficulty in explaining the mechanism of this solidarity. What is in question is fear of an infectious example, of the temptation to imitate - that is, of the contagious character of taboo. If one person succeeds in gratifying the repressed desire, the same desire is bound to be kindled in all the other members of the community. In order to keep the temptation down, the envied transgressor must be deprived of the fruit of his enterprise; and the punishment will not infrequently give those who carry it out an opportunity of committing the same outrage under colour of an act of expiation. This is indeed one of the foundations of the human penal system and it is based, no doubt correctly, on the assumption that the prohibited impulses are present alike in the criminal and in the avenging community. In this, psycho-analysis is no more than confirming the habitual pronouncement of the pious: we are all miserable sinners.

How, then, are we to account for the unexpected nobility of mind of the neurotic, who fears nothing on his own account but everything for someone he loves? Analytical inquiry shows that this attitude is not primary. Originally, that is to say at the beginning of the illness, the threat of punishment applied, as in the case of savages, to the patient himself; he was invariably in fear for his own life; it was not until later that the mortal fear was displaced on to another and a loved person. The process is a little complicated, but we can follow it perfectly. At the root of the prohibition there is invariably a hostile impulse against someone the patient loves - a wish that that person should die. This impulse is repressed by a prohibition and the prohibition is attached to some particular act, which, by displacement, represents, it may be, a hostile act against the loved person. There is a threat of death if this act is performed. But the process goes further, and the original wish that the loved person may die is replaced by fear that he may die. So that when the neurosis appears to be so tenderly altruistic, it is merely compensating for an underlying contrary attitude of brutal egoism. We may describe as ‘social’ the emotions which are determined by showing consideration for another person without taking him as a sexual object. The receding into the background of these social factors may be stressed as a fundamental characteristic of the neurosis, though one which is later disguised by overcompensation.

I do not propose to linger over the origin of these social impulses and their relation to the other basic human instincts but shall proceed to illustrate the second main characteristic of the neurosis by means of another example. In the forms which it assumes, taboo very closely resembles the neurotic’s fear of touching, his ‘touching phobia’. Now, in the case of the neurosis the prohibition invariably relates to touching of a sexual kind, and psycho-analysis has shown that it is in general true that the instinctual forces that are diverted and displaced in neuroses have a sexual origin. In the case of taboo the prohibited touching is obviously not to be understood in an exclusively sexual sense but in the more general sense of attacking, of getting control, and of asserting oneself. If there is a prohibition against touching a chief or anything that has been in contact with him, this means that an inhibition is to be laid on the same impulse which expresses itself on other occasions in keeping a suspicious watch upon the chief or even in ill-treating him physically before his coronation. (See above.) Thus the fact which is characteristic of the neurosis is the preponderance of the sexual over the social instinctual elements. The social instincts, however, are themselves derived from a combination of egoistic and erotic components into wholes of a special kind.

This single comparison between taboo and obsessional neurosis is enough to enable us to gather the nature of the relation between the different forms of neurosis and cultural institutions, and to see how it is that the study of the psychology of the neuroses is important for an understanding of the growth of civilization.

The neuroses exhibit on the one hand striking and far-reaching points of agreement with those great social institutions, art, religion and philosophy. But on the other hand they seem like distortions of them. It might be maintained that a case of hysteria is a caricature of a work of art, that an obsessional neurosis is a caricature of a religion and that a paranoic delusion is a caricature of a philosophical system. The divergence resolves itself ultimately into the fact that the neuroses are asocial structures; they endeavour to achieve by private means what is effected in society by collective effort. If we analyse the instincts at work in the neuroses, we find that the determining influence in them is exercised by instinctual forces of sexual origin; the corresponding cultural formations, on the other hand, are based upon social instincts, originating from the combination of egoistic and erotic elements. Sexual needs are not capable of uniting men in the same way as are the demands of self-preservation. Sexual satisfaction is essentially the private affair of each individual.

The asocial nature of neuroses has its genetic origin in their most fundamental purpose, which is to take flight from an unsatisfying reality into a more pleasurable world of phantasy. The real world, which is avoided in this way by neurotics, is under the sway of human society and of the institutions collectively created by it. To turn away from reality is at the same time to withdraw from the community of man.8

III ANIMISM, MAGIC AND THE OMNIPOTENCE OF THOUGHTS(1)

Writings that seek to apply the findings of psycho-analysis to topics in the field of the mental sciences have the inevitable defect of offering too little to readers of both classes. Such writings can only be in the nature of an instigation: they put before the specialist certain suggestions for him to take into account in his own work. This defect is bound to be extremely evident in an essay which will attempt to deal with the immense domain of what is known as ‘animism’.¹

Animism is, in its narrower sense, the doctrine of souls, and, in its wider sense, the doctrine of spiritual beings in general. The term ‘animatism’ has also been used to denote the theory of the living character of what appear to us to be inanimate objects, and the terms ‘animalism’ and ‘manism’ occur as well in this connection. The word ‘animism’, originally used to describe a particular philosophical system, seems to have been given its present meaning by Tylor.²

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