The psychical disorders of male potency 11 страница

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.

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 (1909b) 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.

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 (1909b).

² In his giraffe phantasy.0

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 (1913a) 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 (1913b), Rank (1913) and Eder (1913).1

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.

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.

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, ßåñïõñãßá) - 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.

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.

But why is this binding force attributed to eating and drinking together? In primitive societies there was only one kind of bond which was absolute and inviolable - that of kinship. The solidarity of such a fellowship was complete. ‘A kin was a group of persons whose lives were so bound up together, in what must be called a physical unity, that they could be treated as parts of one common life.... In a case of homicide Arabian tribesmen do not say, "The blood of M. or N. has been spilt", naming the man; they say, "Our blood has been spilt". In Hebrew the phrase by which one claims kinship is "I am your bone and your flesh".’ Thus kinship implies participation in a common substance. It is therefore natural that it is not merely based on the fact that a man is a part of his mother’s substance, having been born of her and having been nourished by her milk, but that it can be acquired and strengthened by food which a man eats later and with which his body is renewed. If a man shared a meal with his god he was expressing a conviction that they were of one substance; and he would never share a meal with one whom he regarded as a stranger.

The sacrificial meal, then, was originally a feast of kinsmen, in accordance with the law that only kinsmen eat together. In our own society the members of a family have their meals in common; but the sacrificial meal bears no relation to the family. Kinship is an older thing than family life, and in the most primitive societies known to us the family contained members of more than one kindred. The man married a woman of another clan and the children inherited their mother’s clan; so that there was no communion of kin between the man and the other members of the family. In a family of such a kind there was no common meal. To this day, savages eat apart and alone and the religious food prohibitions of totemism often make it impossible for them to eat in common with their wives and children.

Let us now turn to the sacrificial animal. As we have heard, there is no gathering of a clan without an animal sacrifice, nor - and this now becomes significant - any slaughter of an animal except upon these ceremonial occasions. While game and the milk of domestic animals might be consumed without any qualms, religious scruples made it impossible to kill a domestic animal for private purposes. There cannot be the slightest doubt, says Robertson Smith, that the slaughter of a victim was originally among the acts which ‘are illegal to an individual, and can only be justified when the whole clan shares the responsibility of the deed

.’¹ So far as I know, there is only one class of actions recognized by early nations to which this description applies, viz. actions which involve an invasion of the sanctity of the tribal blood. In fact, a life which no single tribesman is allowed to invade, and which can be sacrificed only by the consent and common action of the kin, stands on the same footing with the life of the fellow-tribesman.’ The rule that every participant at the sacrificial meal must eat a share of the flesh of the victim has the same meaning as the provision that the execution of a guilty tribesman must be carried out by the tribe as a whole. In other words, the sacrificial animal was treated as a member of the tribe; the sacrificing community, the god and the sacrificial animal were of the same blood and members of one clan.

Robertson Smith brings forward copious evidence for identifying the sacrificial animal with the primitive totem animal. In later antiquity there were two classes of sacrifice: one in which the victims were domestic animals of the kinds habitually used for eating, and the other extraordinary sacrifices of animals which were unclean and whose consumption was forbidden. Investigation shows that these unclean animals were sacred animals, that they were offered as sacrifices to the gods to whom they were sacred, that originally they were identical with the gods themselves, and that by means of the sacrifice the worshippers in some way laid stress upon their blood kinship with the animal and the god. But in still earlier times this distinction between ordinary and ‘mystic’ sacrifices disappears. Originally all animals were sacred, their flesh was forbidden meat and might only be consumed on ceremonial occasions and with the participation of the whole clan. The slaughter of an animal was equivalent to a shedding of the tribal blood and could occur subject only to the same precautions and the same insurances against incurring reproach.

¹ [This sentence is italicized by Freud.]7

The domestication of animals and the introduction of cattle-breeding seems everywhere to have brought to an end the strict and unadulterated totemism of primaeval days.¹ But such sacred character as remained to domestic animals under what had then become ‘pastoral’ religion is obvious enough to allow us to infer its original totemic nature. Even in late classical times ritual prescribed in many places that the sacrificial priest must take to flight after performing the sacrifice, as though to escape retribution. The idea that slaughtering oxen was a crime must at one time have prevailed generally in Greece. At the Athenian festival of Buphonia a regular trial was instituted after the sacrifice, and all the participants were called as witnesses. At the end of it, it was agreed that the responsibility for the murder should be placed upon the knife; and this was accordingly cast into the sea.

In spite of the ban protecting the lives of sacred animals in their quality of fellow-clansmen, a necessity arose for killing one of them from time to time in solemn communion and for dividing its flesh and blood among the members of the clan. The compelling motive for this deed reveals the deepest meaning of the nature of sacrifice. We have heard how in later times, whenever food is eaten in common, the participation in the same substance establishes a sacred bond between those who consume it when it has entered their bodies. In ancient times this result seems only to have been effected by participation in the substance of a sacrosanct victim. The holy mystery of sacrificial death ‘is justified by the consideration that only in this way can the sacred cement be procured which creates or keeps alive a living bond of union between the worshippers and their god’.²(Ibid., 313.)

This bond is nothing else than the life of the sacrificial animal, which resides in its flesh and in its blood and is distributed among all the participants in the sacrificial meal. A notion of this kind lies at the root of all the blood covenants by which men made compacts with each other even at a late period of history. This completely literal way of regarding blood-kinship as identity of substance makes it easy to understand the necessity for renewing it from time to time by the physical process of the sacrificial meal.

¹ ‘The inference is that the domestication to which totemism inevitably leads (when there are any animals capable of domestication) is fatal to totemism.’ (Jevons, 1902, 120.)

² [This sentence is italicized by Freud.]8

At this point I will interrupt my survey of Robertson Smith’s line of thought and restate the gist of it in the most concise terms. With the establishment of the idea of private property sacrifice came to be looked upon as a gift to the deity, as a transference of property from men to the god. But this interpretation left unexplained all the peculiarities of the ritual of sacrifice. In the earliest times the sacrificial animal had itself been sacred and its life untouchable; it might only be killed if all the members of the clan participated in the deed and shared their guilt in the presence of the god, so that the sacred substance could be yielded up and consumed by the clansmen and thus ensure their identity with one another and with the deity. The sacrifice was a sacrament and the sacrificial animal was itself a member of the clan. It was in fact the ancient totem animal, the primitive god himself, by the killing and consuming of which the clans men renewed and assured their likeness to the god.

From this analysis of the nature of sacrifice Robertson Smith draws the conclusion that the periodic killing and eating of the totem in times before the worship of anthropomorphic deities had been an important element in totemic religion. The ceremonial of a totem meal of this kind is, he suggests, to be found in a description of a sacrifice of comparatively late date. St. Nilus records a sacrificial ritual current among the Bedouin of the Sinai Desert at the end of the fourth century A.D. The victim of the sacrifice, a camel, ‘is bound upon a rude altar of stones piled together, and when the leader of the band has thrice led the worshippers round the altar in a solemn procession accompanied with chants, he inflicts the first wound... and in all haste drinks of the blood that gushes forth. Forthwith the whole company fall on the victim with their swords, hacking off pieces of the quivering flesh and devouring them raw with such wild haste, that in the short interval between the rise of the day star¹ which marked the hour for the service to begin, and the disappearance of its rays before the rising sun, the entire camel, body and bones, skin, blood and entrails, is wholly devoured.’ All the evidence goes to show that this barbaric ritual, which bears every sign of extreme antiquity, was no isolated instance but was everywhere the original form taken by totemic sacrifice, though later toned down in many different directions.

¹ To which the sacrifice was offered.9

Many authorities have refused to attach importance to the concept of the totem meal, because it was not supported by any direct observation at the level of totemism. Robertson Smith himself pointed to instances in which the sacramental significance of the sacrifice seemed to be assured: for instance, the human sacrifices of the Aztecs, and others which recall the circumstances of the totem meal - the sacrifice of bears by the Bear clan of the Ouataouak tribe in America and the bear feast of the Aino in Japan. These and similar cases have been reported in detail by Frazer in the Fifth Part of his great work (1912, 2). An American Indian tribe in California, which worship a large bird of prey (a buzzard), kill it once a year at a solemn festival, after which it is mourned and its skin and feathers are preserved. The Zuni Indians of New Mexico behave in a similar way to their sacred turtles.

A feature has been observed in the intichiuma ceremonies of the Central Australian tribes which agrees admirably with Robertson Smith’s conjectures. Each clan, when it is performing magic for the multiplication of its totem (which it itself is normally prohibited from consuming), is obliged during the ceremony to eat a small portion of its own totem before making it accessible to the other clans. According to Frazer (ibid., 2, 590) the clearest example of a sacramental consumption of an otherwise prohibited totem is to be found among the Bini of West Africa in connection with their funeral ceremonies.

Accordingly, I propose that we should adopt Robertson Smith’s hypothesis that the sacramental killing and communal eating of the totem animal, whose consumption was forbidden on all other occasions, was an important feature of totemic religion.¹

¹ I am not unaware of the objections to this theory of sacrifice which have been brought forward by various writers (such as Marillier, Hubert and Mauss, etc.); but they have not diminished to any important extent the impression produced by Robertson Smith’s hypothesis.

(5)

Let us call up the spectacle of a totem meal of the kind we have been discussing, amplified by a few probable features which we have not yet been able to consider. The clan is celebrating the ceremonial occasion by the cruel slaughter of its totem animal and is devouring it raw - blood, flesh and bones. The clansmen are there, dressed in the likeness of the totem and imitating it in sound and movement, as though they are seeking to stress their identity with it. Each man is conscious that he is performing an act forbidden to the individual and justifiable only through the participation of the whole clan; nor may any one absent himself from the killing and the meal. When the deed is done, the slaughtered animal is lamented and bewailed. The mourning is obligatory, imposed by dread of a threatened retribution. As Robertson Smith (1894, 412) remarks of an analogous occasion, its chief purpose is to disclaim responsibility for the killing.

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