The psychical disorders of male potency 7 страница

¹ The necessity for a concise treatment of the material involves the omission of any elaborate bibliography. Instead, I will merely refer to the standard works of Herbert Spencer, J. G. Frazer, Andrew Lang, E. B. Tylor and Wilhelm Wundt, from which all that I have to say about animism and magic is derived. My own contribution is visible only in my selection both of material and of opinions.

² Cf. Tylor (1891, 1, 425), Wundt (1906, 173)..9

What led to the introduction of these terms was a realization of the highly remarkable view of nature and the universe adopted by the primitive races of whom we have knowledge, whether in past history or at the present time. They people the world with innumerable spiritual beings both benevolent and malignant; and these spirits and demons they regard as the causes of natural phenomena and they believe that not only animals and plants but all the inanimate objects in the world are animated by them. A third, and perhaps the most important, article of this primitive ‘philosophy of nature’ strikes us as less strange, since, while we have retained only a very limited belief in the existence of spirits and explain natural phenomena by the agency of impersonal physical forces, we ourselves are not very far removed from this third belief. For primitive peoples believe that human individuals are inhabited by similar spirits. These souls which live in human beings can leave their habitations and migrate into other human beings; they are the vehicle of mental activities and are to a certain extent independent of their bodies. Originally souls were pictured as very similar to persons and only in the course of a long development have they lost their material characteristics and become to a high degree ‘spiritualized’.¹

Most authorities incline to the view that these ideas of a soul are the original nucleus of the animistic system, that spirits are only souls that have made themselves independent, and that the souls of animals, plants and objects were constructed on the analogy of human souls.

How did primitive men arrive at the peculiar dualistic views on which the animistic system is based? It is supposed that they did so by observing the phenomena of sleep (including dreams) and of death which so much resembles it, and by attempting to explain those states, which are of such close concern to every one. The chief starting-point of this theorizing must have been the problem of death. What primitive man regarded as the natural thing was the indefinite prolongation of life - immortality. The idea of death was only accepted late, and with hesitancy. Even for us it is lacking in content and has no clear connotation. There have been very lively but inconclusive discussions upon the part that may have been played in the formation of the basic doctrines of animism by such other observed or experienced facts as dream-pictures, shadows, mirror images, and so on.²

¹ Wundt (1906), Chapter IV, ‘Die Seelenvorstellungen’.

² Cf. Wundt, Herbert Spencer, as well as the general articles in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1910-11) on ‘Animism’, ‘Mythology’, etc.0

It has been regarded as perfectly natural and not in the least puzzling that primitive man should have reacted to the phenomena which aroused his speculations by forming the idea of the soul and then of extending it to objects in the external world. In discussing the fact that the same animistic ideas have emerged among the most various races and at every period, Wundt (1906, 154) declares that ‘they are the necessary psychological product of a mythopoeic consciousness... and in this sense, therefore, primitive animism must be regarded as the spiritual expression of the natural state of man, so far as it is accessible to our observation’. The justification for attributing life to inanimate objects was already stated by Hume in his Natural History of Religion: ‘There is an universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves, and to transfer to every object those qualities with which they are familiarly acquainted, and of which they are intimately conscious.’¹

Animism is a system of thought. It does not merely give an explanation of a particular phenomenon, but allows us to grasp the whole universe as a single unity from a single point of view. The human race, if we are to follow the authorities, have in the course of ages developed three such systems of thought - three great pictures of the universe: animistic (or mythological), religious and scientific. Of these, animism, the first to be created, is perhaps the one which is most consistent and exhaustive and which gives a truly complete explanation of the nature of the universe. This first human Weltanschauung is a psychological theory. It would go beyond our present purpose to show how much of it still persists in modern life, either in the debased form of superstition or as the living basis of our speech, our beliefs and our philosophies.

With these three stages in mind, it may be said that animism itself is not yet a religion but contains the foundations on which religions are later built. It is obvious, too, that myths are based on animistic premises, though the details of the relation between myths and animism seem to be unexplained in some essential respects.

¹ Quoted by Tylor (1891, 1, 477).1

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Our psycho-analytic approach to the subject, however, is from another side. It is not to be supposed that men were inspired to create their first system of the universe by pure speculative curiosity. The practical need for controlling the world around them must have played its part. So we are not surprised to learn that, hand in hand with the animistic system, there went a body of instructions upon how to obtain mastery over men, beasts and things - or rather, over their spirits. These instructions go by the names of ‘sorcery [Zauberei]’ and ‘magic [Magie]’. Reinach (1905-12, 2, xv) describes them as the ‘strategy of animism’; I should prefer, following Hubert and Mauss (1904), to regard them as its technique.

Can the concepts of sorcery and magic be distinguished? Perhaps - if we are prepared to show a somewhat arbitrary disregard for the fluctuations of linguistic usage. Sorcery, then, is essentially the art of influencing spirits by treating them in the same way as one would treat men in like circumstances: appeasing them, making amends to them, propitiating them, intimidating them, robbing them of their power, subduing them to one’s will - by the same methods that have proved effective with living men. Magic, on the other hand, is something different: fundamentally, it disregards spirits and makes use of special procedures and not of everyday psychological methods. It is easy to guess that magic is the earlier and more important branch of animistic technique; for magical methods can, among others, be used in dealing with spirits,¹ and magic can be applied as well in cases where, as it seems to us, the process of spiritualizing Nature has not yet been carried out.

Magic has to serve the most varied purposes - it must subject natural phenomena to the will of man, it must protect the individual from his enemies and from dangers and it must give him power to injure his enemies. But the principle on the presumption of which magical action is based - or, more properly, the principle of magic - is so striking that none of the authorities has failed to recognize it. Tylor, if we leave on one side an accompanying moral judgement, states it in its most succinct form as mistaking an ideal connection for a real one. I will illustrate this feature from two groups of magical acts.

¹ If a spirit is scared away by making a noise and shouting, the action is one purely of sorcery; if compulsion is applied to it by getting hold of its name, magic has been used against it.2 One of the most widespread magical procedures for injuring an enemy is by making an effigy of him from any convenient material. Whether the effigy resembles him is of little account: any object can be ‘made into’ an effigy of him. Whatever is then done to the effigy, the same thing happens to the detested original; whatever part of the former’s body is damaged, the same part of the latter’s becomes diseased. The same magical technique may be employed, not only for purposes of private enmity, but also for pious ends and for giving help to gods against malignant demons. I will quote from Frazer (1911a, 1, 67): ‘Every night when the sun-god Ra sank down to his home in the glowing west he was assailed by hosts of demons under the leadership of the arch-fiend Apepi. All night long he fought them, and sometimes by day the powers of darkness sent up clouds even into the blue Egyptian sky to obscure his light and weaken his power. To aid the sun-god in this daily struggle, a ceremony was daily performed in his temple at Thebes. A figure of his foe Apepi, represented as a crocodile with a hideous face or a serpent with many coils, was made of wax, and on it the demon’s name was written in green ink. Wrapt in a papyrus case, on which another likeness of Apepi had been drawn in green ink, the figure was then tied up with black hair, spat upon, hacked with a stone knife, and cast on the ground. There the priest trod on it with his left foot again and again, and then burnt it in a fire made of a certain plant or grass. When Apepi himself had thus been effectually disposed of, waxen effigies of each of his principal demons, and of their fathers, mothers and children, were made and burnt in the same way. The service, accompanied by the recitation of certain prescribed spells, was repeated not merely morning, noon and night, but whenever a storm was raging, or heavy rain had set in, or black clouds were stealing across the sky to hide the sun’s bright disc. The fiends of darkness, clouds, and rain felt the injuries inflicted on their images as if they had been done to themselves; they passed away, at least for a time, and the beneficent sun-god shone out triumphant once more.¹

¹ It seems probable that the biblical prohibition against making an image of any living thing originated, not from any objection to the plastic arts, but from a desire to deprive magic (which was abominated by the Hebrew religion) of one of its tools. Cf. Frazer (1911a, 1, 87 n.).3

From the vast number of magical acts having a similar basis I will only draw attention to two more, which have played a large part among primitive peoples of every age and which persist to some degree in the myths and cults of higher stages of civilization - that is, rituals for producing rain and fertility. Rain is produced magically by imitating it or the clouds and storms which give rise to it, by ‘playing at rain’, one might almost say. In Japan, for instance, ‘a party of Ainos will scatter water by means of sieves, while others will take a porringer, fit it up with sails and oars as if it were a boat, and then push or draw it about the village and gardens’. In the same way, the fertility of the earth is magically promoted by a dramatic representation of human intercourse. Thus, to take one from a countless number of instances, ‘in some parts of Java, at the season when the bloom will soon be on the rice, the husbandman and his wife visit their fields by night and there engage in sexual intercourse’ to encourage the fertility of the rice by their example.¹ There is a dread, however, that prohibited, incestuous sexual relations may cause a failure of the crops and make the earth sterile.²

Certain negative observances, that is, magical precautions, must be included in this first group. ‘When a Dyak village has turned out to hunt wild pigs in the jungle, the people who stay at home may not touch oil or water with their hands during the absence of their friends; for if they did so, the hunters would all be "butter-fingered" and the prey would slip through their hands.’³ Or again, ‘while a Gilyak hunter is pursuing game in the forest, his children at home are forbidden to make drawings on wood or on sand; for they fear that if the children did so, the paths in the forest would become as perplexed as the lines in the drawings, so that the hunter might lose his way and never return.’4

¹ Frazer (1911a, 2, 98).

² An echo of this is to be found in the Oedipus Rex of Sophocles.

³ Frazer (1911a, 1, 120).

4 Frazer (1911a, 1, 122).4

In these last, as in so many other instances of the workings of magic, the element of distance is disregarded; in other words, telepathy is taken for granted. We shall find no difficulty, therefore, in understanding this characteristic of magic.

There can be no doubt what is to be regarded as the operative factor in all these examples. It is the similarity between the act performed and the result expected. For this reason Frazer describes this sort of magic as ‘imitative’ or ‘homoeopathic’. If I wish it to rain, I have only to do something that looks like rain or is reminiscent of rain. At a later stage of civilization, instead of this rain-magic, processions will be made to a temple and prayers for rain will be addressed to the deity living in it. Finally, this religious technique will in its turn be given up and attempts will be made to produce effects in the atmosphere which will lead to rain.

In a second group of magical acts the principle of similarity plays no part, and its place is taken by another one, the nature of which will at once become clear from the following examples.

There is another procedure by which an enemy can be injured. One gets possession of some of his hair or nails or other waste products or even a piece of his clothing, and treats them in some hostile way. It is then exactly as though one had got possession of the man himself; and he himself experiences whatever it is that has been done to the objects that originated from him. In the view of primitive man, one of the most important parts of a person is his name. So that if one knows the name of a man or of a spirit, one has obtained a certain amount of power over the owner of the name. This is the origin of the remarkable precautions and restrictions in the use of names which we have already touched upon in the essay on taboo. (See p. 2699 ff.) In these examples the place of similarity is evidently taken by affinity.

The higher motives for cannibalism among primitive races have a similar origin. By incorporating parts of a person’s body through the act of eating, one at the same time acquires the qualities possessed by him. This leads in certain circumstances to precautions and restrictions in regard to diet. A woman who is with child will avoid eating the flesh of certain animals for fear that any undesirable qualities they may have (cowardice, for instance) might be passed over to the child that is nourished by her. The magical power is not affected even if the connection between the two objects has already been severed or even if the contact occurred only on a single important occasion. For instance, the belief that there is a magical bond between a wound and the weapon which caused it may be traced unaltered for thousands of years. If a Melanesian can obtain possession of the bow which caused his wound, he will keep it carefully in a cool place so as to reduce the inflammation of the wound. But if the bow was left in the enemy’s possession, it will undoubtedly be hung up close to the fire so that the wound may become thoroughly hot and inflamed. Pliny (in his Natural History, Book xxviii) tells us that ‘if you have wounded a man and are sorry for it, you have only to spit on the hand that gave the wound, and the pain of the sufferer will be instantly alleviated’. Francis Bacon (in his Sylva Sylvarum) mentions that ‘it is constantly received and avouched that the anointing of the weapon that maketh the wound will heal the wound itself’. English country people are said even to day to follow this prescription, and if they cut themselves with a scythe carefully keep the instrument clean, to prevent the wound from festering. ‘At Norwich in June 1902 a woman named Matilda Henry accidentally ran a nail into her foot. Without examining the wound, or even removing her stocking, she caused her daughter to grease the nail, saying that if this were done no harm would come of the hurt. A few days afterwards she died of lockjaw’ - as a result of this displaced antisepsis. (Frazer, ibid., 203.)

6 The last group of instances exemplify what Frazer distinguishes from ‘imitative’ magic under the name of ‘contagious’ magic. What is believed to be their effective principle is no longer similarity but spatial connection, contiguity, or at least imagined contiguity - the recollection of it. Since, however, similarity and contiguity are the two essential principles of processes of association, it appears that the true explanation of all the folly of magical observances is the domination of the association of ideas. The aptness of Tylor’s description of magic which I have already quoted now becomes evident: mistaking an ideal connection for a real one. Frazer (1911a, 1, 420) has put it almost in the same words: ‘Men mistook the order of their ideas for the order of nature, and hence imagined that the control which they have, or seem to have, over their thoughts, permitted them to exercise a corresponding control over things.’

We shall at first be surprised to learn that this illuminating explanation of magic has been rejected by some writers as unsatisfactory (e.g. Thomas, 1910-11a). On reflection, however, it will be seen that the criticism is justified. The associative theory of magic merely explains the paths along which magic proceeds; it does not explain its true essence, namely the misunderstanding which leads it to replace the laws of nature by psychological ones. Some dynamic factor is evidently missing. But whereas the critics of Frazer’s theory have gone astray in their search for it, it will be easy to arrive at a satisfactory explanation of magic merely by carrying the associative theory further and deeper.

Let us consider first the simpler and more important case of imitative magic. According to Frazer (1911a, 1, 54) it can be practised by itself, whereas contagious magic as a rule presupposes the other. It is easy to perceive the motives which lead men to practise magic: they are human wishes. All we need to suppose is that primitive man had an immense belief in the power of his wishes. The basic reason why what he sets about by magical means comes to pass is, after all, simply that he wills it. To begin with, therefore, the emphasis is only upon his wish.

Children are in an analogous psychical situation, though their motor efficiency is still undeveloped. I have elsewhere (1911b) put forward the hypothesis that, to begin with, they satisfy their wishes in a hallucinatory manner, that is, they create a satisfying situation by means of centrifugal excitations of their sense organs. An adult primitive man has an alternative method open to him. His wishes are accompanied by a motor impulse, the will, which is later destined to alter the whole face of the earth in order to satisfy his wishes. This motor impulse is at first employed to give a representation of the satisfying situation in such a way that it becomes possible to experience the satisfaction by means of what might be described as motor hallucinations. This kind of representation of a satisfied wish is quite comparable to children’s play, which succeeds their earlier purely sensory technique of satisfaction. If children and primitive men find play and imitative representation enough for them, that is not a sign of their being unassuming in our sense or of their resignedly accepting their actual impotence. It is the easily understandable result of the paramount virtue they ascribe to their wishes, of the will that is associated with those wishes and of the methods by which those wishes operate. As time goes on, the psychological accent shifts from the motives for the magical act on to the measures by which it is carried out - that is, on to the act itself. (It would perhaps be more correct to say that it is only these measures that reveal to the subject the excessive valuation which he attaches to his psychical acts.) It thus comes to appear as though it is the magical act itself which, owing to its similarity with the desired result, alone determines the occurrence of that result. There is no opportunity, at the stage of animistic thinking, for showing any objective evidence of the true state of affairs. But a possibility of doing so does arrive at a later time, when, though all of these procedures are still being carried out, the psychical phenomenon of doubt has begun to emerge as an expression of a tendency to repression. At that point, men will be ready to admit that conjuring up spirits has no result unless it is accompanied by faith, and that the magical power of prayer fails if there is no piety at work behind it.¹

¹ Cf. the King in Hamlet (III. 3):

My words fly up, my thoughts remain below:

Words without thoughts never to heaven go.8

The fact that it has been possible to construct a system of contagious magic on associations of contiguity shows that the importance attached to wishes and to the will has been extended from them on to all those psychical acts which are subject to the will. A general overvaluation has thus come about of all mental processes - an attitude towards the world, that is, which, in view of our knowledge of the relation between reality and thought, cannot fail to strike us as an overvaluation of the latter. Things become less important than ideas of things: whatever is done to the latter will inevitably also occur to the former. Relations which hold between the ideas of things are assumed to hold equally between the things themselves. Since distance is of no importance in thinking - since what lies furthest apart both in time and space can without difficulty be comprehended in a single act of consciousness - so, too, the world of magic has a telepathic disregard for spatial distance and treats past situations as though they were present. In the animistic epoch the reflection of the internal world is bound to blot out the other picture of the world - the one which we seem to perceive.

It is further to be noticed that the two principles of association - similarity and contiguity - are both included in the more comprehensive concept of ‘contact’. Association by contiguity is contact in the literal sense; association by similarity is contact in the metaphorical sense. The use of the same word for the two kinds of relation is no doubt accounted for by some identity in the psychical processes concerned which we have not yet grasped. We have here the same range of meaning of the idea of ‘contact’ as we found in our analysis of taboo. (Cf. p. 2675.)

By way of summary, then, it may be said that the principle governing magic, the technique of the animistic mode of thinking, is the principle of the ‘omnipotence of thoughts’.

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I have adopted the term ‘omnipotence of thoughts’ from a highly intelligent man who suffered from obsessional ideas and who, after having been set right by psycho-analytic treatment, was able to give evidence of his efficiency and good sense. (Cf. Freud, 1909d.) He had coined the phrase as an explanation of all the strange and uncanny events by which he, like others afflicted with the same illness, seemed to be pursued. If he thought of someone, he would be sure to meet that very person immediately afterwards, as though by magic. If he suddenly asked after the health of an acquaintance whom he had not seen for a long time, he would hear that he had just died, so that it would look as though a telepathic message had arrived from him. If, without any really serious intention, he swore at some stranger, he might be sure that the man would die soon afterwards, so that he would feel responsible for his death. In the course of the treatment he himself was able to tell me how the deceptive appearance arose in most of these cases, and by what contrivances he himself had helped to strengthen his own superstitious beliefs. All obsessional neurotics are superstitious in this way, usually against their better judgement.¹

¹ We appear to attribute an ‘uncanny’ quality to impressions that seek to confirm the omnipotence of thoughts and the animistic mode of thinking in general, after we have reached a stage at which, in our judgement, we have abandoned such beliefs.9

It is in obsessional neuroses that the survival of the omnipotence of thoughts is most clearly visible and that the consequences of this primitive mode of thinking come closest to consciousness. But we must not be misled into supposing that it is a distinguishing feature of this particular neurosis, for analytic investigation reveals the same thing in the other neuroses as well. In all of them what determines the formation of symptoms is the reality not of experience but of thought. Neurotics live in a world apart, where, as I have said elsewhere, only ‘neurotic currency’ is legal tender; that is to say, they are only affected by what is thought with intensity and pictured with emotion, whereas agreement with external reality is a matter of no importance. What hysterics repeat in their attacks and fix by means of their symptoms are experiences which have occurred in that form only in their imagination though it is true that in the last resort those imagined experiences go back to actual events or are based upon them. To attribute the neurotic sense of guilt to real misdeeds would show an equal misunderstanding. An obsessional neurotic may be weighed down by a sense of guilt that would be appropriate in a mass-murderer, while in fact, from his childhood onwards, he has behaved to his fellow-men as the most considerate and scrupulous member of society. Nevertheless, his sense of guilt has a justification: it is founded on the intense and frequent death wishes against his fellows which are unconsciously at work in him. It has a justification if what we take into account are unconscious thoughts and not intentional deeds. Thus the omnipotence of thoughts, the overvaluation of mental processes as compared with reality, is seen to have unrestricted play in the emotional life of neurotic patients and in everything that derives from it. If one of them undergoes psycho-analytic treatment, which makes what is unconscious in him conscious, he will be unable to believe that thoughts are free and will constantly be afraid of expressing evil wishes, as though their expression would lead inevitably to their fulfilment. This behaviour, as well as the superstitions which he practises in ordinary life, reveals his resemblance to the savages who believe they can alter the external world by mere thinking.

The primary obsessive acts of these neurotics are of an entirely magical character. If they are not charms, they are at all events counter-charms, designed to ward off the expectations of disaster with which the neurosis usually starts. Whenever I have succeeded in penetrating the mystery, I have found that the expected disaster was death. Schopenhauer has said that the problem of death stands at the outset of every philosophy; and we have already seen that the origin of the belief in souls and in demons, which is the essence of animism, goes back to the impression which is made upon men by death. It is difficult to judge whether the obsessive or protective acts performed by obsessional neurotics follow the law of similarity (or, as the case may be, of contrast); for as a rule, owing to the prevailing conditions of the neurosis, they have been distorted by being displaced on to something very small, some action in itself of the greatest triviality.¹ The protective formulas of obsessional neuroses, too, have their counterpart in the formulas of magic. It is possible, however, to describe the course of development of obsessive acts: we can show how they begin by being as remote as possible from anything sexual - magical defences against evil wishes - and how they end by being substitutes for the forbidden sexual act and the closest possible imitations of it.

¹ A further motive for such displacement on to a very small action will appear in what follows.1 If we are prepared to accept the account given above of the evolution of human views of the universe - an animistic phase followed by a religious phase and this in turn by a scientific one - it will not be difficult to follow the vicissitudes of the ‘omnipotence of thoughts’ through these different phases. At the animistic stage men ascribe omnipotence to themselves. At the religious stage they transfer it to the gods but do not seriously abandon it themselves, for they reserve the power of influencing the gods in a variety of ways according to their wishes. The scientific view of the universe no longer affords any room for human omnipotence; men have acknowledged their smallness and submitted resignedly to death and to the other necessities of nature. None the less some of the primitive belief in omnipotence still survives in men’s faith in the power of the human mind, which grapples with the laws of reality.

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