5

AUTHOR’S PREFACE

The essays treated here appeared under the subtitle of
this book in the first numbers of the periodical Imago
edited by me. They represent my first efforts to apply
view-points and results of psychoanalysis to un-
explained problems of racial psychology. In method
this book contrasts with that of W. Wundt and the
works of the Zurich Psychoanalytic School. The
former tries to accomplish the same object through
assumptions and procedures from non-analytic psycho-
logy, while the latter follow the opposite course and
strive to settle problems of individual psychology by
referring to material of racial psychology.¹⁾ I am
pleased to say that the first stimulus for my own works
came from these two sources.

I am fully aware of the shortcomings in these essays.
I shall not touch upon those which are characteristic
of first efforts at investigation. The others, however,
demand a word of explanation. The four essays which
are here collected will be of interest to a wide circle of
educated people, but they can only be thoroughly
understood and judged by those who are really ac-
customed to this method of thought.

¹⁾Jung: Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (Transformations
and Symbols of the Libido), translated by Dr. Beatrice Hinkle
under the title The Psychology of the Unconscious, and Principles
of Psychoanalysis, Nervous and Mental Diseases.

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AUTHOR’S PREFACE

quainted with psychoanalysis as such. It is hoped that
they may serve as a bond between students of ethno-
logy, folklore and of the allied sciences, and
psychoanalysts; they cannot, however, supply both
groups the entire requisites for such co-
operation.
They will not furnish the former with sufficient insight
into the new psychological technique, nor will the
psychoanalysts acquire through them an adequate
command over the material to be elaborated. Both
groups will have to content themselves with whatever
attention they can stimulate here and there and with
the hope that frequent meetings between them will not
remain unproductive for science.

The two principal themes, totem and taboo, which
give the name to this small book are not treated alike
here. The problem of taboo is presented more ex-
haustively, and the effort to solve it is approached with
perfect confidence. The investigation of totemism
may be modestly expressed as: “This is all that
psycho-
analytic study can contribute at present to the
elucidation of the problem of totemism.” This
difference in the treatment of the two subjects is due to
the fact that taboo still exists in our midst. To be
sure, it is negatively conceived and directed to different
contents, but according to its psychological nature, it is
still nothing else than Kant’s “Categorical Impera-
tive,” which tends to act compulsively and rejects all
conscious motivations. On the other hand totemism
is a religio-
social institution which is alien to our
present feelings; it has long been abandoned and

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AUTHOR'S PREFACE

replaced by new forms. In the religions, morals, and
customs of the civilized races of to-
day it has left only
slight traces, and even among those races where it is
still retained, it has had to undergo great changes.
The social and material progress of the history of man-
kind could obviously change taboo much less than
totemism.

In this book the attempt is ventured to find the
original meaning of totemism through its infantile
traces, that is, through the indications in which it re-
appears in the development of our own children. The
close connection between totem and taboo indicates
the further paths to the hypothesis maintained here.
And although this hypothesis leads to somewhat
improbable conclusions, there is no reason for rejecting
the possibility that it comes more or less near to the
reality which is so hard to reconstruct.