124

CHAPTER III

ANIMISM, MAGIC AND THE OMNIPOTENCE OF
THOUGHT

1

It is a necessary defect of studies which seek
to apply the point of view of psychoanalysis to
the mental sciences that they cannot do justice to
either subject. They therefore confine them-
selves to the rôle of incentives and make sugges-
tions to the expert which he should take into con-
sideration in his work. This defect will make
itself felt most strongly in an essay such as this
which tries to treat of the enormous sphere called
animism.¹

Animism in the narrower sense is the theory of
psychic concepts and in the wider sense, of spir-
itual beings in general. Animatism, the anima-
tion theory of seemingly inanimate nature, is a
further subdivision which also includes animatism

¹The necessary crowding of the material also compels us to dis-
pense with a thorough bibliography. Instead of this the reader is
referred to the well-known works of Herbert Spencer, J. G. Fra-
zer, A. Lang, E. B. Tylor and W. Wundt, from which all the
statements concerning animism and magic are taken. The inde-
pendence of the author can manifest itself only in the choice of
the material and of opinions.

125

and animism. The name animism, formerly ap-
plied to a definite philosophic system, seems to
have acquired its present meaning through E. B.
Tylor.²

What led to the formulation of these names is
the insight into the very remarkable conceptions
of nature and the world of those primitive races
known to us from history and from our own
times. These races populate the world with a
multitude of spiritual beings which are benevolent
or malevolent to them, and attribute the causation
of natural processes to these spirits and demons;
they also consider that not only animals and
plants, but inanimate things as well are animated
by them. A third and perhaps the most impor-
tant part of this primitive “nature philosophy”
seems far less striking to us because we ourselves
are not yet far enough removed from it, though
we have greatly limited the existence of spirits
and to-day explain the processes of nature by the
assumption of impersonal physical forces. For
primitive people believe in a similar “animation”
of human individuals as well. Human beings
have souls which can leave their habitation and
enter into other beings; these souls are the bearers
of spiritual activities and are, to a certain extent,
independent of the “bodies.” Originally souls

²E. B. Tylor, “Primitive Culture,” Vol. I, p. 425, fourth ed.,
1903. W. Wundt, “Myth and Religion,” Vol. II, p. 173, 1906.

126

were thought of as being very similar to individ-
uals; only in the course of a long evolution did
they lose their material character and attain a
high degree of “spiritualization.”³

Most authors incline to the assumption that
these soul conceptions are the original nucleus
of the animistic system, that spirits merely corre-
spond to souls that have become independent, and
that the souls of animals, plants and things were
formed after the analogy of human souls.

How did primitive people come to the pecul-
iarly dualistic fundamental conceptions on which
this animistic system rests? Through the obser-
vation, it is thought, of the phenomena of sleep
(with dreams) and death which resemble
sleep, and through the effort to explain these
conditions, which affect each individual so inti-
mately. Above all, the problem of death must
have become the starting point of the formation
of the theory. To primitive man the continua-
tion of life–immortality–would be self-evident.
The conception of death is something accepted
later, and only with hesitation, for even to us it is
still devoid of content and unrealizable. Very
likely discussions have taken place over the part
which may have been played by other observa-
tions and experiences in the formation of the
fundamental animistic conceptions such as dream

³Wundt l. c., Chapter IV, “Die Seelenvorstellungen.”

127

imagery, shadows and reflections, but these have
led to no conclusion.⁴

If primitive man reacted to the phenomena that
stimulated his reflection with the formation of
conceptions of the soul, and then transferred
these to objects of the outer world, his attitude
will be judged to be quite natural and in no way
mysterious. In view of the fact that animistic
conceptions have been shown to be similar among
the most varied races and in all periods, Wundt
states that these “are the necessary psychological
product of the myth forming consciousness, and
primitive animism may be looked upon as the
spiritual expression of man’s natural state in so
far as this is at all accessible to our observation.”⁵
Hume has already justified the animation of the
inanimate in his “Natural History of Religions,”
where he said: “There is a universal tendency
among mankind to conceive all beings like them-
selves and to transfer to every object those qual-
ities with which they are familiarly acquainted
and of which they are intimately conscious.”⁶

Animism is a system of thought, it gives not
only the explanation of a single phenomenon, but
makes it possible to comprehend the totality of

⁴Compare, besides Wundt and H. Spencer and the instructive
article in the “Encyclopedia Britannica,” 1911 (Animism,
Mythology, and so forth).

⁵I. c., p. 154.

⁶See Tylor, “Primitive Culture,” Vol. I, p. 477.

128

the world from one point, as a continuity. Writ-
ers maintain that in the course of time three such
systems of thought, three great world systems
came into being: the animistic (mythological),
the religious, and the scientific. Of these ani-
mism, the first system is perhaps the most con-
sistent and the most exhaustive, and the one which
explains the nature of the world in its entirety.
This first world system of mankind is now a psy-
chological theory. It would go beyond our
scope to show how much of it can still be demon-
strated in the life of to-day, either as a worth-
less survival in the form of superstition, or in living
form, as the foundation of our language, our
belief, and our philosophy.

It is in reference to the successive stages of
these three world systems that we say that anim-
ism in itself was not yet a religion but contained
the prerequisites from which religions were later
formed. It is also evident that myths are based
upon animistic foundations, but the detailed rela-
tion of myths to animism seem unexplained in
some essential points.

2

Our psychoanalytic work will begin at a differ-
ent point. It must not be assumed that mankind
came to create its first world system through a
purely speculative thirst for knowledge. The

129

practical need of mastering the world must have
contributed to this effort. We are therefore not
astonished to learn that something else went hand
in hand with the animistic system, namely the
elaboration of directions for making oneself mas-
ter of men, animals and things, as well as of their
spirits. S. Reinach⁷ wants to call these direc-
tions, which are known under the names of
“sorcery and magic,” the strategy of animism;
With Mauss and Hubert, I should prefer to com-
pare them to a technique.⁸

Can the conceptions of sorcery and magic be
separated? It can be done if we are willing on
our own authority to put ourselves above the
vagaries of linguistic usage. Then sorcery is
essentially the art of influencing spirits by treat-
ing them like people under the same circum-
stances, that is to say by appeasing them, recon-
ciling them, making them more favorably dis-
posed to one, by intimidating them, by depriving
them of their power and by making them subject
to one’s will; all that is accomplished through the
same methods that have been found effective with
living people. Magic, however, is something
else; it does not essentially concern itself with
spirits, and uses special means, not the ordinary

⁷“Cultes, Mythes et Religions,” T. II, Introduction, p. XV,
1909.

⁸“Année Sociologique,” Seventh Vol., 1904.

130

psychological method. We can easily guess that
magic is the earlier and the more important part
of animistic technique, for among the means with
which spirits are to be treated there are also found
the magic kind,⁹ and magic is also applied where
spiritualization of nature has not yet, as it seems
to us, been accomplished.

Magic must serve the most varied purposes.
It must subject the processes of nature to the will
of man, protect the individual against enemies
and dangers, and give him the power to injure
his enemies. But the principles on whose as-
sumptions the magic activity is based, or rather
the principle of magic, is so evident that it was
recognized by all authors. If we may take the
opinion of E. B. Tylor at its face value it can be
most tersely expressed in his words: “mistaking
an ideal connection for a real one.” We shall
explain this characteristic in the case of two
groups of magic acts.

One of the most widespread magic procedures
for injuring an enemy consists of making an
effigy of him out of any kind of material. The
likeness counts for little, in fact any object may
be “named” as his image. Whatever is subse-
quently done to this image will also happen to

⁹To frighten away a ghost with noise and cries is a form of
pure sorcery; to force him to do something by taking his name is
to employ magic against him.

131

the hated prototype; thus if the effigy has been
injured in any place he will be afflicted by a dis-
ease in the corresponding part of the body. This
same magic technique, instead of being used for
private enmity can also be employed for pious
purposes and can thus be used to aid the gods
against evil demons. I quote Frazer:¹⁰ “Ev-
ery night when the sun-god Ra in ancient Egypt
sank to his home in the glowing west he was
assailed by hosts of demons under the leadership
of the archfiend Apepi. All night long he fought
them, and sometimes by day the powers of dark-
ness 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 cere-
mony 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 burned it in a fire made of a
certain plant or grass. When Apepi himself had
thus been effectively disposed of, waxen effigies

¹⁰ “The Magic Art,” II, p. 67.

132

of each of his principal demons, and of their
fathers, mothers, and children, were made and
burnt in the same way. The service, accom-
panied 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 steal-
ing across the sky to hide the sun’s bright disk.
The fiends of darkness, clouds and rain, felt the
injury inflicted on their images as if it had been
done to themselves; they passed away, at least for
a time, and the beneficent sun-god shone out tri-
umphant once more.”¹¹

There is a great mass of magic actions which
show a similar motivation but I shall lay stress
upon only two, which have always played a great
rôle among primitive races and which have been
partly preserved in the myths and cults of higher
stages of evolution: the art of causing rain and
fruitfulness by magic. Rain is produced by
magic means, by imitating it, and perhaps also
by imitating the clouds and storm which produce
it. It looks as if they wanted to “play rain.”
The Ainos of Japan, for instance, make rain by

¹¹The Biblical prohibition against making an image of anything
living hardly sprang from any fundamental rejection of plastic
art, but was probably meant to deprive magic, which the Hebraic
religion proscribed, of one of its instruments. Frazer, l. c., p. 87,
note.

133

pouring out water through a big sieve, while
others fit out a big bowl with sails and oars as
if it were a ship, which is then dragged about
the village and gardens. But the fruitfulness of
the soil was assured by magic means by showing
it the spectacle of human sexual intercourse. To
cite one out of many examples; in some part of
Java, the peasants used to go out into the fields
at night for sexual intercourse when the rice
was about to blossom in order to stimulate the
rice to fruitfulness through their example.¹² At
the same time it was feared that proscribed in-
cestuous relationships would stimulate the soil
to grow weeds and render it unfruitful.¹³

Certain negative rules, that is to say magic
precautions, must be put into this first group.
If some of the inhabitants of a Dayak village had
set out on a hunt for wild-boars, those remaining
behind were in the meantime not permitted to
touch either oil or water with their hands, as such
acts would soften the hunters’ fingers and would
let the quarry slip through their hands.¹⁴ Or
when a Gilyak hunter was pursuing game in the
woods, his children were forbidden to make draw-
ings on wood or in the sand, as the paths in the

¹²“The Magic Art,” II, p. 98.

¹³An echo of this is to be found in the “Oedipus Rex” of
Sophocles.

¹⁴“The Magic Art,” p. 120.

134

thick woods might become as intertwined as the
lines of the drawing, and the hunter would not
find his way home.¹⁵

The fact that in these as in a great many other
examples of magic influence, distance plays no
part, telepathy is taken as a matter of course—
will cause us no difficulties in grasping the pecul-
iarity of magic.

There is no doubt about what is considered the
effective force in all these examples. It is the
similarity between the performed action and the
expected happening. Frazer therefore calls this
kind of magic imitative or homeopathic. If I
want it to rain I only have to produce something
that looks like rain or recalls rain. In a later
phase of cultural development, instead of these
magic conjurations of rain, processions are ar-
ranged to a house of god, in order to supplicate
the saint who dwells there to send rain. Finally
also this religious technique will be given up and
instead an effort will be made to find out what
would influence the atmosphere to produce rain.

In another group of magic actions the prin-
ciple of similarity is no longer involved, but in its
stead there is another principle the nature of
which is well brought out in the following exam-
ples.

Another method may be used to injure an

¹⁵l. c., p. 122.

135

THE OMNIPOTENCE OF THOUGHT

enemy. You possess yourself of his hair, his
nails, anything that he has discarded, or even a
part of his clothing, and do something hostile
to these things. This is just as effective as if
you had dominated the person himself, and any-
thing that you do to the things that belong to
him must happen to him too. According to the
conception of primitive men a name is an essen-
tial part of a personality; if therefore you know
the name of a person or a spirit you have ac-
quired a certain power over its bearer. This
explains the remarkable precautions and restric-
tions in the use of names which we have touched
upon in the essay on taboo.¹⁶ In these examples
similarity is evidently replaced by relationship.

The cannibalism of primitive races derives its
more sublime motivation in a similar manner.
By absorbing parts of the body of a person
through the act of eating we also come to possess
the properties which belonged to that person.
From this there follow precautions and restric-
tions as to diet under special circumstances.

Thus a pregnant woman will avoid eating the
meat of certain animals because their undesir-
able properties, for example, cowardice, might
thus be transferred to the child she is nourishing.
It makes no difference to the magic influence
whether the connection is already abolished or

¹⁶See preceding chapter, p. 92.

136

whether it had consisted of only one very im-
portant contact. Thus, for instance, the belief
in a magic bond which links the fate of a wound
with the weapon which caused it can be followed
unchanged through thousands of years. If a
Melanesian gets possession of the bow by which
he was wounded he will carefully keep it in a cool
place in order thus to keep down the inflamma-
tion of the wound. But if the bow has remained
in the possession of the enemy it will certainly be
kept in close proximity to a fire in order that
the wound may burn and become thoroughly
inflamed. Pliny, in his Natural History
XXVIII, advises spitting on the hand which
has caused the injury if one regrets having in-
jured some one; the pain of the injured person
will then immediately be eased. Francis Bacon,
in his Natural History, mentions the generally
accredited belief that putting a salve on the
weapon which has made a wound will cause this
wound to heal of itself. It is said that even to-
day English peasants follow this prescription,
and that if they have cut themselves with a scythe
they will from that moment on carefully keep the
instrument clean in order that the wound may
not fester. In June, 1902, a local English
weekly reported that a woman called Matilde
Henry of Norwich accidentally ran an iron nail
into the sole of her foot. Without having the

137

wound examined or even taking off her stocking
she bade her daughter to oil the nail thoroughly,
in the expectation that then nothing could hap-
pen to her. She died a few days later of
tetanus ¹⁷ in consequence of postponed antisepsis.
The examples from this last group illustrate
Frazer’s distinction between contagious magic
and imitative magic. What is considered as
effective in these examples is no longer the simi-
larity, but the association in space, the contiguity,
or at least the imagined contiguity, or the mem-
ory of its existence. But since similarity and
contiguity are the two essential principles of the
processes of association of ideas, it must be con-
cluded that the dominance of associations of ideas
really explains all the madness of the rules of
magic. We can see how true Tylor’s quoted
characteristic of magic: “mistaking an ideal con-
nection for a real one,” proves to be. The same
may be said of Frazer’s idea, who has expressed
it in almost the same terms: “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 have a corresponding control over
things.” ¹⁸

It will at first seem strange that this illuminat-

¹⁷Frazer, “The Magic Art,” p. 201–203.

¹⁸ “The Magic Art,” p. 420.

138

ing explanation of magic could have been re-
jected by some authors ‘as unsatisfactory.¹⁹
But on closer consideration we must sustain the
objection that the association theory of magic
merely explains the paths that magic travels, and
not its essential nature, that is, it does not ex-
plain the misunderstanding which bids it put
psychological laws in place of natural ones. We
are apparently in need here of a dynamic factor;
but while the search for this leads the critics of
Frazer’s theory astray, it will be easy to give a
satisfactory explanation of magic by carrying
its association theory further and by entering
more deeply into it.

First let us examine the simpler and more im-
portant case of imitative magic. According to
Frazer this may be practiced by itself, whereas
contagious magic as a rule presupposes the imi-
tative.²⁰ The motives which impel one to ex-
ercise magic are easily recognized; they are the
wishes of men. We need only assume that
primitive man had great confidence in the power
of his wishes. At bottom everything which he
accomplished by magic means must have been
done solely because he wanted it. Thus in the
beginning only his wish is accentuated.

¹⁹Compare the article “Magic” (N. T. W.) “Encyclopedia
Britannica, 11th Ed.

²⁰l. c., p. 54.

139

In the case of the child which finds itself un-
der analogous psychic conditions, without be-
ing as yet capable of motor activity, we have
elsewhere advocated the assumption that it at
first really satisfies its wishes by means of hal-
lucinations, in that it creates the satisfying sit-
uation through centrifugal excitements of its
sensory organs.²¹ The adult primitive man
knows another way. A motor impulse, the will,
clings to his wish and this will which later will
change the face of the earth in the service of wish
fulfillment is now used to represent the gratifica-
tion so that one may experience it, as it were,
through motor hallucination. Such a represen-
tation of the gratified wish is altogether compar-
able to the play of children, where it replaces the
purely sensory technique of gratification. If
play and imitative representation suffice for the
child and for primitive man, it must not be taken
as a sign of modesty, in our sense, or of resigna-
tion due to the realization of their impotence, on
the contrary, it is the very obvious result of the
excessive valuation of their wish, of the will which
depends upon the wish and of the paths the wish
takes. In time the psychic accent is displaced
from the motives of the magic act to its means,
namely to the act itself. Perhaps it would be

²¹Formulation of two principles of psychic activity, “Jahrb. für
Psychoanalyt. Forschungen,” Vol. III, 1912, p. 2.

140

more correct to say that primitive man does not
become aware of the over-valuation of his psychic
acts until it becomes evident to him through the
means employed. It would also seem as if it
were the magic act itself which compels the ful-
fillment of the wish by virtue of its similarity
to the object desired. At the stage of animistic
thinking there is as yet no way of demonstrating
objectively the true state of affairs, but this
becomes possible at later stages when, though
such procedures are still practiced, the psychic
phenomenon of skepticism already manifests it-
self as a tendency to repression. At that stage
men will acknowledge that the conjuration of
spirits avails nothing unless accompanied by be-
lief, and that the magic effect of prayer fails if
there is no piety behind it.²²

The possibility of a contagious magic which
depends upon contiguous association will then
show us that the psychic valuation of the wish and
the will has been extended to all psychic acts
which the will can command. We may say that
at present there is a general over-valuation of all
psychic processes, that is to say there is an atti-
tude towards the world which according to our
understanding of the relation of reality to

²²The King in “Hamlet” (Act III, Scene 4):
“My words fly up, my thoughts remain below,
Words without thoughts never to heaven go.”

141

thought must appear like an over-estimation of
the latter. Objects as such are over-shadowed
by the ideas representing them; what takes place
in the latter must also happen to the former and
the relations which exist between ideas are also
postulated as to things. As thought does not
recognize distances and easily brings together in
one act of consciousness things spatially and tem-
porally far removed, the magic world also puts
itself above spatial distance by telepathy, and
treats a past association as if it were a present
one. In the animistic age the reflection of the
inner world must obscure that other picture of
the world which we believe we recognize.

Let us also point out that the two principles of
association, similarity and contiguity, meet in
the higher unity of contact. Association by con-
tiguity is contact in the direct sense, and associa-
tion by similarity is contact in the transferred
sense. Another identity in the psychic process
which has not yet been grasped by us is probably
concealed in the use of the same word for both
kinds of associations. It is the same range of the
concept of contact which we have found in the
analysis of taboo.²³

In summing up we may now say that the prin-
ciple which controls magic, and the technique of

²³Compare Chapter II.

142

the animistic method of thought, is “Omnipotence
of Thought.”

3

I have adopted the term “Omnipotence of
Thought” from a highly intelligent man, a
former sufferer from compulsion neurosis, who,
after being cured through psychoanalytic treat-
ment, was able to demonstrate his efficiency and
good sense.²⁴ He had coined this phrase to
designate all those peculiar and uncanny occur-
rences which seemed to pursue him just as they
pursue others afflicted with his malady. Thus
if he happened to think of a person, he was actu-
ally confronted with this person as if he had con-
jured him up; if he inquired suddenly about the
state of health of an acquaintance whom he had
long missed he was sure to hear that this ac-
quaintance had just died, so that he could believe
that the deceased had drawn his attention to him-
self by telepathic means; if he uttered a half
meant imprecation against a stranger, he could
expect to have him die soon thereafter and bur-
den him with the responsibility for his death.
He was able to explain most of these cases in the
course of the treatment, he could tell how the
illusion had originated, and what he himself had

²⁴Remarks upon a case of Compulsion Neurosis, “Jahrb. für
Psychoanalyt. und Psychopath. Forschungen,” Vol. I, 1909.

143

contributed towards furthering his superstitious
expectations.²⁵ All compulsion neurotics are
superstitious in this manner and often against
their better judgment.

The existence of omnipotence of thought is
most clearly seen in compulsion neurosis, where
the results of this primitive method of thought
are most often found or met in consciousness.
But we must guard against seeing in this a dis-
tinguishing characteristic of this neurosis, for
analytic investigation reveals the same mechan-
ism in the other neuroses. In every one of the
neuroses it is not the reality of the experience but
the reality of the thought which forms the basis
for the symptom formation. Neurotics live in a
special world in which, as I have elsewhere ex-
pressed it, only the “neurotic standard of cur-
rency” counts, that is to say, only things inten-
sively thought of or affectively conceived are ef-
fective with them, regardless of whether these
things are in harmony with outer reality. The
hysteric repeats in his attacks and fixates through
his symptoms, occurrences which have taken place
only in his phantasy, though in the last analysis
they go back to real events or have been built up
from them. The neurotic’s guilty conscience is

²⁵We seem to attribute the character of the “uncanny” to all
such impressions which seek to confirm the omnipotence of
thought and the animistic method of thought in general, though
our judgment has long rejected it.

144

just as incomprehensible if traced to real mis-
deeds. A compulsion neurotic may be oppressed
by a sense of guilt which is appropriate to a
wholesale murderer, while at the same time he
acts towards his fellow being in a most consider-
ate and scrupulous manner, a behavior which he
evinced since his childhood. And yet his sense
of guilt is justified; it is based upon intensive and
frequent death wishes which unconsciously mani-
fest themselves towards his fellow beings. It is
motivated from the point of view of unconscious
thoughts, but not of intentional acts. Thus the
omnipotence of thought, the over-estimation of
psychic processes as opposed to reality, proves to
be of unlimited effect in the neurotic’s affective
life and in all that emanates from it. But if we
subject him to psychoanalytic treatment, which
makes his unconscious thoughts conscious to him,
he refuses to believe that thoughts are free and
is always afraid to express evil wishes lest
they be fulfilled in consequence of his utterance.
But through this attitude as well as through the
superstition which plays an active part in his life
he reveals to us how close he stands to the sav-
age who believes he can change the outer world
by a mere thought of his.

The primary obsessive actions of these neu-
rotics are really altogether of a magical nature.
If not magic they are at least anti-magic and are

145

destined to ward off the expectation of evil with
which the neurosis is wont to begin. Whenever
I was able to pierce these secrets it turned out
that the content of this expectation of evil was
death. According to Schopenhauer the problem
of death stands at the beginning of every philoso-
phy; we have heard that the formation of the
soul conception and of the belief in demons which
characterize animism, are also traced back to the
impression which death makes upon man. It is
hard to decide whether these first compulsive and
protective actions follow the principle of similar-
ity, or of contrast, for under the conditions of
the neurosis they are usually distorted through
displacement upon some trifle, upon some action
which in itself is quite insignificant.²⁶ The pro-
tective formulas of the compulsion neurosis also
have a counterpart in the incantations of magic.
But the evolution of compulsive actions may be
described by pointing out how these actions be-
gin as a spell against evil wishes which are very
remote from anything sexual, only to end up as a
substitute for forbidden sexual activity, which
they imitate as faithfully as possible.

If we accept the evolution of man’s concep-
tions of the universe mentioned above, according
to which the animistic phase is succeeded by the

²⁶The following discussions will yield a further motive for this
displacement upon a trivial action.

146

religious, and this in turn by the scientific, we
have no difficulty in following the fortunes of the
“omnipotence of thought” through all these
phases. In the animistic stage man ascribes om-
nipotence to himself; in the religious he has ceded
it to the gods, but without seriously giving it up,
for he reserves to himself the right to control the
gods by influencing them in some way or other in
the interest of his wishes. In the scientific at-
titude towards life there is no longer any room
for man’s omnipotence; he has acknowledged his
smallness and has submitted to death as to all
other natural necessities in a spirit of resignation.
Nevertheless, in our reliance upon the power of
the human spirit which copes with the laws of
reality, there still lives on a fragment of this
primitive belief in the omnipotence of thought.
In retracing the development of libidinous im-
pulses in the individual from its mature form
back to its first beginnings in childhood, we at
first found an important distinction which is
stated in the “Three Contributions to the Theory
of Sex.”²⁷ The manifestations of sexual im-
pulses can be recognized from the beginning but
at first they are not yet directed to any outer
object. Each individual component of the sex-
ual impulse works for a gain in pleasure and
finds its gratification in its own body. This stage

²⁷Monograph Series, 1916.

147

is called autoerotism and is distinguished from
the stage of object selection.

In the course of further study it proved to be
practical and really necessary to insert a third
stage between these two or, if one prefers, to
divide the first stage of autoerotism into two. In
this intermediary stage, the importance of which
increases the more we investigate it, the sexual
impulses which formerly were separate, have al-
ready formed into a unit and have also found an
object; but this object is not external and foreign
to the individual, but is his own ego, which is
formed at this period. This new stage is called
narcism, in view of the pathological fixation of
this condition which may be observed later on.
The individual acts as if he were in love with
himself; for the purposes of our analysis the ego
impulses and the libidinous wishes cannot yet be
separated from each other.

Although this narcissistic stage, in which the hith-
erto dissociated sexual impulses combine into a
unity and take the ego as their object, cannot as
yet be sharply differentiated, we can already
surmise that the narcissistic organization is never
altogether given up again. To a certain extent
man remains narcissistic, even after he has found
outer objects for his libido, and the objects upon
which he bestows it represent, as it were, emana-
tions of the libido which remain with his ego and
 

148

which can be withdrawn into it. The state of
being in love, so remarkable psychologically, and
the normal prototype of the psychoses, corre-
sponds to the highest stage of these emanations,
in contrast to the state of self-love.

This high estimation of psychic acts found
among primitives and neurotics, which we feel to
be an overestimation, may now appropriately be
brought into relation to narcissism, and interpreted
as an essential part of it. We would say that
among primitive people thinking is still highly
sexualized and that this accounts for the belief
in the omnipotence of thought, the unshaken
confidence in the capacity to dominate the world
and the inaccessibility to the obvious facts which
could enlighten man as to his real place in the
world. In the case of neurotics a considerable
part of this primitive attitude has remained as
a constitutional factor, while on the other hand
the sexual repression occurring in them has
brought about a new sexualization of the proc-
esses of thought. In both cases, whether we deal
with an original libidinous investment of thought
or whether the same process has been accom-
plished regressively, the psychic results are the
same, namely, intellectual narcissism and omnipo-
tence of thought.²⁸

²⁸It is almost an axiom with writers on this subject, that a sort
of “Solipsism or Berkleianism” (as Professor Sully terms it as

149

THE OMNIPOTENCE OF THOUGHT

If we may take the now established omnipo-
tence of thought among primitive races as a
proof of their narcism, we may venture to com-
pare the various evolutionary stages of man’s
conception of the universe with the stages of the
libidinous evolution of the individual. We find
that the animistic phase corresponds in time as
well as in content with narcism, the religious
phase corresponds to that stage of object finding
which is characterized by dependence on the par-
ents, while the scientific stage has its full counter-
part in the individual’s state of maturity where,
having renounced the pleasure principle and hav-
ing adapted himself to reality, he seeks his ob-
ject in the outer world.²⁹

Only in one field has the omnipotence of
thought been retained in our own civilization,
namely in art. In art alone it still happens that
man, consumed by his wishes, produces some-
thing similar to the gratification of these wishes
and this playing, thanks to artistic illusion, calls
forth affects as if it were something real. We
rightly speak of the magic of art and compare the
artist with a magician. But this comparison is

he finds it in the child) operates in the savage to make him refuse
to recognize death as a fact.–Marett, “Pre-animistic Religion,
Folklore,” Vol. XI, 1900, p. 178.

²⁹ We merely wish to indicate here that the original narcism of
the child is decisive for the interpretation of its character de-
velopment and that it precludes the assumption of a primitive
feeling of inferiority for the child.

150

perhaps more important than it claims to be.
Art, which certainly did not begin as art for art’s
sake, originally served tendencies which to-day
have for the greater part ceased to exist.
Among these we may suspect various magic in-
tentions.³⁰

4

Animism, the first conception of the world
which man succeeded in evolving, was therefore
psychological. It did not yet require any
science to establish it, for science sets in only after
we have realized that we do not know the world
and that we must therefore seek means of getting
to know it. But animism was natural and self-
evident to primitive man; he knew how the things
of the world were constituted, and as man con-
ceived himself to be. We are therefore prepared
to find that primitive man transferred the struc-

³⁰⁾S. Reinach, “L’art et la Magie,” in the collection, “Cultes,
Mythes et Religions,” Vol. I, p. 125–136. Reinach thinks that the
primitive artists who have left us the scratched or painted animal
pictures in the caves of France did not want to “arouse” pleasure,
but to “conjure things.” He explains this by showing that these
drawings are in the darkest and most inaccessible part of the
caves and that representations of feared beasts of prey are absent.
“Les modernes parlent souvent, par hyperbole, de la magie du
pinceau ou du ciseau d’un grand artiste et, en général, de la
magie de l’art. Entendu en sense propre, qui est celui d’une con-
trainte mystique exercée par la volonté de l’homme sur d’autres
volontés ou sur les choses, cette expression n’est plus admissible;
mais nous avons vu qu’elle était autrefois rigoureusement vraie, du
moins dans l’opinion des artistes” (p. 136).

151

tural relations of his own psyche to the outer
world,³¹ and on the other hand we may make the
attempt to transfer back into the human soul
what animism teaches about the nature of things.
Magic, the technique of animism, clearly and
unmistakably shows the tendency of forcing the
laws of psychic life upon the reality of things,
under conditions where spirits did not yet have
to play any rôle, and could still be taken as
objects of magic treatment. The assumptions
of magic are therefore of older origin than the
spirit theory, which forms the nucleus of ani-
mism. Our psychoanalytic view here coincides
with a theory of R. R. Marett, according to
which animism is preceded by a pre-animistic
stage the nature of which is best indicated by
the name Animatism (the theory of general ani-
mation). We have practically no further knowl-
edge of pre-animism, as no race has yet been
found without conceptions of spirits.³²

While magic still retains the full omnipotence
of ideas, animism has ceded part of this omnipo-
tence to spirits and thus has started on the way
to form a religion. Now what could have moved
primitive man to this first act of renunciation?
It could hardly have been an insight into the in-

³¹ Recognized through so-called endopsychic perceptions.

³² R. R. Marett, “Pre-animistic Religion, Folklore,” Vol. XI,
No. 2, London, 1900.—Comp. Wundt, “Myth and Religion,” Vol.
II, p. 171.

152

correctness of his assumptions, for he continued
to retain the magic technique.

As pointed out elsewhere, spirits and demons
were nothing but the projection of primitive
man’s emotional impulses;³³ he personified the
things he endowed with affects, populated the
world with them and then rediscovered his inner
psychic processes outside himself, quite like the
ingenious paranoiac Schreber, who found the
fixations and detachments of his libido reflected
in the fates of the “God-
rays” which he in-
vented.³⁴

As on a former occasion,³⁵ we want to avoid the
problem as to the origin of the tendency to pro-
ject psychic processes into the outer world. It
is fair to assume, however, that this tendency be-
comes stronger where the projection into the
outer world offers psychic relief. Such a state
of affairs can with certainty be expected if the
impulses struggling for omnipotence have come
into conflict with each other, for then they evi-
dently cannot all become omnipotent. The mor-

³³We assume that in this early narcistic stage feelings from
libidinous and other sources of excitement are perhaps still indis-
tinguishably combined with each other.

³⁴Schreber, “Denwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken,” 1903.—
Freud, Psychoanalytic Observations concerning an autobiog-
raphically described case of Paranoia, “Jahrbuch für Psycho-
analyt. Forsch,” Vol. III, 1911.

³⁵Compare the latest communication about the Schreber case,
p. 59.

153

bid process in paranoia actually uses the mechan-
ism of projection to solve such conflicts which
arise in the psychic life. However, it so hap-
pens that the model case of such a conflict be-
tween two parts of an antithesis is the ambivalent
attitude which we have analyzed in detail in the
situation of the mourner at the death of one dear
to him. Such a case appeals to us as especially
fitted to motivate the creation of projection
formations. Here again we are in agreement
with those authors who declare that evil spirits
were the first born among spirits, and who find
the origin of soul conceptions in the impression
which death makes upon the survivors. We dif-
fer from them only in not putting the intellec-
tual problem which death imposes upon the living
into the foreground, instead of which we trans-
fer the force which stimulates inquiry to the con-
flict of feelings into which this situation plunges
the survivor.

The first theoretical accomplishment of man,
the creation of spirits, would therefore spring
from the same source as the first moral restric-
tions to which he subjects himself, namely, the
rules of taboo. But the fact that they have the
same source should not prejudice us in favor of
a simultaneous origin. If it really were the situa-
tion of the survivor confronted by the dead which
first caused primitive man to reflect, so that he

154

was compelled to surrender some of his omnipo-
tence to spirits and to sacrifice a part of the free
will of his actions, these cultural creations would
be a first recognition of the ἀνάγκη, which opposes
man’s narcism. Primitive man would bow to
the superior power of death with the same ges-
ture with which he seems to deny it.

If we have the courage to follow our assump-
tions further, we may ask what essential part of
our psychological structure is reflected and re-
viewed in the projection formation of souls and
spirits. It is then difficult to dispute that the
primitive conception of the soul, though still far
removed from the later and wholly immaterial
soul, nevertheless shares its nature and therefore
looks upon a person or thing as a duality, over
the two elements of which the known properties
and changes of the whole are distributed. This
origin duality, we have borrowed the term from
Herbert Spencer,³⁶ is already identical with the
dualism which manifests itself in our customary
separation of spirit from body, and whose inde-
structible linguistic manifestations we recognize,
for instance, in the description of a person who
faints or raves as one who is “beside himself.”³⁷

The thing which we, just like primitive man,
project into outer reality, can hardly be anything

³⁶“Principles of Sociology,” Vol. I.

³⁷Herbert Spencer, l. c., p. 179.

155

else than the recognition of a state in which a
given thing is present to the senses and to con-
sciousness, next to which another state exists in
which the thing is latent, but can reappear, that
is to say, the co-existence of perception and mem-
ory, or, to generalize it, the existence of uncon-
scious psychic processes next to conscious ones.³⁸

It might be said that in the last analysis the
“spirit” of a person or a thing is the faculty of
remembering and representing the object, after
he or it was withdrawn from conscious percep-
tion.

Of course we must not expect from either the
primitive or the current conception of the “soul”
that its line of demarcation from other parts
should be as marked as that which contemporary
science draws between conscious and unconscious
psychic activity. The animistic soul, on the con-
trary, unites determinants from both sides. Its
flightiness and mobility, its faculty of leaving
the body, of permanently or temporarily taking
possession of another body, all these are char-
acteristics which remind us unmistakably of the
nature of consciousness. But the way in which
it keeps itself concealed behind the personal ap-
pearance reminds us of the unconscious; to-day

³⁸Compare my short paper: “A Note on the Unconscious in
Psychoanalysis,” in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical
Research, Part LXVI, Vol. XXVI, London, 1912.

156

we no longer ascribe its unchangeableness and
indestructibility to conscious but to unconscious
processes and look upon these as the real bear-
ers of psychic activity.

We said before that animism is a system of
thought, the first complete theory of the world;
we now want to draw certain inferences through
psychoanalytic interpretation of such a system.
Our everyday experience is capable of constantly
showing us the main characteristics of the “sys-
tem.” We dream during the night and have
learnt to interpret the dream in the daytime.
The dream can, without being untrue to its na-
ture, appear confused and incoherent; but on the
other hand it can also imitate the order of im-
pressions of an experience, infer one occurrence
from another, and refer one part of its content
to another. The dream succeeds more or less
in this, but hardly ever succeeds so completely
that an absurdity or a gap in the structure does
not appear somewhere. If we subject the dream
to interpretation we find that this unstable and
irregular order of its components is quite un-
important for our understanding of it. The es-
sential part of the dream are the dream thoughts,
which have, to be sure, a significant, coherent
order. But their order is quite different from
that which we remember from the manifest con-
tent of the dream. The coherence of the dream

157

thoughts has been abolished and may either re
main altogether lost or can be replaced by the
new coherence of the dream content. Besides
the condensation of the dream elements there is
almost regularly a re-grouping of the same which
is more or less independent of the former order.
We say in conclusion, that what the dream-work
has made out of the material of the dream
thoughts has been subjected to a new influence,
the so-called “secondary elaboration,” the object
of which evidently is to do away with the inco
herence and incomprehensibility caused by the
dream-work, in favor of a new “meaning.” This
new meaning which has been brought about by
the secondary elaboration is no longer the mean
ing of the dream thoughts.
The secondary elaboration of the product of
the dream-work is an excellent example of the
nature and the pretensions of a system. An in
tellectual function in us demands the unification,
coherence and comprehensibility of everything
perceived and thought of, and does not hesitate
to construct a false connection if, as a result of
special circumstances, it cannot grasp the right
one. We know such system formations not only
from the dream, but also from phobias, from com
pulsive thinking and from the types of delusions.
The system formation is most ingenious in de
lusional states (paranoia) and dominates the

158

clinical picture, but it also must not be overlooked
in other forms of neuropsychoses. In every case
we can show that a re-arrangement of the psychic
material takes place, which may often be quite
violent, provided it seems comprehensible from
the point of view of the system. The best indi-
cation that a system has been formed then lies
in the fact that each result of it can be shown to
have at least two motivations one of which
springs from the assumptions of the system and
is therefore eventually delusional,—and a hid-
den one which, however, we must recognize as
the real and effective motivation.

An example from a neurosis may serve as il-
lustration. In the chapter on taboo I mentioned
a patient whose compulsive prohibitions corre-
spond very neatly to the taboo of the Maori.³⁹
The neurosis of this woman was directed against
her husband and culminated in the defense
against the unconscious wish for his death. But
her manifest systematic phobia concerned the
mention of death in general, in which her hus-
band was altogether eliminated and never be-
came the object of conscious solicitude. One
day she heard her husband give an order to have
his dull razors taken to a certain shop to have
them sharpened. Impelled by a peculiar un-
rest she went to the shop herself and on her re-
 

³⁹ p. 26.

159

turn from this reconnoiter she asked her husband
to lay the razors aside for good because she had
discovered that there was a warehouse of coffins
and funeral accessories next to the shop he men-
tioned. She claimed that he had intentionally
brought the razors into permanent relation with
the idea of death. This was then the systematic
motivation of the prohibition, but we may be
sure that the patient would have brought home
the prohibition relating to the razors even if she
had not discovered this warehouse in the neigh-
borhood. For it would have been sufficient if on
her way to the shop she had met a hearse, a
person in mourning, or somebody carrying a
wreath. The net of determinants was spread
out far enough to catch the prey in any case, it
was simply a question whether she should pull it
in or not. It could be established with certainty
that she did not mobilize the determinants of the
prohibition in other circumstances. She would
then have said that it had been one of her “better
days.” The real reason for the prohibition of
the razor was, of course, as we can easily guess,
her resistance against a pleasurably accentuated
idea that her husband might cut his throat with
the sharpened razors.

In much the same way a motor inhibition, an
abasia or an agoraphobia, becomes perfected and
detailed if the symptom once succeeds in repre-

160

senting an unconscious wish and of imposing a
defense against it. All the patient’s remaining
unconscious phantasies and effective reminis-
cences strive for symptomatic expression through
this outlet, when once it has been opened, and
range themselves appropriately in the new order
within the sphere of the disturbance of gait. It
would therefore be a futile and really foolish way
to begin to try to understand the sympto-
matic structure and the details of, let us say, an
agoraphobia, in terms of its basic assumptions.
For the whole logic and strictness of connection
is only apparent. Sharper observation can re-
veal, as in the formation of the façade in the
dream, the greatest inconsistency and arbitrari-
ness in the symptom formation. The details of
such a systematic phobia take their real motiva-
tion from concealed determinants which must
have nothing to do with the inhibition in gait;
it is for this reason that the form of such a phobia
varies so and is so contradictory in different
people.

If we now attempt to retrace the system of
animism with which we are concerned, we may
conclude from our insight into other psycho-
logical systems that “superstition” need not be
the only and actual motivation of such a single
rule or custom even among primitive races, and
that we are not relieved of the obligation of seek-
 

161

ing for concealed motives. Under the domi-
nance of an animistic system it is absolutely es-
sential that each rule and activity should receive
a systematic motivation which we to-day call
“superstitious.” But “superstition,” like “anxi-
ety,” “dreams,” and “demons,” is one of the pre-
liminaries of psychology which have been dis-
sipated by psychoanalytic investigation. If we
get behind these structures, which like a screen
conceal understanding, we realize that the psychic
life and the cultural level of savages have hitherto
been inadequately appreciated.

If we regard the repression of impulses as a
measure of the level of culture attained, we must
admit that under the animistic system too, prog-
ress and evolution have taken place, which un-
justly have been under-estimated on account of
their superstitious motivation. If we hear that
the warriors of a savage tribe impose the great-
est chastity and cleanliness upon themselves as
soon as they go upon the war-path,⁴⁰ the obvious
explanation is that they dispose of their refuse
in order that the enemy may not come into posses-
sion of this part of their person in order to harm
them by magical means, and we may surmise
analogous superstitious motivations for their ab-
stinence. Nevertheless the fact remains that the
impulse is renounced and we probably under-
 

⁴⁰Frazer, “Taboo and the Perils of the Soul, p. 158.

162

stand the case better if we assume that the sav-
age warrior imposes such restrictions upon him-
self in compensation, because he is on the point
of allowing himself the full satisfaction of cruel
and hostile impulses otherwise forbidden. The
same holds good for the numerous cases of sex-
ual restriction while he is pre-occupied with diffi-
cult or responsible tasks.⁴¹ Even if the basis of
these prohibitions can be referred to some asso-
ciation with magic, the fundamental conception
of gaining greater strength by foregoing grati-
fication of desires nevertheless remains unmistak-
able, and besides the magic rationalization of the
prohibition, one must not neglect its hygienic
root. When the men of a savage tribe go away
to hunt, fish, make war or collect valuable plants,
the women at home are in the meantime subjected
to numerous oppressive restrictions which, ac-
cording to the savages themselves, exert a sym-
pathetic effect upon the success of the far away
expedition. But it does not require much accu-
men to guess that this element acting at a dis-
tance is nothing but a thought of home, the
longing of the absent, and that these disguises
conceal the sound psychological insight that the
men will do their best only if they are fully as-
sured of the whereabouts of their guarded

⁴¹Frazer, l. c., p. 200.

163

women. On other occasions the thought is di-
rectly expressed without magic motivation, that
the conjugal infidelity of the wife thwarts the
absent husband’s efforts.

The countless taboo rules to which the women
of savages are subject during their menstrual
periods are motivated by the superstitious dread
of blood which in all probability actually deter-
mines it. But it would be wrong to overlook the
possibility that this blood dread also serves
æsthetic and hygienic purposes which in every
case have to be covered by magic motivations.

We are probably not mistaken in assuming
that such attempted explanations expose us to
the reproach of attributing a most improbable
delicacy of psychic activities to contemporary
savages.

But I think that we may easily make the same
mistake with the psychology of these races who
have remained at the animistic stage that we
made with the psychic life of the child, which we
adults understood no better and whose richness
and fineness of feeling we have therefore so
greatly undervalued.

I want to consider another group of hitherto
unexplained taboo rules because they admit of
an explanation with which the psychoanalyst is
familiar. Under certain conditions it is forbid-
 

164

den to many savage races to keep in the house
sharp weapons and instruments for cutting.⁴²
Frazer cites a German superstition that a knife
must not be left lying with the edge pointing up-
ward because God and the angels might injure
themselves with it. May we not recognize in this
taboo a premonition of certain “symptomatic
actions” ⁴³ for which the sharp weapon might be
used by unconscious evil impulses?

⁴² Frazer, l. c., p. 237.

⁴³ Freud, “Psychopathology of Everyday Life,” p. 215, trans.
by A. A. Brill (The Macmillan Company, N. Y., and T. Fisher
Unwin, London).