865

III

ANIMISM, MAGIC AND THE OMNIPOTENCE OF
THOUGHT

I

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 themselves to the rôle of incentives
and make suggestions to the expert which he should take into considera-
tion 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 spiritual beings in general. Animatism, the anima-
tion theory of seemingly inanimate nature, is a further subdivision which
also includes animatism and animism. The name animism, formerly
applied to a definite philosophic system, seems to have acquired its pres-
ent 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 important 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
 

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

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

866

and today explain the processes of nature by the assump-
tion of impersonal physical forces. For primitive people believe in a similar “anima-
tion” 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 were thought of as being very similar
to individuals; only in the course of a long evolution did they lose their
material character and attain a high degree of “spiritualization.”¹⁾

Most authors incline to the assumption that these soul conceptions
are the original nucleus of the animistic system, that spirits merely cor-
respond 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 peculiarly dualistic fundamental
conceptions on which this animistic system rests? Through the observa-
tion, it is thought, of the phenomena of sleep (with dreams) and death,
which resembles sleep, and through the effort to explain these condi-
tions, which affect each individual so intimately. Above all, the problem
of death must have become the starting point of the formation of the
theory. To primitive man the continuation 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 observations and experiences in
the formation of the fundamental animistic conceptions such as dream
imagery, shadows and reflections, but these have led to no conclusion.²⁾

If primitive man reacted to the phenomena that stimulated his reflec-
tion 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 animis-
tic conceptions have been shown to be similar among the most varied
races and in all periods, Wundt states that these “are the necessary psy-
chological 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.”³⁾

Hune has
already justified the animation of the inanimate in his Natural History
of Religions, where he said: “There is a universal tendency among man-
kind to conceive all beings like themselves and to transfer to every ob-

¹⁾ Wundt, l.c., Chapter IV: Die Seelenvorstellungen.

²⁾ Compare, besides Wundt and H. Spencer and the instructive articles in the Encyclo-
pedia Britannica, 1911 (Animism, Mythology, and so forth).

³⁾ l.c., p. 154.

867

ject those qualities with which they are familiarly acquainted and of
which they are intimately conscious.”¹

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 the world from one point, as a continuity. Writers maintain that in
the course of time three such systems of thought, three great world sys-
tems came into being: the animistic (mythological), the religious, and
the scientific. Of these animism, the first system, is perhaps the most
consistent 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 psychological theory. It would go beyond our scope to show
how much of it can still be demonstrated in the life of today, either as a
worthless 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 animism in itself was not yet a religion but contained
the prerequisites from which religions were later formed. It is also evi-
dent that myths are based upon animistic foundations, but the detailed
relation of myths to animism seem unexplained in some essential points.

Our psychoanalytic work will begin at a different point. It must not be
assumed that mankind came to create its first world system through a
purely speculative thirst for knowledge. The 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 ani-
mistic system, namely the elaboration of directions for making one’s self
master of men, animals and things, as well as of their spirits. S. Reinach²
wants to call these directions, which are known under the names of
“sorcery and magic,” the strategy of animism. With Mauss and Hubert,
I should prefer to compare them to a technique.³

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 in-
fluencing spirits by treating them like people under the same circum-
stances, that is to say by appeasing them, reconciling them, making
them more favourably disposed 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 effec-
tive with living people. Magic, however, is something else; it does not

¹ See Tylor, Primitive Culture, Vol. I, p. 477.
² Cultes, Mythes et Religions, Vol. II: Introduction, p. XV, 1909.
³ Année Sociologique, Seventh Vol., 1904.

308

essentially concern itself with spirits, and uses special means, not the
ordinary 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,¹⁾ 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 assumptions 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 con-
nection 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 subsequently done to this image will also happen to
the hated prototype; thus if the effigy has been injured in any place
he will be afflicted by a disease 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:²⁾ “Every 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 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
burned it in a fire made of a certain plant of grass. When Apepi himself
had thus been effectively 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

¹⁾To 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.

²⁾The Magic Art, II, p. 67.

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ANIMISM, MAGIC AND OMNIPOTENCE OF THOUGHT

of certain prescribed spells, was repeated not merely morning, noon and
night, but whenever a storm was raging or a heavy rain had set in, or
black clouds were stealing 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 triumphant once more.”¹

There is a great mass of magic actions which show a similar motiva-
tion, 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 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 stimu-
late the rice to fruitfulness through their example.² At the same time it
was feared that proscribed incestuous relationships would stimulate the
soil to grow weeds and render it unfruitful.³

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.⁴ Or when a Gilyak hunter was pursuing game
in the woods, his children were forbidden to make drawings on wood
or in the sand, as the paths in the thick woods might become as inter-
twined as the lines of the drawing and the hunter would not find his
way home.⁵

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 peculiarity of magic.

There is no doubt about what is considered the effective force in all
 

¹ The 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.

² The Magic Art, II, p. 98.

³ An echo of this is to be found in the Oedipus Rex of Sophocles.

⁴ The Magic Art, p. 120.

⁵ L.c., p. 122.

870

these examples. It is the similarity between the performed action and
the expected happening. Frazer therefore calls this kind of magic imi-
tative or homœopathic. If I want it to rain I only have to produce some
thing that looks like rain or recalls rain. In a later phase of cultural
development, instead of these magic conjurations of rain, processions
are arranged 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 principle 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 examples.

Another method may be used to injure an enemy. You possess your-
self 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 anything that
you do to the things that belong to him must happen to him too. Accord-
ing to the conception of primitive men a name is an essential part of a
personality; if therefore you know the name of a person or a spirit you
have acquired a certain power over its bearer. This explains the remark-
able precautions and restrictions in the use of names which we have
touched upon in the essay on taboo.¹ In these examples similarity is
evidently replaced by relationship.

The cannibalism of primitive races derives its more sublime motiva-
tion 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 undesirable
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 whether it had consisted
of only one very important 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 inflam-
mation 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 injured some one; the pain of

¹ See preceding chapter, p. 850.

871

ANIMISM, MAGIC AND OMNIPOTENCE OF THOUGHT
the injured person will then immediately be eased. Francis Bacon, in
his Natural History, mentions the generally accredited belief that put-
ting a salve on the weapon which has made a wound will cause this
wound to heal of itself. It is said that even today 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 wound examined or even taking off her stocking she bade her daugh-
ter to oil the nail thoroughly in the expectation that then nothing could
happen to her. She died a few days later of tetanus¹ in consequence of
postponed antisepsis.

The examples from this last group illustrate Frazer’s distinction be-
tween contagious magic and imitative magic. What is considered as
effective in these examples is no longer the similarity, but the association
in space, the contiguity, or at least the imagined contiguity, or the
memory of its existence. But since similarity and contiguity are the
two essential principles of the processes of association of ideas, it must
be concluded 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 idea connection 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.”²

It will at first seem strange that this illuminating explanation of magic
could have been rejected by some authors as unsatisfactory.³ 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 explain 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 fur-
ther and by entering more deeply into it.

First, let us examine the simpler and more important case of imitative
magic. According to Frazer this may be practised by itself, whereas con-
tagious magic as a rule presupposes the imitative.⁴ The motives which

¹ Frazer, The Magic Art, pp. 201–3.
² The Magic Art, p. 420.
³ Compare the article Magic (N. T. W.), in the Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th Ed.
⁴ l.c., p. 54.

872

impel one to exercise 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.

In the case of the child which finds itself under analogous psychic
conditions, without being as yet capable of motor activity, we have else-
where advocated the assumption that it at first really satisfies its wishes
by means of hallucinations, in that it creates the satisfying situation
through centrifugal excitements of its sensory organs.¹⁾ The adult primi-
tive 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 gratification so
that one may experience it, as it were, through motor hallucination. Such
a representation of the gratified wish is altogether comparable to the
play of children, where it replaces the purely sensory technique of grati-
fication. 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 resignation due to the realization of their impotence; on the con-
trary, 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 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 fulfilment 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
practised, the psychic phenomenon of scepticism already manifests itself
as a tendency to repression. At that stage men will acknowledge that the
conjuration of spirits avails nothing unless accompanied by belief, and
that the magic effect of prayer fails if there is no piety behind it.²⁾

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 com-
mand. We may say that at present there is a general over-valuation of

¹⁾Formulation of two principles of psychic activity, Jahrb. für Psychoanalyt. Fors-
schungen, Vol. III, 1912, p. 2.

²⁾The King in Hamlet (Act III, Scene 4):
 

“My words fly up, my thoughts remain below,
Words without thoughts never to heaven go.”

873

ANIMISM, MAGIC AND OMNIPOTENCE OF THOUGHT
all psychic processes, that is to say there is an attitude towards the
world which according to our understanding of the relation of reality to
thought must appear like an over-estimation of the latter. Objects as
such are overshadowed 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 temporally 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 be-
lieve 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 association 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.¹

In summing up we may now say that the principle which controls
magic, and the technique of the animistic method of thought, is “Omnip-
otence 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 treatment, was able to demonstrate
his efficiency and good sense.² He had coined this phrase to designate
all those peculiar and uncanny occurrences 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 actually confronted with this person as if he
had conjured 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 acquaintance had just died, so that he could believe that the de-
ceased had drawn his attention to himself by telepathic means; if he
uttered a half meant imprecation against a stranger, he could expect to
have him die soon thereafter and burden 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 contributed towards furthering his superstitious expecta-
tions.

¹⁾Compare Chapter II.

²⁾Remarks upon a case of Compulsion Neurosis, Jahrb. für Psychoanalyt. und Psv-
chopath. Forschungen, Vol. I, 1909.

874

tions.¹ 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 com-
pulsion 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 distinguishing characteristic of this neurosis, for analytic
investigation reveals the same mechanism 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. Neu-
rotics live in a special world in which, as I have elsewhere expressed it,
only the “neurotic standard of currency” counts, that is to say, only things
intensively thought of or affectively conceived are effective with them,
regardless of whether these things are in harmony with outer reality. The
hysteric repeats in his attacks and fixates through his symptoms, occur-
rences 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 just as incomprehensible if traced
to real misdeeds. 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 beings in a most considerate and scrupu-
lous manner, a behaviour 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 manifest themselves towards his fel-
low 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 ema-
nates 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 atti-
tude as well as through the superstition which plays an active part in his
life, he reveals to us how close he stands to the savage, who believes he can
change the outer world by a mere thought of his.

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

¹We 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.

875

ANIMISM, MAGIC AND OMNIPOTENCE OF THOUGHT
philosophy; 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 similarity, 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.¹ The protective formulæ 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 begin 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 conceptions of the universe men-
tioned above, according to which the animistic phase is succeeded by the
religious, and this in turn by the scientific, we have no difficulty in fol-
lowing the fortunes of the “omnipotence of thought” through all these
phases. In the animistic stage man ascribes omnipotence 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
attitude 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 impulses 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 contri-
butions to the Theory of Sex. The manifestations of sexual impulses can
be recognized from the beginning, but at first they are not yet directed
to any outer object. Each individual component of the sexual impulse
works for a gain in pleasure and finds its gratification in its own body.
This stage 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 already formed into a unit
and have also found an object; but this object is not external and foreign
¹ The following discussions will yield a further motive for this displacement upon ?
trivial action.

876

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 im-
pulses and the libidinous wishes cannot yet be separated from each
other.

Although this narcistic stage, in which the hitherto 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 narcistic
organization is never altogether given up again. To a certain extent man
remains narcistic, even after he has found outer subjects for his libido,
and the objects on which he bestows it represent, as it were, emanations
of the libido which remain with his ego and which can be withdrawn
into it. The state of being in love, so remarkable psychologically, and the
normal prototype of the psychoses, corresponds 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 neu-
rotics, which we feel to be an overestimation, may now appropriately be
brought into relation to narcism, and interpreted as an essential part of it.
We would say that among primitive people thinking is still highly sexu-
alized 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 had remained as a constitutional factor, while on
the other hand the sexual repression occurring in them has brought about
a new sexualization of the processes of thought. In both cases, whether
we deal with an original libidinous investment of thought or whether the
same process has been accomplished regressively, the psychic results are
the same, namely, intellectual narcism and omnipotence of thought.¹⁾

If we may take the now established omnipotence of thought among
primitive races as a proof of their narcism, we may venture to compare
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 parents, while the scientific stage
has its full counterpart in the individual’s state of maturity where, hav-

¹⁾It is almost an axiom with writers on this subject that a sort of “Solipsism or
Berkleyanism” (as Professor Sully terms it as 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.

871

ing renounced the pleasure principle and having adapted himself to
reality, he seeks his object in the outer world.¹⁾

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 something similar to the gratifica-
tion of these wishes, and this playing, thanks to artistic illusion, calls
forth effects 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
perhaps more important than it claims to be. Art, which certainly did
not begin as art for art’s sake, originally served tendencies which today
have for the greater part ceased to exist. Among these we may suspect
various magic intentions.²⁾

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 structural relations of his own psyche to the outer
world,³⁾ 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 animism. Our psychoanalytic view here coincides with a
theory of R. R. Marett, according to which animism is preceded by a pre-

¹⁾ We merely wish to indicate here that the original narcism of the child is decisive for
the interpretation of its character development and that it precludes the assumption
of a primitive feeling of inferiority for the child.

²⁾ S. Reinach, L’Art et la Magie, in the collection Cultes, Mythes et Religions, Vol. I,
pp. 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. En
vertu en sense propre, qui est celui d’une contrainte mystique exercée par la volonté
de l’homme sur d’autres volontés ou sur les choses, cette expression n’est plus admis-
sible; mais nous avons vu qu’elle était autrefois rigoureusement vraie, du moins dans
l’opinion des artistes” (p. 136).

³⁾ Recognized through so-
called endopsychic perceptions.

878

animistic stage the nature of which is best indicated by the name Ani-
matism (the theory of general animation). We have practically no fur-
ther knowledge of pre-animism, as no race has yet been found without
conceptions of spirits.¹

While magic still retains the full omnipotence of ideas, animism has
ceded part of this omnipotence 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
incorrectness of his assumptions, for he continued to retain the magic
technique.

As pointed out elsewhere, spirits and demons were nothing but the pro-
jection of primitive man’s emotional impulses; ² he personified the
things he personified his 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 invented.³

As on a former occasion,⁴ we want to avoid the problem as to the origin
of the tendency to project psychic processes into the outer world. It is
fair to assume, however, that this tendency becomes stronger where the
projection into the outer world offers psychic relief. Such a state of af-
fairs can with certainty be expected if the impulses struggling for om-
nipotence have come into conflict with each other, for then they evidently
cannot all become omnipotent. The morbid process in paranoia actually
uses the mechanism of projection to solve such conflicts which arise in
the psychic life. However, it so happens that the model case of such a
conflict between two parts of an antithesis is the ambivalent attitude
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 differ from them
only in not putting the intellectual problem which death imposes upon
the living into the foreground, instead of which we transfer the force
which stimulates inquiry to the conflict of feelings into which this situa-
tion plunges the survivor.

¹ R. R. Marett, Pre-animistic Religion in Folklore, Vol. XI, No. 2, 1900.–comp.
Wundt, Myth and Religion, Vol. II, p. 171.

² We assume that in this early narcissistic stage feelings from libidinal and other
sources of excitement are perhaps still indistinguishably combined with each other.

³ Schreber, Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken, 1903.–Freud, Psychoanalytic
Observations concerning an autobiographically described case of Paranoia, Jahrbuch
für Psychoanalyt. Forsch., Vol. III, 1911.

⁴ Schreber, p. 59.

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ANIMISM, MAGIC AND OMNIPOTENCE OF THOUGHT

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 favour
of a simultaneous origin. If it really were the situation of the survivor
confronted by the dead which first caused primitive man to reflect, so
that he was compelled to surrender some of his omnipotence to spirits
and to sacrifice a part of the free will of his actions, these cultural crea-
tions 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 gesture with which he seems to deny it.

If we have the courage to follow our assumptions 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 re-
moved from the later and wholly immaterial soul, nevertheless shares
its nature and therefore looks upon a person or a thing as a duality, over
the two elements of which the known properties and changes of the whole
are distributed. This original duality, we have borrowed the term from
Herbert Spencer,¹ 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 de-
scription of a person who faints or raves as one who is “beside himself.”²

The thing which we, just like primitive man, project in outer reality,
can hardly be anything else but the recognition of a state in which a
given thing is present to the senses and to consciousness, 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 memory, or, to generalize it,
the existence of unconscious psychic processes next to conscious ones.³

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

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 characteristics which remind us

¹ Principles of Sociology, Vol. I.

² l.c., p. 179.

³ Compare my short paper: A note on the Unconscious in Psychoanalysis, in the
Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, Part LXVI, Vol. XXVI, 1912.

880

unmistakably of the nature of consciousness. But the way in which it
keeps itself concealed behind the personal appearance reminds us of the
unconscious; today we no longer ascribe its unchangeableness and in-
destructibility to conscious but to unconscious processes and look upon
these as the real bearers 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 nature, ap-
pear confused and incoherent; but on the other hand it can also imitate
the order of impressions of an experience, infer one occurrence from an-
other, and refer one part of its contents to another. The dream succeeds
more or less in this, but hardly ever succeeds so completely that an ab-
surdity or a gap in the structure does not appear somewhere. If we sub-
ject the dream to interpretation we find that this unstable and irregular
order of its components is quite unimportant for our understanding of it.
The essential part of the dream is 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 content of the dream.
The coherence of the dream thoughts has been abolished and may either
remain 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 independ-
ent 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 incoherence and incomprehensibility
caused by the dream-work, in favour of a new “meaning.” This new mean-
ing which has been brought about by the secondary elaboration is no
longer the meaning of the dream thoughts.

The secondary elaboration of the product of the dream-work is an ex-
cellent example of the nature and the pretensions of a system. An intel-
lectual function in us demands the unification, coherence and compre-
hensibility 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 formation not only
from the dream, but also from phobias, from compulsive thinking and
from the types of delusions. The system formation is most ingenious in
delusional states (paranoia) and dominates the clinical picture, but it
also must not be overlooked in other forms of neuroses. In every
case we can show that a re-arrangement of the psychic material takes

381

place, which may often be quite violent, provided it seems compre-
hensible from the point of view of the system. The best indication 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 hidden one which, however, we must recognize as the real and effective
motivation.

An example from a neurosis may serve as illustration. In the chapter
on Taboo I mentioned a patient whose compulsive prohibitions corre-
spond very neatly to the taboo of the Maori.¹ The neurosis of this woman
was directed against her husband and culminated in the defence against
the unconscious wish for his death. But her manifest systematic phobia
concerned the mention of death in general, in which her husband was
altogether eliminated and never became the object of conscious solici-
tude. 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 unrest she went to the shop herself, and on her return from
this reconnoitre 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 mentioned. 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 prohibi-
tion, 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 ware-
house in the neighbourhood. 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 it had been one of her “better days.” The real rea-
son 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-
senting an unconscious wish and of imposing a defence against it. All the
patient’s remaining unconscious phantasies and effective reminiscences
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 symptomatic struc-
ture

¹⁾ pp. 828 ff.

882

ture, and the details of, let us say, an agoraphobia, in terms of its basic
assumptions. For the whole logic and strictness of connexion is only
apparent. Sharper observation can reveal, as in the formation of the
façade in the dream, the greatest inconsistency and arbitrariness in the
symptom formation. The details of such a systematic phobia take their
real motivation 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 psychological
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 seeking for concealed motives.
Under the dominance of an animistic system it is absolutely essential
that each rule and activity should receive a systematic motivation which
we today call “superstitious.” But “superstition,” like “anxiety,”
“dreams,” and “demons,” is one of the preliminaries of psychology
which have been dissipated 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,
progress and evolution have taken place, which unjustly have been under-
estimated on account of their superstitious motivation. If we hear that
the warriors of a savage tribe impose the greatest chastity and cleanliness
upon themselves as soon as they go upon the war-
path,¹⁾ the obvious ex-
planation is that they dispose of their refuse in order that the enemy
may not come into possession of this part of their person in order to harm
them by magical means, and we may surmise analogous superstitious
motivations for their abstinence. Nevertheless the fact remains that the
impulse is renounced and we probably understand the case better if we
assume that the savage warrior imposes such restrictions upon himself
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 sexual restriction while he is pre-
occupied with difficult or responsible tasks.²⁾ Even if the basis of these
prohibitions can be referred to some association with magic, the funda-
mental conception of gaining greater strength by foregoing gratification
of desires nevertheless remains unmistakable, and besides the magic ra-
tionalization of the prohibition, one must not neglect its hygienic root.

¹⁾ Frazer, Taboo and the Perils of the Soul, p. 158.

²⁾ Frazer, l.c., p. 200.

883

ANIMISM, MAGIC AND OMNIPOTENCE OF THOUGHT

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 sub-
jected to numerous oppressive restrictions which, according to the sav-
ages themselves, exert a sympathetic effect upon the success of the far-
away expedition. But it does not require much acumen to guess that this
element acting at a distance is nothing but a thought of home, the longing
for the absent, and that these disguises conceal the sound psychological
insight that the men will do their best only if they are fully assured of
the whereabouts of their guarded women. On other occasions the thought
is directly expressed with magic motivation, that the conjugal infi-
delity 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 determines it. But it would be
wrong to overlook the possibility that this blood dread also serves æs-
thetic and hygienic purposes which in every case have to be covered by
magic motivations.

We are probably not mistaken in assuming that such attempted ex-
planations 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 psy-
chology 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 forbidden to many savage races
to keep in the house sharp weapons and instruments for cutting.¹ Frazer
cites a German superstition that a knife must not be left lying with the
edge pointing upward because God and the angels might injure them-
selves with it. May we not recognize in this taboo a premonition of cer-
tain “symptomatic actions”² for which the sharp weapon might be used
by unconscious evil impulses?

¹ Frazer, l.c., p. 237.

² Cf. The Psychopathology of Everyday Life.