884

IV

THE INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM

I

The reader need not fear that psychoanalysis, which first revealed the
regular over-determination of psychic acts and formations, will be
tempted to derive anything so complicated as religion from a single
source. If it necessarily seeks, as in duty bound, to gain recognition for
one of the sources of this institution, it by no means claims exclusiveness
for this source or even first rank among the concurring factors. Only a
synthesis from various fields of research can decide what relative im-
portance in the genesis of religion is to be assigned to the mechanism
which we are to discuss; but such a task exceeds the means as well as the
intentions of the psychoanalyst.

The first chapter of this book made us acquainted with the conception
of totemism. We heard that totemism is a system which takes the place
of religion among certain primitive races in Australia, America, and
Africa, and furnishes the basis of social organization. We know that in
1869 the Scotchman MacLennan attracted general interest to the phe-
nomena of totemism, which until then had been considered merely as
curiosities, by his conjecture that a large number of customs and usages
in various old as well as modern societies were to be taken as remnants
of a totemic epoch. Science has since then fully recognized this signifi-
cance of totemism. I quote a passage from the Elements of the Psychol-
ogy of Races by W. Wundt (1912), as the latest utterance on this
question: ¹ “Taking all this together it becomes highly probable that a
totemic culture was at one time the preliminary stage of every later
evolution as well as a transition stage between the state of primitive man
and the age of gods and heroes.”

It is necessary for the purposes of this chapter to go more deeply into
the nature of totemism. For reasons that will be evident later I here give

¹p. 139.

885

preference to an outline by S. Reinach, who in the year 1900 sketched
the following Code du Totémisme in twelve articles, like a catechism of
the totemic religion:¹⁾

1. Certain animals must not be killed or eaten, but men bring up
individual animals of these species and take care of them.

2. An animal that dies accidentally is mourned and buried with the
same honours as a member of the tribe.

3. The prohibition as to eating sometimes refers only to a certain
part of the animal.

4. If pressure of necessity compels the killing of an animal usually
spared, it is done with excuses to the animal and the attempt is made
to mitigate the violation of the taboo, namely the killing, through various
tricks and evasions.

5. If the animal is sacrificed by ritual, it is solemnly mourned.

6. At specified solemn occasions, like religious ceremonies, the skins
of certain animals are donned. Where totemism still exists, these are
totem animals.

7. Tribes and individuals assume the names of totem animals.

8. Many tribes use pictures of animals as coats of arms and decorate
their weapons with them; the men paint animal pictures on their bodies
or have them tattooed.

9. If the totem is one of the feared and dangerous animals it is as-
sumed that the animal will spare the members of the tribe named after
it.

10. The totem animal protects and warns the members of the tribe.

11. The totem animal foretells the future to those faithful to it and
serves as their leader.

12. The members of a totem tribe often believe that they are con-
nected with the totem animal by the bond of common origin.

The value of this catechism of the totem religion can be more appre-
ciated if one bears in mind that Reinach has here also incorporated all
the signs and clews which lead to the conclusion that the totemic system
had once existed. The peculiar attitude of this author to the problem is
shown by the fact that to some extent he neglects the essential traits
of totemism, and we shall see that of the two main tenets of the totemistic
catechism he has forced one into the background and completely lost
sight of the other.

In order to get a more correct picture of the characteristics of totemism
we turn to an author who has devoted four volumes to the theme, com-
bining the most complete collection of the observations in question with
the most thorough discussion of the problems they raise. We shall remain

¹⁾ Revue Scientifique, October, 1900 reprinted in the four volume work of the author,
Cultes, Mythes et Religions, 1908, Tome I, p. 17.

886

indebted to J. G. Frazer, the author of Totemism and Exogamy,¹⁾ for the
pleasure and information he affords, even though psychoanalytic inves-
tigation may lead us to results which differ widely from his.²⁾

“A totem,” wrote Frazer in his first essay,³⁾ “is a class of material ob-
jects which a savage regards with superstitious respect, believing that
there exists between him and every member of the class an intimate and
altogether special relation. The connection between a person and his
totem is mutually beneficent; the totem protects the man and the man
shows his respect for the totem in various ways, by not killing it if it be
an animal, and not cutting or gathering it if it be a plant. As distin-
guished from a fetish, a totem is never an isolated individual but always
a class of objects, generally a species of animals or of plants, more rarely
a class of inanimate natural objects, very rarely a class of artificial ob-
jects.”

At least three kinds of totem can be distinguished:
1. The tribal totem which a whole tribe shares and which is heredi-
tary from generation to generation,
2. The sex totem which belongs to all the masculine or feminine
members of a tribe to the exclusion of the opposite sex, and
3. The individual totem which belongs to the individual and does
not descend to his successors.

¹⁾1910.

²⁾But it may be well to show the reader beforehand how difficult it is to establish the
facts in this field.

³⁾In the first place those who collect the observations are not identical with those
who digest and discuss them; the first are travellers and missionaries, while the others
are scientific men who perhaps have never seen the objects of their research.—It is
not easy to establish an understanding with savages. Not all the observers were
familiar with the language but had to use the assistance of interpreters or else had
to communicate with the people they questioned in the auxiliary language of pidgin-
English. Savages are not communicative about the most intimate affairs of their
culture and unburden themselves only to those foreigners who have passed many
years in their midst. From various motives they often give wrong or misleading in-
formation (Compare Frazer, The Beginnings of Religion and Totemism Among the
Australian Aborigines; Fortnightly Review, 1905; Totemism and Exogamy, Vol. I,
p. 150).—It must not be forgotten that primitive races are not young races but really
are as old as the most civilized, and that we have no right to expect that they have
preserved their original ideas and institutions for our information without any evo-
lution or distortion. It is certain, on the contrary, that far-reaching changes in all
directions have taken place among primitive races, so that we can never unhesitat-
ingly decide which of their present conditions and opinions have preserved the
original past, having remained petrified, as it were, and which represent a distortion
and change of the original. It is due to this that one meets the many disputes among
authors as to what proportion of the peculiarities of a primitive culture is to be
taken as a primary, and what as a later and secondary manifestation. To establish
the original conditions, therefore, always remains a matter of construction. Finally,
it is not easy to adapt oneself to the ways of thinking of primitive races. For like
children, we easily misunderstand them, and are always inclined to interpret their
acts and feelings according to our own psychic constellations.

³⁾Totemism (Edinburgh, 1887), reprinted in the first volume of his great study,
Totemism and Exogamy.

887

THE INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM

The last two kinds of totem are comparatively of little importance
compared to the tribal totem. Unless we are mistaken they are recent
formations and of little importance as far as the nature of the taboo is
concerned.

The tribal totem (clan totem) is the object of veneration of a group
of men and women who take their name from the totem and consider
themselves consanguineous offspring of a common ancestor, and who are
firmly associated with each other through common obligations towards
each other as well as by the belief in their totem.

Totemism is a religious as well as a social system. On its religious side
it consists of the relations of mutual respect and consideration between
a person and his totem, and on its social side it is composed of obligations
of the members of the clan towards each other and towards other tribes.
In the later history of totemism these two sides show a tendency to part
company; the social system often survives the religious and conversely
remnants of totemism remain in the religion of countries in which the
social system based upon totemism had disappeared. In the present state
of our ignorance about the origin of totemism we cannot say with cer-
tainty how these two sides were originally combined. But there is on the
whole a strong probability that in the beginning the two sides of totemism
were indistinguishable from each other. In other words, the further we
go back the clearer it becomes that a member of a tribe looks upon him-
self as being of the same genus as his totem and makes no distinction
between his attitude towards the totem and his attitude towards his
tribal companions.

In the special description of totemism as a religious system, Frazer
lays stress on the fact that the members of a tribe assume the name of
their totem and also as a rule believe that they are descended from it.
It is due to this belief that they do not hunt the totem animal or kill or
eat it, and that they deny themselves every other use of the totem if it
is not an animal. The prohibitions against killing or eating the totem are
not the only taboos affecting it; sometimes it is also forbidden to touch
it and even to look at it; in a number of cases the totem must not be
called by its right name. Violation of the taboo prohibitions which protect
the totem is punished automatically by serious disease or death.¹

Specimens of the totem animals are sometimes raised by the clan and
taken care of in captivity.² A totem animal found dead is mourned and
buried like a member of the clan. If a totem animal had to be killed it
was done with a prescribed ritual of excuses and ceremonies of expiation.
The tribe expected protection and forbearance from its totem. If it

¹Compare the chapter on Totem.
²Just as today we still have the wolves in a cage at the steps of the Capitol in Rom-
and the bears in the pit at Berne.

388

TOTEM AND TABOO

was a dangerous animal (a beast of prey or a poisonous snake), it was
assumed that it would not harm, and where this assumption did not come
true the person attacked was expelled from the tribe. Frazer thinks that
oaths were originally ordeals, many tests as to descent and genuineness
being in this way left to the decision of the totem. The totem helps in
case of illness and gives the tribe premonitions and warnings. The ap-
pearance of the totem animal near a house was often looked upon as an
announcement of death. The totem had come to get its relative.¹

A member of a clan seeks to emphasize his relationship to the totem
in various significant ways; he imitates an exterior similarity by dressing
himself in the skin of the totem animal, by having the picture of it tattooed
upon himself, and in other ways. On the solemn occasions of birth, ini-
tiation into manhood or funeral obsequies this identification with the
totem is carried out in deeds and words. Dances in which all the mem-
bers of the tribe disguise themselves as their totem and act like it, serve
various magic and religious purposes. Finally there are the ceremonies
at which the totem animal is killed in a solemn manner.²

The social side of totemism is primarily expressed in a sternly observed
commandment and in a tremendous restriction. The members of a totem
clan are brothers and sisters, pledged to help and protect each other; if
a member of the clan is slain by a stranger the whole tribe of the slayer
must answer for the murder and the clan of the slain man shows its
solidarity in the demand for expiation for the blood that has been shed.
The ties of the totem are stronger than our ideas of family ties, with
which they do not altogether coincide, since the transfer of the totem
takes place as a rule through maternal inheritance, paternal inheritance
possibly not counting at all in the beginning.

But the corresponding taboo restriction consists in the prohibition
against members of the same clan marrying each other or having any
kind of sexual intercourse whatsoever with each other. This is the famous
and enigmatic exogamy connexion with totemism. We have devoted the
whole first chapter of this book to it, and therefore need only mention
here that this exogamy springs from the intensified incest dread of primi-
tive races, that it becomes entirely comprehensible as a security against
incest in group marriages, and that at first it accomplishes the avoidance
of incest for the younger generation and only in the course of further
development becomes a hindrance to the older generation as well.³

To this presentation of totemism by Frazer, one of the earliest in the
literature on the subject, I will now add a few excerpts from one of the
latest summaries. In the Elements of the Psychology of Races, which

¹Like the legend of the white woman in many noble families.

²l.c., p. 35. See the discussion of sacrifice further on.

³See Chapter I.

88§

THE INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM
appeared in 1912, W. Wundt says:¹ “The totem animal is considered
the ancestral animal. ‘Totem’ is therefore both a group name and a birth
name and in the latter aspect this name has at the same time a mytho-
logical meaning. But all these uses of the conception play into each other
and the particular meanings may recede so that in some cases the totems
have become almost a mere nomenclature of the tribal divisions, while
in others the idea of the descent or else the cultic meaning of the totem
remains in the foreground. . . . The conception of the totem deter-
mines the tribal arrangement and the tribal organization. These norms
and their establishment in the belief and feelings of the members of the
tribe account for the fact that originally the totem animal was certainly
not considered merely a name for a group division but that it usually
was considered the progenitor of the corresponding division. . . . This
accounted for the fact that these animal ancestors enjoyed a cult. . . .
This animal cult expresses itself primarily in the attitude towards the
totem animal, quite aside from special ceremonies and ceremonial festivi-
ties: not only each individual animal but every representative of the same
species was to a certain degree a sanctified animal; the member of the
totem was forbidden to eat the flesh of the totem animal or he was
allowed to eat it only under special circumstances. This is in accord
with the significant contradictory phenomenon found in this connexion,
namely, that under certain conditions there was a kind of ceremonial
consumption of the totem flesh. . . .”
“ . . . But the most important social side of this totemic tribal arrange-
ment consists in the fact that it was connected with certain rules of con-
duct for the relations of the groups with each other. The most important
of these were the rules of conjugal relations. This tribal division is thus
connected with an important phenomenon which first made its appear-
ance in the totemic age, namely with exogamy.”
If we wish to arrive at the characteristics of the original totemism by
shifting through everything that may correspond to later development
or decline, we find the following essential facts: The totems were orig-
inally only animals and were considered the ancestors of single tribes.
The totem was hereditary only through the female line; it was forbidden
to kill the totem (or to eat it, which under primitive conditions amounts
to the same thing); members of a totem were forbidden to have sexual
intercourse with each other.²

¹p. 116.

²The conclusion which Frazer draws about totemism in his second work on the sub-
ject (The Origin of Totemism; Fortnightly Review, 1899) agrees with this text:
“Thus totemism has commonly been treated as a primitive system both of religion
and of society. As a system of religion it embraces the mystic union of the savage
with his totem; as a system of society it comprises the relations in which men and
women of the same totem stand to each other and to the members of other totemic

890

TOTEM AND TABOO

It may now seem strange to us that in the Code du totémisme which
Reinach has drawn up the one principal taboo, namely exogamy, does
not appear at all while the assumption of the second taboo, namely the
descent from the totem animal, is only casually mentioned. Yet, Reinach
is an author to whose work in this field we owe much and I have chosen
his presentation in order to prepare us for the differences of opinion
among the authors, which will now occupy our attention.

2

The more convinced we became that totemism had regularly formed
a phase of every culture, the more urgent became the necessity of ar-
riving at an understanding of it and of casting light upon the riddle
of its nature. To be sure, everything about totemism is in the nature
of a riddle; the decisive questions are the origin of the totem, the mo-
tivation of exogamy (or rather of the incest taboo which it represents)
and the relation between the two, the totem organization and the incest
prohibition. The understanding should be at once historical and psycho-
logical; it should inform us under what conditions this peculiar institu-
tion developed and to what psychic needs of man it has given expression.
The reader will certainly be astonished to hear from how many dif-
ferent points of view the answer to these questions has been attempted
and how far the opinions of expert investigators vary. Almost everything
that might be asserted in general about totemism is doubtful; even the
above statement of it, taken from an article by Frazer in 1887, cannot
escape the criticism that it expresses an arbitrary preference of the
author and would be challenged today by Frazer himself, who has re-
peatedly changed his view on the subject.¹
It is quite obvious that the nature of totemism and exogamy could be
most readily grasped if we could get into closer touch with the origin of
both institutions. But in judging the state of affairs we must not forget
the remark of Andrew Lang, that even primitive races have not preserved
these original forms and the conditions of their origin, so that we are

¹In connection with such a change of opinion Frazer made this excellent statement:
“That my conclusions on these difficult questions are final, I am not so foolish as
to pretend. I have changed my views repeatedly, and I am resolved to change them
again with every change of the evidence, for like a chameleon the inquirer should
shift his colours with the shifting colours of the ground he treads.” Preface to Vol. I,
Totemism and Exogamy, 1910.

891

altogether dependent upon hypotheses to take the place of the observation
we lack.¹ Among the attempted explanations some seem inadequate from
the very beginning in the judgment of the psychologist. They are alto-
gether too rational and do not take into consideration the effective char-
acter of what they are to explain. Others rest on assumptions which ob-
servation fails to verify; while still others appeal to facts which could
better be subjected to another interpretation. The refutation of these
various opinions as a rule hardly presents any difficulties; the authors are,
as usual, stronger in the criticism which they practice on each other than
in their own work. The final result as regards most of the points treated
is a non liquet. It is therefore not surprising that most of the new literature
on the subject, which we have largely omitted here, shows the unmistak-
able effort to reject a general solution of totemic problems as unfeasible.
(See, for instance, B. Goldenweiser in the Journal of American Folklore,
XXIII, 1910. Reviewed in the Britannica Year Book, 1913.) I have taken
the liberty of disregarding the chronological order in stating these con-
tradictory hypotheses.

(a) The Origin of Totemism

The question of the origin of totemism can also be formulated as follows:
How did primitive people come to select the names of animals, plants and
inanimate objects for themselves and their tribes?²

The Scotchman, MacLennan, who discovered totemism and exogamy
for science,³ refrained from publishing his views of the origin of totemism.
According to a communication of Andrew Lang ⁴ he was for a time in-
clined to trace totemism back to the custom of tattooing. I shall divide the
accepted theories of the derivation of totemism into three groups, (α)
nominalistic, (β) sociological, (γ) psychological.

(a) The Nominalistic Theories

The information about these theories will justify their summation under
the headings I have used.

Garcilaso de La Vega, a descendant of the Peruvian Incas, who wrote
the history of his race in the seventeenth century, is already said to have
traced back what was known to him about totemic phenomena to the
need of the tribes to differentiate themselves from each other by means

¹“By the nature of the case, as the origin of totemism lies far beyond our powers of
historical examination or of experiment, we must have recourse as regards this mat-
ter to conjecture,” Andrew Lang, Secret of the Totem, p. 27.—“Nowhere do we
see absolutely primitive man, and a totemic system in the making,” p. 29.

²At first probably only animals.

³The Worship of Animals and Plants (Fortnightly Review, 1869–1870). Primitive
Marriage, 1865; both works reprinted in Studies in Ancient History, 1876; second
edition, 1886.

⁴The Secret of the Totem, 1905, p. 34.

892

TOTEM AND TABOO

of names.¹ The same idea appears centuries later in the Ethnology of A.
K. Keane where totems are said to be derived from heraldic badges
through which individuals, families and tribes wanted to differentiate
themselves.²

Max Müller expresses the same opinion about the meaning of the totem
in his Contributions to the Science of Mythology.³ A totem is said to be,
1. a mark of the clan, 2. a clan name, 3. the name of the ancestor of the
clan, 4. the name of the object which the clan reveres. J. Pikler wrote later,
in 1899, that men needed a permanent name for communities and in-
dividuals that could be preserved in writing. . . . Thus totemism arises,
not from a religious, but from a prosaic everyday need of mankind. The
giving of names, which is the essence of totemism, is a result of the tech-
nique of primitive writing. The totem is of the nature of an easily repre-
sented writing symbol. But if savages first bore the name of an animal they
deduced the idea of relationship from this animal.⁴

Herbert Spencer,⁵ also, thought that the origin of totemism was to be
found in the giving of names. The attributes of certain individuals, he
showed, had brought about their being named after animals so that they
had come to have names of honour or nicknames which continued in their
descendants. As a result of the indefiniteness and incomprehensibility of
primitive languages, these names are said to have been taken by later
generations as proof of their descent from the animals themselves. Totem-
ism would thus be the result of a mistaken reverence for ancestors.

Lord Avebury (better known under his former name, Sir John Lub-
bock) has expressed himself quite similarly about the origin of totemism,
though without emphasizing the misunderstanding. If we want to explain
the veneration of animals we must not forget how often human names
are borrowed from animals. The children and followers of a man who
was called bear or lion naturally made this their ancestral name. In this
way it came about that the animal itself came to be respected and finally
venerated.

Fison has advanced what seems an irrefutable objection to such a der-
ivation of the totem name from the names of individuals.⁶ He shows from
conditions in Australia that the totem is always the mark of a group of
people and never of an individual. But if it were otherwise, if the totem
was originally the name of a single individual, it could never, with the
system of maternal inheritance, descend to his children.

¹Ibid.

²Ibid.

³ According to Andrew Lang.

⁴Pikler and Somló, The Origin of Totemism, 1901. The authors rightly call their
attempt at explanation a “Contribution to the materialistic theory of History.”

⁵The Origin of Animal Worship (Fortnightly Review, 1870). Principles of Psy-
chology, Vol. I, §§ 169 to 176.

⁶Kamilaroi and Kurmai, p. 165, 1880 (Lang, Secret of the Totem, etc.).

893

THE INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM

The theories thus far stated are evidently inadequate. They may explain
how animal names came to be applied to primitive tribes but they can
never explain the importance attached to the giving of names which con-
stitutes the totemic system. The most noteworthy theory of this group has
been developed by Andrew Lang in his books, Social Origins, 1903, and
The Secret of the Totem, 1905. This theory still makes naming the centre
of the problem, but it uses two interesting psychological factors and thus
may claim to have contributed to the final solution of the riddle of
totemism.

Andrew Lang holds that it does not make any difference how clans ac-
quired their animal names. It might be assumed that one day they awoke
to the consciousness that they had them without being able to account
from where they came. The origin of these names had been forgotten. In
that case they would seek to acquire more information by pondering over
their names, and with their conviction of the importance of names they
necessarily came to all the ideas that are contained in the totemic system.
For primitive men, as for savages of today and even for our children,¹
a name is not indifferent and conventional as it seems to us, but is some-
thing important and essential. A man’s name is one of the main constit-
uents of his person and perhaps a part of his psyche. The fact that they
had the same names as animals must have led primitive men to assume a
secret and important bond between their persons and the particular animal
species. What other bond than consanguinity could it be? But if the sim-
ilarity of names once led to this assumption it could also account directly
for all the totemic prohibitions of the blood taboo, including exogamy.

“No more than these three things—a group animal name of unknown
origin; belief in a transcendental connexion between all bearers, human
and bestial, of the same name; and belief in the blood superstitions—were
needed to give rise to all the totemic creeds and practices, including ex-
ogamy” (Secret of the Totem, p. 126).

Lang’s explanation extends over two periods. It derives the totemic
system of psychological necessity from the totem names, on the assump-
tion that the origin of the naming has been forgotten. The other part of
the theory now seeks to clear up the origin of these names. We shall see
that it bears an entirely different stamp.

This other part of the Lang theory is not markedly different from those
which I have called “nominalistic.” The practical need of differentiation
compelled the individual tribes to assume names and therefore they toler-
ated the names which every tribe ascribed to the other. This “naming from
without” is the peculiarity of Lang’s construction. The fact that the names
which thus originated were borrowed from animals is not further remark-
able and need not have been felt by primitive men as abuse or derision.

¹See the chapter on Taboo.

894

TOTEM AND TABOO

Besides, Lang has cited numerous cases from later epochs of history in
which names given from without that were first meant to be derisive were
accepted by those nicknamed and voluntarily borne (The Guises, Whigs
and Tories). The assumption that the origin of these names was forgotten
in the course of time connects this second part of the Lang theory with
the first one just mentioned.

(β) The Sociological Theories

S. Reinach, who successfully traced the relics of the totemic system in the
cult and customs of later periods, though attaching from the very be-
ginning only slight value to the factor of descent from the totem animal,
once made the casual remark that totemism seemed to him to be nothing
but “une hypertrophie de l’instinct social.”¹

The same interpretation seems to permeate the new work of E. Durk-
heim, Les Formes Élémentaires de la Vie Religieuse; Le Système Toté-
mique en Australie, 1912. The totem is the visible representative of the
social religion of these races. It embodies the community, which is the
real object of veneration.

Other authors have sought a more intimate reason for the share which
social impulses have played in the formation of totemic institutions. Thus
A. C. Haddon has assumed that every primitive tribe originally lived on
a particular plant or animal species and perhaps also traded with this
food and exchanged it with other tribes. It then was inevitable that a tribe
should become known to other tribes by the name of the animal which
played such weighty rôle with it. At the same time this tribe would de-
velop a special familiarity with this animal, and a kind of interest for it
which, however, was based upon the psychic motive of man’s most ele-
mentary and pressing need, namely, hunger.²

The objections against this most rational of all the totem theories are
that such a state of the food supply is never found among primitive men
and probably never existed. Savages are the more omnivorous the lower
they stand in the social scale. Besides, it is incomprehensible how such
an exclusive diet could have developed an almost religious relation to the
totem, culminating in an absolute abstention from the revered food.

The first of the three theories about the origin of totemism which Frazer
stated, was a psychological one. We shall report it elsewhere.

Frazer’s second theory, which we will discuss here, originated under
the influence of an important publication by two investigators of the
inhabitants of Central Australia.³

¹l.c., Vol. I, p. 41.

²Address to the Anthropological Section, British Association, Belfast, 1902. Accord-
ing to Frazer, l.c., Vol. IV, p. 50.

³The Native Tribes of Central Australia, by Baldwin Spencer and H. J. Gillen,
London, 1891.

895

Spencer and Gillen describe a series of peculiar institutions, customs,
and opinions of a group of tribes, the so-called Arunta nation, and Frazer
subscribes to their opinion that these peculiarities are to be looked upon
as characteristics of a primary state and that they can explain the first
and real meaning of totemism.

In the Arunta tribe itself (a part of the Arunta nation) these peculiari-
ties are as follows:

1. They have the division into totem clans but the totem is not heredi-
tary but is individually determined (as will be shown later).

2. The totem clans are not exogamus, and the marriage restrictions
are brought about by a highly developed division into marriage classes
which have nothing to do with the totems.

3. The function of the totem clan consists of carrying out a ceremony
which in a subtle magic manner brings about an increase of the edible
totem. (This ceremony is called Intichiuma.)

4. The Aruntas have a peculiar theory about conception and re-
birth. They assume that the spirits of the dead who belonged to their totem
wait for their re-
birth in definite localities and penetrate into the bodies
of the women who pass such a spot. When a child is born the mother
states at which spirit abode she thinks she conceived her child. This deter-
mines the totem of the child. It is further assumed that the spirits (of the
dead as well as of the re-
born) are bound to peculiar stone amulets, called
Churinga, which are found in these places.

Two factors seem to have induced Frazer to believe that the oldest form
of totemism had been found in the institution of the Aruntas. In the first
place the existence of certain myths which assert that the ancestors of the
Aruntas always lived on their totem animal, and that they married no
other women except those of their own totem. Secondly, the apparent
disregard of the sexual act in their theory of conception. People who have
not yet realized that conception was the result of the sexual act might
well be considered the most backward and primitive people living today.

Frazer, in having recourse to the Intichiuma ceremony to explain totem-
ism, suddenly saw the totemic system in a totally different light as a thor-
oughly practical organization for accomplishing the most natural needs
of man. (Compare Haddon above.¹⁾ The system was simply an extraor-
dinary piece of “co-
operative magic.” Primitive men formed what might
be called a magic production and consumption club. Each totem clan un-
dertook to see to the cleanliness of a certain article of food. If it were a
question of inedible totems like harmful animals, rain, wind, or similar
objects, it was the duty of the totem clan to dominate this part of nature
and to conjure up over the humblest beginnings of human
speculation but which is utterly foreign to the simple, sensuous, and concrete modes
of the savage. (Totemism and Exogamy, I, p. 117).

¹⁾There is nothing vague or mystical about it, nothing of that metaphysical haze
which some writers love to conjure up over the humblest beginnings of human
speculation but which is utterly foreign to the simple, sensuous, and concrete modes
of the savage. (Totemism and Exogamy, I, p. 117).

896

TOTEM AND TABOO

and to ward off its injuriousness. The efforts of each clan were for the
good of all the others. As the clan could not eat its totem or could eat
only a very little of it, it furnished this valuable product for the rest
and was in turn supplied with what these had to take care of as their
social totem duty. In the light of this interpretation furnished by the
Intichiuma ceremony, it appeared to Frazer as if the prohibition against
eating the totem had misled observers to neglect the more important side
of the relation, namely the commandment to supply as much as possible
of the edible totem for the needs of others.

Frazer accepted the tradition of the Aruntas that each totem clan had
originally lived on its totem without any restriction. It then became diffi-
cult to understand the evolution that followed through which savages
were satisfied to ensure the totem for others while they themselves ab-
stained from eating it. He then assumed that this restriction was by no
means the result of a kind of religious respect, but came about through
the observation that no animal devoured its own kind, so that this break
in the identification with the totem was injurious to the power which sav-
ages sought to acquire over the totem. Or else it resulted from the en-
deavour to make the being favourably disposed by sparing it. Frazer did
not conceal the difficulties of this explanation from himself,¹ nor did he
dare to indicate in what way the habit of marrying within the totem, which
the myths of the Aruntas proclaimed, was converted into exogamy.

Frazer’s theory based on the Intichiuma, stands or falls with the recog-
nition of the primitive nature of the Arunta institutions. But it seems
impossible to hold to this in the face of the objections advanced by Durk-
heim² and Lang.³ The Aruntas seem on the contrary to be the most de-
veloped of the Australian tribes and to represent rather a dissolution stage
of totemism than its beginning. The myths that made such an impression
on Frazer because they emphasize, in contrast to prevailing institutions
of today, that the Aruntas are free to eat the totem and to marry within
it, easily explain themselves to us as wish phantasies, which are projected
into the past, like the myths of the Golden Age.

(γ) The Psychological Theories

Frazer’s first psychological theories, formed before his acquaintance with
the observations of Spencer and Gillen, were based upon the belief in
an “outward soul.”⁴ The totem was meant to represent a safe place of
refuge where the soul is deposited in order to avoid the dangers which
threaten it. After primitive man had housed his soul in his totem, he him-
him-
¹

l.c., p. 120.

²

L’Année Sociologique, Vols. I, V, VIII, and elsewhere. See especially the chapter
Sur le Totémisme, Vol. V, 1901.

³

Social Origins and the Secret of the Totem.

⁴

The Golden Bough, Vol. II, p. 332.

897

THE INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM
self became invulnerable and he naturally took care himself not to harm
the bearer of his soul. But as he did not know which individual of the
species in question was the bearer of his soul, he was concerned in spar-
ing the whole species. Frazer himself later gave up this derivation of
totemism from the belief in souls.

When he became acquainted with the observations of Spencer and Gil-
len, he set up the other social theory which has just been stated, but he
himself then saw that the motive from which he had derived totemism was
altogether too “rational” and that he had assumed a social organization
for it which was altogether too complicated to be called primitive.¹ The
magic coöperative companies now appeared to him rather as the fruit
than as the germ of totemism. He sought a simpler factor for the deriva-
tion of totemism in the shape of a primitive superstition behind these
forms. He then found this original factor in the remarkable conception
theory of the Aruntas.

As already stated, the Aruntas establish no connection between concep-
tion and the sexual act. If a woman feels herself to be a mother it means
that at that moment one of the spirits from the nearest spirit abode who
has been watching for a re-birth, has penetrated into her body and is born
as her child. This child has the same totem as all the spirits that lurk in
that particular locality. But if we are willing to go back a step further and
assume that the woman originally believed that the animal, plant, stone,
or other object which occupied her fancy at the moment when she first felt
herself pregnant had really penetrated into her and was being born
through her in human form, then the identity of a human being with his
totem would really be founded on the belief of the mother, and all the
other totem commandments (with the exception of exogamy) could easily
be derived from this belief. Men would refuse to eat the particular animal
or plant because it would be just like eating themselves. But occasionally
they would be impelled to eat some of their totem in a ceremonial manner
because they could thus strengthen their identification with the totem,
which is the essential part of totemism. W. H. R. Rivers’ observations
among the inhabitants of the Banks Islands seemed to prove men’s direct
identification with their totems on the basis of such a conception theory.²

The ultimate sources of totemism would then be the ignorance of sav-
ages as to the process of procreation among human beings and animals;
especially their ignorance as to the rôle which the male plays in fertiliza-
tion. This ignorance must be facilitated by the long interval which is in-
terposed between the fertilizing act and the birth of the child or the sensa-

¹“It is unlikely that a community of savages should deliberately parcel out the
realm of nature into provinces, assign each province to a particular band of magi-
cians, and bid all the bands to work their magic and weave their spells for the com-
mon good.” Totemism and Exogamy, Vol. IV, p. 57.
²Totemism and Exogamy, Vol. II, p. 89, and IV, p. 59.

898

tion of the child’s first movements. Totemism is therefore a creation of the
feminine mind and not of the masculine. The sick fancies of the pregnant
woman are the roots of it. Anything indeed that struck a woman at that
mysterious moment of her life when she first knows herself to be a mother
might easily be identified by her with the child in her womb. Such ma-
ternal fancies, so natural and seemingly so universal, appear to be the
root of totemism.¹

The main objection to this third theory of Frazer’s is the same which
has already been advanced against his second, sociological theory. The
Aruntas seem to be far removed from the beginnings of totemism. Their
denial of fatherhood does not apparently rest upon primitive ignorance;
in many cases they even have paternal inheritance. They seem to have
sacrificed fatherhood to a kind of a speculation which strives to honour
the ancestral spirits.² Though they raise the myth of immaculate concep-
tion through a spirit to a general theory of conception, we cannot for that
reason credit them with ignorance as to the conditions of procreation any
more than we could the old races who lived during the rise of the Christian
myths.

Another psychological theory of the origin of totemism has been formu-
lated by the Dutch writer, G. A. Wilcken. It establishes a connection be-
tween totemism and the migration of souls. “The animal into which,
according to general belief, the souls of the dead passed, became a blood
relative, an ancestor, and was revered as such.” But the belief in the
soul’s migration to animals is more readily derived from totemism than
inversely.³

Still another theory of totemism is advanced by the excellent American
ethnologists, Franz Boas, Hill-Tout, and others. It is based on observa-
tions of totemic Indian tribes and asserts that the totem is originally the
guardian spirit of an ancestor who has acquired it through a dream and
handed it on to his descendants. We have already heard the difficulties
which the derivation of totemism through inheritance from a single indi-
vidual offers; besides, the Australian observations seem by no means to
support the tracing back of the totem to the guardian spirit.⁴

Two facts have become decisive for the last of the psychological theories
as stated by Wundt: in the first place, that the original and most widely
known totem object was an animal, and secondly, that the earliest totem
animals corresponded to animals which had a soul.⁵ Such animals as birds,
snakes, lizards, mice are fitted by their extreme mobility, their flight

¹Totemism and Exogamy, Vol. IV, p. 63.

² “That belief is a philosophy far from primitive,” Andrew Lang, Secret of the
Totem, p. 192.

³Frazer, Totemism and Exogamy, Vol. IV, p. 45.

⁴Frazer, l.c., p. 48.

⁵Wundt, Elemente der Völker-Psychologie, p. 190.

899

through the air, and by other characteristics which arouse surprise and
fear, to become the bearers of souls which leave their bodies. The totem
animal is a descendant of the animal transformations of the spirit-soul.
Thus, with Wundt totemism is directly connected with the belief in souls
or with animism.

(b) and (c) The Origin of Exogamy and Its Relation to Totemism

I have put forth the theories of totemism with considerable detail and yet
I am afraid that I have not made them clear enough on account of the
condensation that was constantly necessary. In the interest of the reader
I am taking the liberty of further condensing the other questions that
arise. The discussions about the exogamy of totem races become especially
complicated and untractable, one might even say confused, on account of
the nature of the material used. Fortunately the object of this treatise
permits me to limit myself to pointing out several guide-posts and re-
ferring to the frequently quoted writings of experts in the field for a more
thorough pursuit of the subject.

The attitude of an author to the problems of exogamy is of course not
independent of the stand he has taken toward one or the other of the
totem theories. Some of these explanations of totemism lack all connection
with exogamy so that the two institutions are entirely separated. Thus
we find here two opposing views, one of which clings to the original likeli-
hood that exogamy is an essential part of the totemic system while the
other disputes such a connection and believes in an accidental combination
of these two traits of the most ancient cultures. In his later works Frazer
has emphatically stood for this latter point of view.

“I must request the reader to bear constantly in mind that the two
institutions of totemism and exogamy are fundamentally distinct in origin
and nature though they have accidentally crossed and blended in many
tribes.” (Totemism and Exogamy I, Preface XII.)

He warns directly against the opposite view as being a source of endless
difficulties and misunderstandings. In contrast to this, many authors have
found a way of conceiving exogamy as a necessary consequence of the
basic views on totemism. Durkheim ¹ has shown in his writings how the
taboo, which is attached to the totem, must have entailed the prohibition
against putting a woman of the same totem to sexual uses. The totem is
of the same blood as the human being and for this reason the blood ban
(in reference to defloration and menstruation) forbids sexual intercourse
with a woman of the same totem.² Andrew Lang, who here agrees with
Durkheim, goes so far as to believe that the blood taboo was not necessary
to bring about the prohibition in regard to the women of the same tribe.³

¹L’année Sociologique, 1898–1904.

²See Frazer’s Criticism of Durkheim, Totemism and Exogamy, p. 101.

³Secret, etc., p. 125.

900

The general totem taboo which, for instance, forbids any one to sit in the
shadow of the totem tree, would have sufficed. Andrew Lang also contends
for another derivation of exogamy (see below) and leaves it in doubt how
these two explanations are related to each other.

As regards the temporal relations, the majority of authors subscribe to
the opinion that totemism is the older institution and that exogamy came
later.¹

Among the theories which seek to explain exogamy independently of
totemism only a few need be mentioned in so far as they illustrate different
attitudes of the authors towards the problem of incest.

MacLennan ² had ingeniously guessed that exogamy resulted from the
remnants of customs pointing to earlier forms of female rape. He assumed
that it was the general custom in ancient times to procure women from
strange tribes so that marriage with a woman from the same tribe grad-
ually became “improper because it was unusual.” He sought the motive
for the exogamous habit in the scarcity of women among these tribes,
which had resulted from the custom of killing most female children at
birth. We are not concerned here with investigation whether actual con-
ditions corroborate MacLennan’s assumptions. We are more interested in
the argument that these premises still leave it unexplained why the male
members of the tribe should have made these few women of their blood
inaccessible to themselves, as well as in the manner in which the incest
problem is here entirely neglected.³

Other writers have on the contrary assumed, and evidently with more
right, that exogamy is to be interpreted as an institution for the preven-
tion of incest.⁴

If we survey the gradually increasing complication of Australian mar-
riage restrictions we can hardly help agreeing with the opinion of Morgan,
Frazer, Hewitt and Baldwin Spencer,⁵ that these institutions bear the
stamp of “deliberate design,” as Frazer puts it, and that they were meant
to do what they have actually accomplished. “In no other way does it seem
possible to explain in all its details a system at once so complex and so
regular.” ⁶

It is of interest to point out that the first restrictions which the intro-
duction of marriage classes brought about affected the sexual freedom
of the younger generation, in other words, incest between brothers and

¹ See Frazer, l.c., Vol. IV, p. 75: “The totemic clan is a totally different social organ-
ism from the exogamous class, and we have good grounds for thinking that it is far
older.”

² Primitive Marriage, 1865.

³ Frazer, l.c., p. 73 to 92.

⁴ Compare Chapter I.

⁵ Morgan, Ancient Society, 1877.—Frazer Totemism and Exogamy, Vol. IV, p. 105.

⁶ Frazer, l.c., p. 106.

901

THE INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM

sisters and between sons and mothers, while incest between father and
daughter was only abrogated by more sweeping measures.

However, to trace back exogamous sexual restrictions to legal intentions
does not add anything to the understanding of the motive which created
these institutions. From what source, in the final analysis, springs the
dread of incest which must be recognized as the root of exogamy? It evi-
dently does not suffice to appeal to an instinctive aversion against sexual
intercourse with blood relatives, that is to say, to the fact of incest dread,
in order to explain the dread of incest, if social experience shows that,
in spite of this instinct, incest is not a rare occurrence even in our society,
and if the experience of history can acquaint us with cases in which in-
cestuous marriage of privileged persons was made the rule.

Westermarck ¹ advanced the following to explain the dread of incest:
“that an innate aversion against sexual intercourse exists between persons
who live together from childhood and that this feeling, since such persons
are as a rule consanguineous, finds a natural expression in custom and law
through the abhorrence of sexual intercourse between those closely re-
lated.” Though Havelock Ellis disputed the instinctive character of this
aversion in the Studies in the Psychology of Sex, he otherwise supported
the same explanation in its essentials by declaring: “The normal absence
of the manifestation of the pairing instinct where brothers and sisters or
boys and girls living together from childhood are concerned, is a purely
negative phenomenon due to the fact that under these circumstances the
antecedent conditions for arousing the mating instinct must be entirely
lacking. … For persons who have grown up together from childhood,
habit has dulled the sensual attraction of seeing, hearing and touching
and has led it into a channel of quiet attachment, robbing it of its power
to call forth the necessary erotic excitement required to produce sexual
tum-
escence.”

It seems to me very remarkable that Westermarck looks upon this
innate aversion to sexual intercourse with persons with whom we have
shared childhood as being at the same time a psychic representative of
the biological fact that inbreeding means injury to the species. Such a
biological instinct would hardly go so far astray in its psychological mani-
festation as to affect the companions of home and hearth who in this
respect are quite harmless, instead of the blood relatives who alone are
injurious to procreation. And I cannot resist citing the excellent criticism
which Frazer opposes to Westermarck’s assertion. Frazer finds it incom-
prehensible that sexual sensibility today is not at all opposed to sexual
intercourse with companions of the hearth and home while the dread of
incest, which is said to be nothing but an offshoot of this reluctance, has

¹Origin and Development of Moral Conceptions, Vol. II: Marriage (1909). See also
there the author’s defence against familiar objections.

902

nowadays grown to be so overpowering. But other remarks of Frazer’s go
deeper and I set them down here in unabbreviated form because they are
in essential agreement with the arguments developed in my chapter on
Taboo.

“It is not easy to see why any deep human instinct should need rein-
forcement through law. There is no law commanding men to eat and drink,
or forbidding them to put their hands in the fire. Men eat and drink and
keep their hands out of the fire instinctively, for fear of natural, not legal
penalties, which would be entailed by violence done to these instincts. The
law only forbids men to do what their instincts incline them to do; what
nature itself prohibits and punishes it would be superfluous for the law
to prohibit and punish. Accordingly we may always safely assume that
crimes forbidden by law are crimes which many men have a natural
propensity to commit. If there were no such propensity there would be no
such crimes, and if no such crimes were committed, what need to forbid
them? Instead of assuming therefore, from the legal prohibition of incest,
that there is a natural aversion to incest we ought rather to assume that
there is a natural instinct in favour of it, and that if the law represses it,
it does so because civilized men have come to the conclusion that the
satisfaction of these natural instincts is detrimental to the general inter-
ests of society.”¹

To this valuable argument of Frazer’s I can add that the experiences
of psychoanalysis make the assumption of such an innate aversion to in-
cestuous relations altogether impossible. They have taught, on the con-
trary, that the first sexual impulses of the young are regularly of an in-
cestuous nature and that such repressed impulses play a rôle which can
hardly be overestimated as the motive power of later neuroses.

The interpretation of incest dread as an innate instinct must therefore
be abandoned. The same holds true of another derivation of the incest
prohibition which counts many supporters, namely, the assumption that
primitive races very soon observe the dangers with which inbreeding
threatened their race and that they therefore had decreed the incest pro-
hibition with a conscious purpose. The objections to this attempted expla-
nation crowd upon each other.² Not only must the prohibition of incest
be older than all breeding of domestic animals from which men could
derive experience of the effect of inbreeding upon the characteristics of
the breed, but the harmful consequences of inbreeding are not established
beyond all doubt even today and in man they can be shown only with
difficulty. Besides, everything that we know about contemporaneous sav-
ages makes it very improbable that the thoughts of their far-removed
ancestors should already have been occupied with preventing injury to

¹L.c., p. 97.

²Compare Durkheim, La Prohibition de l’Inceste (L’année Sociologique, I, 1896–7).

903

their later descendants. It sounds almost ridiculous to attribute hygienic
and eugenic motives such as have hardly yet found consideration in our
culture, to these children of the race who lived without thought of the
morrow.¹

And finally it must be pointed out that a prohibition against inbreeding
as an element weakening to the race, which is imposed from practical
hygienic motives, seems quite inadequate to explain the deep abhorrence
which our society feels against incest. This dread of incest, as I have
shown elsewhere,² seems to be even more active and stronger among prim-
itive races living to-day than among the civilized.

In inquiring into the origin of incest dread it could be expected that
here also there is the choice between possible explanations of a socio-
logical, biological, and psychological nature in which the psychological
motives might have to be considered as representative of biological forces.
Still, in the end, one is compelled to subscribe to Frazer’s resigned state-
ment, namely, that we do not know the origin of incest dread and do not
even know how to guess at it. None of the solutions of the riddle thus far
advanced seems satisfactory to us.³

I must mention another attempt to explain the origin of incest dread
which is of an entirely different nature from those considered up to now.
It might be called an historic explanation.

This attempt is associated with a hypothesis of Charles Darwin about
the primal social state of man. From the habits of the higher apes Darwin
concluded that man, too, lived originally in small hordes in which the
jealousy of the oldest and strongest male prevented sexual promiscuity.
“We may indeed conclude from what we know of the jealousy of all male
quadrupeds, armed, as many of them are, with special weapons for bat-
tling with their rivals, that promiscuous intercourse in a state of nature
is extremely improbable. . . . If we therefore look back far enough into
the stream of time and judging from the social habits of man as he now
exists, the most probable view is that he originally lived in small com-
munities, each with a single wife, or if powerful, with several, whom he
jealously defended against all other men. Or he may not have been a social
animal and yet have lived with several wives, like the gorilla; for all the
natives agree that only the adult male is seen in a band; when the young
male grows up a contest takes place for mastery, and the strongest, by
killing and driving out the others, establishes himself as the head of the
community (Dr. Savage in the Boston Journal of Natural History, Vol.

¹Charles Darwin says about savages: “They are not likely to reflect on distant evils
to their progeny.”

²See Chapter I.

³“Thus the ultimate origin of exogamy and with it the law of incest—since exogamy
was devised to prevent incest—remains a problem nearly as dark as ever.”—Totem-
ism and Exogamy, I, p. 165.

904

V, 1845–7). The younger males being thus driven out and wandering
about would also, when at last successful in finding a partner, prevent too
close breeding within the limits of the same family.”¹

Atkinson² seems to have been the first to recognize that these condi-
tions of the Darwinian primal horde would in practice bring about the
exogamy of the young men. Each one of those driven away could found
a similar horde in which, thanks to jealousy of the chief, the same prohi-
bition as to sexual intercourse obtained, and in the course of time these
conditions would have brought about the rule which is now known as
law: no sexual intercourse with the members of the horde. After the ad-
vent of totemism the rule would have changed into a different form: no
sexual intercourse within the totem.

Andrew Lang³ declared himself in agreement with this explanation of
exogamy. But in the same book he advocates the other theory of Durk-
heim which explains exogamy as a consequence of the totem laws. It is
not altogether easy to combine the two interpretations; in the first case
exogamy would have existed before totemism; in the second case it would
be a consequence of it.⁴

3

[Into this darkness psychoanalytic experience throws one single ray of
light.

The relation of the child to animals has much in common with that
of primitive man. The child does not yet show any trace of the pride
which afterwards moves the adult civilized man to set a sharp dividing
line between his own nature and that of all other animals. The child un-
hesitatingly attributes full equality to animals; he probably feels himself
more closely related to the animal than to the undoubtedly mysterious
adult, in the freedom with which he acknowledges his needs.

Not infrequently a curious disturbance manifests itself in this excellent
understanding between child and animal. The child suddenly begins to

¹The Origin of Man, Vol. II, Chap. 20, pp. 603–4.

²Primal Law, London, 1903 (with Andrew Lang, Social Origins).

³Secret of the Totem, pp. 114, 143.

⁴“If it be granted that exogamy existed in practice, on the lines of Mr. Darwin’s
theory, before the totem beliefs lent to the practice a sacred sanction, our task is
relatively easy. The first practical rule would be that of the jealous sire: ‘No males to
touch the females in my camp,’ with expulsion of adolescent sons. In a flux of time
that rule, becoming habitual, would be, ‘No marriages within the local group.’ Next
let the local groups receive names such as Emus, Crows, Opossums, Snipes, and the
rule becomes, ‘No marriage within the local group of animal name; no Snipe to marry
a Snipe.’ But, if the primal groups were not exogamous they would become so as
soon as totemic myths and taboos were developed out of the animal, vegetable, and
other names of small local groups.”—Secret of the Totem, p. 143. [The italics above
are mine.]—In his last expression on the subject (Folklore, December, 1911), Andrew
Lang states, however, that he has given up the derivation of exogamy out of the
“general totemic” taboo.

905

fear a certain animal species and to protect himself against seeing or
touching any individual of this species. There results the clinical picture
of an animal phobia, which is one of the most frequent among the psycho-
neurotic diseases of this age and perhaps the earliest form of such an ail-
ment. The phobia is as a rule in regard to animals for which the child
has until then shown the liveliest interest and has nothing to do with
the individual animal. In cities the choice of animals which can become
the object of phobia is not great. They are horses, dogs, cats, more seldom
birds, and strikingly often very small animals like bugs and butterflies.
Sometimes animals which are known to the child only from picture-books
and fairy stories become objects of the senseless and inordinate anxiety
which is manifested with these phobias; it is seldom possible to learn the
manner in which such an unusual choice of anxiety has been brought
about. I am indebted to Dr. Karl Abraham for the report of a case in
which the child itself explained its fear of wasps by saying that the colour
and the stripes of the body of the wasp had made it think of the tiger
of which, from all that it had heard, it might well be afraid.

The animal phobias have not yet been made the object of careful
analytical investigation, although they very much merit it. The difficul-
ties of analysing children of so tender an age have probably been the
motive of such neglect. It cannot therefore be asserted that the general
meaning of these illnesses is known, and I myself do not think that it
would turn out to be the same in all cases. But a number of such phobias
directed against larger animals have proved accessible to analysis and
have thus betrayed their secret to the investigator. In every case it was
the same: the fear at bottom was of the father, if the children examined
were boys, and was merely displaced upon the animal.

Every one of any experience in psychoanalysis has undoubtedly seen
such cases and has received the same impression from them. But I can
refer to only a few detailed reports on the subject. This is an accident of
the literature of such cases, from which the conclusion should not be
drawn that our general assertion is based on merely scattered observa-
tion. For instance I mention an author, M. Wulff of Odessa, who has very
intelligently occupied himself with the neuroses of childhood. He tells,
in relating the history of an illness, that a nine-year-old boy suffered from
a dog phobia at the age of four. “When he saw a dog running by on the
street he wept and cried: ‘Dear dog, don’t touch me, I will be good.’ ”
By “being good” he meant “not to play violin any more” (to practice
onanism).¹⁾

The same author later sums up as follows: “His dog phobia is really
his fear of the father displaced upon the dog, for his peculiar expression:

¹⁾M. Wulff, Contributions to Infantile Sexuality, Zentralbl. f. Psychoanalyze, 1912,
II, No. 1, p. 15.

906

‘Dog, I will be good’—that is to say, I will not masturbate—really refers
to the father who has forbidden masturbation.” He then adds something
in a note which fully agrees with my experience and at the same time
bears witness to the abundance of such experiences: “Such phobias (of
horses, dogs, cats, chickens and other domestic animals) are, I think, at
least as prevalent as pavor nocturnus in childhood, and usually reveal
themselves in the analysis as a displacement of fear from one of the
parents to animals. I am not prepared to assert that the wide-
spread mouse and rat phobia has the same mechanism.”

I reported the “Analysis of the Phobia of a Five-
year-
old Boy”¹⁾ which
the father of the little patient had put at my disposal. It was a fear of
horses as a result of which the boy refused to go on the street. He ex-
pressed his apprehension that the horse would come into the room and
bite him. It proves that this was meant to be the punishment for his wish
that the horse should fall over (die). After assurances had relieved the
boy of his fear of his father, it proved that he was fighting against wishes
whose content was the absence (departure or death) of the father. He
indicated only too plainly that he felt the father to be his rival for the
favour of the mother, upon whom his budding sexual wishes were by dark
premonitions directed. He therefore had the typical attitude of the male
child to its parents which we call the “Œdipus complex” in which we rec-
ognize the central complex of the neuroses in general. Through the analysis
of “little John” we have learnt a fact which is very valuable in relation
to totemism, namely, that under such conditions the child displaces a part
of its feelings from the father upon some animal.

Analysis showed the paths of association, both significant and acci-
dental in content, along which such a displacement took place. It also
allowed one to guess the motives for the displacement. The hate which
resulted from the rivalry for the mother could not permeate the boy’s
psychic life without being inhibited; he had to contend with the tender-
ness and admiration which he had felt for his father from the beginning,
so that the child assumed a double or ambivalent emotional attitude
towards the father and relieved himself of this ambivalent conflict by
displacing his hostile and anxious feelings upon a substitute for the father.
The displacement could not, however, relieve the conflict by bringing
about a smooth division between the tender and the hostile feelings. On
the contrary, the conflict was continued in reference to the object to which
displacement has been made and to which also the ambivalence spreads.
There is no doubt that little John had not only fear, but respect and
interest for horses. As soon as his fear was moderated he identified him-
self with the feared animal; he jumped around like a horse, and now

¹⁾ Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. VIII, English translation in Collected Papers, Vol. III.

907

THE INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM
it was he who bit the father.¹ In another stage of solution of the phobia
he did not scruple to identify his parents with other large animals.²

We may venture the impression that certain traits of totemism return
as a negative expression in these animal phobias of children. But we are
indebted to S. Ferenczi for a beautiful individual observation of what
must be called a case of positive totemism in the child.³ It is true that
with the little Arpád, whom Ferenczi reports, the totemic interests do not
awaken in direct connection with the Œdipus complex, but on the basis of
a narcistic premise, namely, the fear of castration. But whoever looks at
tentively through the history of little John will also find there abundant
proof that the father was admired as the possessor of large genitals and
was feared as threatening the child’s own genitals. In the Œdipus as well
as in the castration complex the father plays the same rôle of feared
opponent to the infantile sexual interests. Castration and its substitute
through blinding is the punishment he threatens.⁴

When little Arpád was two and a half years old he once tried, while at
a summer resort, to urinate into the chicken coop, and on this occasion
a chicken bit his penis or snapped at it. When he returned to the same
place a year later he became a chicken himself, was interested only in the
chicken coop and in everything that occurred there, and gave up human
speech for cackling and crowing. During the period of observation, at the
age of five, he spoke again, but his speech was exclusively about chickens
and other fowl. He played with no other toy and sang only songs in which
there was something about poultry. His behaviour towards his totem
animal was subtly ambivalent, expressing itself in immoderate hating and
loving. He loved best to play killing chickens. “The slaughtering of
poultry was quite a festival for him. He could dance around the animals’
bodies for hours at a time in a state of intense excitement.”⁵ But then
he kissed and stroked the slaughtered animal, and cleaned and caressed
the chicken effigies which he himself had ill-used.

Arpád himself saw to it that the meaning of his curious activity could
not remain hidden. At times he translated his wishes from the totemic
method of expression back into that of everyday life. “Now I am small,
now I am a chicken. When I get bigger I shall be a fowl. When I am
bigger still, I shall be a cock.” On another occasion he suddenly expressed
the wish to eat a “potted mother” (by analogy, potted fowl). He was

¹l.c., p. 41.
² “The Phantasy of the Giraffe,” l.c., p. 30.
³S. Ferenczi, Contributions to Psychoanalysis, p. 204, translated by Ernest Jones
(Badger, Boston, 1916).
⁴ Compare the communications of Reitler, Ferenczi, Rank, and Eder about the sub-
stitution of blindness in the Œdipus myth for castration. Intern. Zeitschrift f. ärtzl
Psychoanalyse, 1913, I, No. 2.
⁵Ferenczi, l.c., p. 209.

908

very free with open threats of castration against others, just as he himself
had received them on account of onanistic preoccupation with his penis.

According to Ferenczi there was no doubt as to the source of his in-
terest in the activities of the chicken yard: “The continual sexual activity
between cock and hen, the laying of eggs and the creeping out of the
young brood”¹ satisfied his sexual curiosity which really was directed
towards human family life. His object wishes have been formed on the
model of chicken life when we find him saying to a woman neighbour:
“I am going to marry you and your sister and my three cousins and the
cook; no, instead of the cook I’ll marry my mother.”

We shall be able to complete our consideration of these observations
later; at present we will only point out two traits that show a valuable
correspondence with totemism: the complete identification with the totem
animal,² and the ambivalent affective attitude towards it. In view of these
observations we consider ourselves justified in substituting the father for
the totem animal in the male’s formula of totemism. We then notice that
in doing so we have taken no new or especially daring step. For primitive
men say it themselves and, as far as the totemic system is still in effect
today, the totem is called ancestor and primal father. We have only
taken literally an expression of these races which ethnologists did not
know what to do with and were therefore inclined to put it into the
background. Psychoanalysis warns us, on the contrary, to emphasize this
very point and to connect it with the attempt to explain totemism.³

The first result of our substitution is very remarkable. If the totem
animal is the father, then the two main commandments of totemism, the
two taboo rules which constitute its nucleus—not to kill the totem animal
and not to use a woman belonging to the same totem for sexual purposes
—agree in content with the two crimes of Œdipus, who slew his father
and took his mother to wife, and also with the child’s two primal wishes
whose insufficient repression or whose re-awakening forms the nucleus of
perhaps all neuroses. If this similarity is more than a deceptive play of
accident it would perforce make it possible for us to shed light upon the
origin of totemism in prehistoric times. In other words, we should succeed
in making it probable that the totemic system resulted from the conditions
underlying the Œdipus complex, just as the animal phobia of “little
John” and the poultry perversion of “little Arpád” resulted from it. In
order to trace this possibility we shall in what follows study a peculiarity

¹ Ferenczi, l.c., p. 212.
² Frazer finds that the essence of totemism is in this identification: “Totemism is an
identification of a man with his totem.” Totemism and Exogamy, IV, p. 5.
³ I am indebted to Otto Rank for the report of a case of dog phobia in an intelligent
young man whose explanation of how he acquired his ailment sounds remarkably
like the totem theory of the Aruntas mentioned above. He had heard from his father
that his mother at one time during her pregnancy had been frightened by a dog.

909

of the totemic system or, as we may say, of the totemic religion, which
until now could hardly be brought into the discussion.

4

W. Robertson Smith, who died in 1894, was a physicist, philologist, Bible
critic, and archæologist, a many-sided as well as keen and free-thinking
man, expressed the assumption in his work, The Religion of the Semites,¹
published in 1889, that a peculiar ceremony, the so-called totem feast,
had, from the very beginning, formed an integral part of the totemic sys-
tem. For the support of this supposition he had at his disposal at that time
only a single description of such an act from the year 500 A.D.; he knew,
however, how to give a high degree of probability to his assumption
through his analysis of the nature of sacrifice among the old Semites. As
sacrifice assumes a godlike person we are dealing here with an inference
from a higher phase of religious rite to its lowest phase in totemism.

I shall now cite from Robertson Smith’s excellent book ² those state-
ments about the origin and meaning of the sacrificial right which are of
great interest to us; I shall omit the only too numerous tempting details
as well as the parts dealing with all later developments. In such an excerpt
it is quite impossible to give the reader any sense of the lucidity or of the
argumentative force of the original.

Robertson Smith shows that sacrifice at the altar was the essential part
of the rite of old religions. It plays the same rôle in all religions, so that
its origin must be traced back to very general causes whose effects were
everywhere the same.

But the sacrifice—the holy action κατξογξη (sacrificium ἱερουργία)—
originally meant something different from what later times understood by
it: the offering to the deity in order to reconcile him or to incline him to
be favourable. The profane use of the word was afterwards derived from
the secondary sense of self-denial. As is demonstrated, the first sacrifice
was nothing else but “an act of social fellowship between the deity and
his worshippers.”

Things to eat and drink were brought as sacrifice; man offered to his
god the same things as those on which he himself lived, flesh, cereals,
fruits, wine and oil. Only in regard to sacrificial flesh did there exist re-
strictions and exceptions. The god partakes of the animal sacrifices with
his worshippers while the vegetable sacrifices are left to him alone. There
is no doubt that animal sacrifices are older and at one time were the only
forms of sacrifice. The vegetable sacrifices resulted from the offering of
the first-fruits and correspond to a tribute to the lord of the soil and the
land. But animal sacrifice is older than agriculture.

¹ The Religion of the Semites, Second Edition, London, 1907.

² Ibid.

910

Linguistic survivals make it certain that the part of the sacrifice des-
tined for the god was looked upon as his real food. This conception became
offensive with the progressive dematerialization of the diety, and was
avoided by offering the deity only the liquid part of the meal. Later the
use of fire, which made the sacrificial flesh ascend in smoke from the altar,
made it possible to prepare human food in such a way that it was more
suitable for the deity. The drink sacrifice was originally the blood of the
sacrificed animals; wine was used later as a substitute for the blood.
Primitive man looked upon wine as the “blood of the grape,” as our poets
still call it.

The oldest form of sacrifice, older than the use of fire and the knowledge
of agriculture, was therefore the sacrifice of animals, whose flesh and
blood the god and his worshippers ate together. It was essential that both
participants should receive their shares of the meal.

Such a sacrifice was a public ceremony, the celebration of a whole clan.
As a matter of fact all religion was a public affair, religious duty was a
part of the social obligation. Sacrifice and festival go together among all
races; each sacrifice entails a holiday and no holiday can be celebrated
without a sacrifice. The sacrificial festival was an occasion for joyously
transcending one’s own interests and emphasizing social community and
community with god.

The ethical power of the public sacrificial feast was based upon primal
conceptions of the meaning of eating and drinking in common. To eat
and drink with some one was at the same time a symbol and a confirma-
tion of social community and of the assumption of mutual obligations;
the sacrificial eating gave direct expression to the fact that the god and
his worshippers are communicants, thus confirming all their other rela-
tions. Customs that today still are in force among the Arabs of the desert
prove that the binding force resulting from the common meal is not a
religious factor but that the subsequent mutual obligations are due to
the act of eating itself. Whoever has shared the smallest bite with such a
Bedouin, or has taken a swallow of his milk, need not fear him any longer
as an enemy, but may be sure of his protection and help. Not indeed, for
ever, strictly speaking this lasts only while it may be assumed that the
food partaken remains in the body. So realistically is the bond of union
conceived; it requires repetition to strengthen it and make it endure.

But why is this binding power ascribed to eating and drinking in com-
mon? In the most primitive societies there is only one unconditional and
never failing bond, that of kinship. The members of a community stand
by each other jointly and severally, a kin is a group of persons whose life
is so bound into a physical unity that they can be considered as parts
of a common life. In case of the murder of one of this kin they therefore
do not say: the blood of so and so has been spilt, but our blood has been

911

spilt. The Hebraic phrase by which the tribal relation is acknowledged is:
“Thou art my bone and my flesh.” Kinship therefore signifies having
part in a general substance. It is natural then that it is based not only
upon the fact that we are a part of the substance of our mother who has
borne us, and whose milk nourished us, but also that the food eaten later
through which the body is renewed, can acquire and strengthen kinship.
If one shared a meal with one’s god the conviction was thus expressed
that one was of the same substance as he; no meal was therefore partaken
with any one recognized as a stranger.

The sacrificial repast was therefore originally a feast of the kin, follow-
ing the rule that only those of kin could eat together. In our society the
meal unites the members of the family; but the sacrificial repast has
nothing to do with the family. Kinship is older than family life; the oldest
families known to us regularly comprised persons who belonged to various
bonds of kinship. The men married women of strange clans and the chil-
dren inherited the clan of the mother; there was no kinship between the
man and the rest of the members of the family. In such a family there was
no common meal. Even today savages eat apart and alone, and the re-
ligious prohibitions of totemism as to eating often make it impossible for
them to eat with their wives and children.

Let us now turn to the sacrificial animal. There was, as we have heard,
no meeting of the kin without animal sacrifice, but, and this is significant,
no animal was slaughtered except for such a solemn occasion. Without
any hesitation the people ate fruits, game and the milk of domestic ani-
mals, but religious scruples made it impossible for the individual to kill
a domestic animal for his own use. There is not the least doubt, says Rob-
ertson Smith, that every sacrifice was originally a clan sacrifice, and that
the killing of a sacrificial animal originally belonged to those acts which
were forbidden to the individual and were only justified if the whole kin
assumed the responsibility. Primitive men had only one class of actions
which were thus characterized, namely, actions which touched the holi-
ness of the kin’s common blood. A life which no individual might take
and which could be sacrificed only through the consent and participation
of all the members of the clan was on the same plane as the life of a mem-
ber of the kin. The rule that every guest of the sacrificial repast must
partake of the flesh of the sacrificial animal, had the same meaning as the
rule that the execution of a guilty member of the kin must be performed
by the whole kin. In other words: the sacrificial animal was treated like
one of kin, the sacrificing community, its god, and the sacrificial animal
were of the same blood, and the members of a clan.

On the basic of much evidence Robertson Smith identifies the sacrificial
animal with the old totem animal. In a later age there were two kinds of
sacrifices, those of domestic animals which usually were also eaten, and

912

TOTEM AND TABOO

the unusual sacrifice of animals which were forbidden as being unclean.
Further investigation then shows that these unclean animals were holy
and that they were sacrificed to the gods to whom they were holy, that
these animals were originally identified with the gods themselves and
that at the sacrifice the worshippers in some way emphasized their blood
relationship to the god and to the animal. But this difference between
usual and “mystic” sacrifices does not hold good for still earlier times.
Originally all animals were holy, their meat was forbidden and might be
eaten only on solemn occasions, with the participation of the whole kin.
The slaughter of the animal amounted to the spilling of the kin’s blood
and had to be done with the same precautions and assurances against
reproach.

The taming of domestic animals and the rise of cattle-breeding seems
everywhere to have put an end to the pure and rigorous totemism of earli-
est times.¹ But such holiness as still clung to domestic animals in what
was now a “pastoral” religion, is sufficiently distinct for us to recognize
its totemic character. Even in late classical times the rite in several locali-
ties prescribed flight for the sacrificer after the sacrifice, as if to escape
revenge. In Greece the idea must once have been general that the killing
of an ox was really a crime. At the Athenian festival of the Bouphonia
a formal trial, to which all the participants were summoned, was insti-
tuted after the sacrifice. Finally it was agreed to put the blame for the
murder upon the knife, which was then cast into the sea.

In spite of the dread which protects the life of the animal as being of
kin, it became necessary to kill it from time to time in solemn conclave,
and to divide its flesh and blood among the members of the clan. The
motive which commands this act reveals the deepest meaning of the es-
sence of sacrifice. We have heard that in later times every eating in com-
mon, the participation in the same substance which entered into their
bodies, established a holy bond between the communicants; in oldest
time this meaning seemed to be attached only to participation in the sub-
stance of a holy sacrifice. The holy mystery of the sacrificial death was
justified in that only in this way could the holy bond be established which
united the participants with each other and with their god.²

This bond was nothing else but the life of the sacrificial animal which
lived on its flesh and blood and was shared by all the participants by
means of the sacrificial feast. Such an idea was the basis of all the blood
bonds through which men in still later times became pledged to each other.
The thoroughly realistic conception of consanguinity as an identity of

¹ “The inference is that the domestication to which totemism leads (when there are
any animals capable of domestication) is fatal to totemism.” Jevons, Introduction to
the History of Religion, 1911, fifth edition, p. 120.

² L.c., p. 313.

913

THE INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM

substance makes comprehensible the necessity of renewing it from time
to time through the physical process of the sacrificial repast.

We will now stop quoting from Robertson Smith’s train of thought in
order to give a condensed summary of what is essential in it. When the
idea of private property came into existence sacrifice was conceived as a
gift to the deity, as a transfer from the property of man to that of the god.
But this interpretation left all the peculiarities of the sacrificial ritual un-
explained. In oldest times the sacrificial animal itself had been holy and
its life inviolate; it could be taken only in the presence of the god, with
the whole tribe taking part and sharing the guilt in order to furnish the
holy substance through the eating of which the members of the clan as-
sured themselves of their material identity with one another and with the
deity. The sacrifice was a sacrament, and the sacrificial animal itself was
one of the kin. In reality it was the old totem animal, the primitive god
himself through the slaying and eating of whom the members of the clan
revived and assured their similarity with the god.

From this analysis of the nature of sacrifice Robertson Smith drew the
conclusion that the periodic killing and eating of the totem before the
period when the anthropomorphic deities were venerated was an important
part of totem religion. The ceremonial of such a totem feast was preserved
for us, he thought, in the description of a sacrifice in later times. Saint
Nilus tells of a sacrificial custom of the Bedouins in the desert of Sinai
towards the end of the fourth century A.D. The victim, a camel, was bound
and laid upon a rough altar of stones; the leader of the tribe made the
participants walk three times around the altar to the accompaniment of
song, inflicted the first wound upon the animal and greedily drank the
spurting blood; then the whole community threw itself upon the sacrifice,
cut off pieces of the palpitating flesh with their swords and ate them raw
in such haste that in a short interval between the rise of the morning
star, for whom this sacrifice was meant, and its fading before the rays
of the sun, the whole sacrificial animal, flesh, skin, bones, and entrails,
were devoured. According to every testimony this barbarous rite, which
bespeaks great antiquity, was not a rare custom but the general original
form of the totem sacrifice, which in later times underwent the most
varied modifications.

Many authors have refused to grant any weight to this conception of
the totem feast because it could not be strengthened by direct observation
at the stage of totemism. Robertson Smith himself has referred to exam-
ples in which the sacramental meaning of sacrifices seems certain, such
as the human sacrifices of the Aztecs and others which recall the conditions
of the totem feast, the bear sacrifices of the bear tribe of the Ouataouaks
in America, and the bear festival of the Ainus in Japan. Frazer has given
a full account of these and similar cases in the two divisions of his great

914

work that have last appeared.¹ An Indian tribe in California which reveres
the buzzard, a large bird of prey, kills it once a year with solemn cere-
mony, whereupon the bird is mourned and its skin and feathers preserved.
The Zuni Indians in New Mexico do the same thing with their holy turtle.

In the Intichiuma ceremonies of Central Australian tribes a trait has
been observed which fits in excellently with the assumptions of Robertson
Smith. Every tribe that practises magic for the increase of its totem, which
it cannot eat itself, is bound to eat a part of its totem at the ceremony
before it can be touched by the other tribes. According to Frazer the best
example of the sacramental consumption of the otherwise forbidden totem
is to be found among the Bini in West Africa, in connexion with the
burial ceremony of this tribe.²

But we shall follow Robertson Smith in the assumption that the sacra-
mental killing and the common consumption of the otherwise forbidden
totem animal was an important trait of the totem religion.³

5

LET us now envisage the scene of such a totem meal and let us embellish
it further with a few probable features which could not be adequately
considered before. Thus we have the clan, which on a solemn occasion
kills its totem in a cruel manner and eats it raw, blood, flesh, and bones.
At the same time the members of the clan disguised in imitation of the
totem, mimic it in sound and movement as if they wanted to emphasize
their common identity. There is also the conscious realization that an
action is being carried out which is forbidden to each individual and which
can only be justified through the participation of all, so that no one is
allowed to exclude himself from the killing and the feast. After the act
is accomplished the murdered animal is bewailed and lamented. The death
lamentation is compulsive, being enforced by the fear of a threatening
retribution, and its main purpose is, as Robertson Smith remarks on an
analogous occasion, to exculpate oneself from responsibility for the slay-
ing.⁴

But after this mourning there follows loud festival gaiety accompanied
by the unchaining of every impulse and the permission of every gratifi-
cation. Here we find an easy insight into the nature of the holiday.
A holiday is a permitted, or rather a prescribed excess, a solemn violation
of a prohibition. People do not commit the excesses, which at all times

¹ The Golden Bough, Part V; Spirits of the Corn and of the Wild, 1912, in the
chapters: “Eating the God and Killing the Divine Animal.”

² Frazer, Totem and Exogamy, Vol. II, p. 590.

³ I am not ignorant of the objections to this theory of sacrifice as expressed by
Marillier, Hubert, Mauss and others, but they have not essentially impaired the
theories of Robertson Smith.

⁴ Religion of the Semites, Second Edition, 1907, p. 412.

915

THE INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM

have characterized holidays, as a result of an order to be in a holiday
mood, but because in the very nature of a holiday there is excess; the holi-
day mood is brought about by the release of what is otherwise forbidden.
But what has mourning over the death of the totem animal to do with
the introduction of this holiday spirit? If men are happy over the slaying
of the totem, which is otherwise forbidden to them, why do they also
mourn it?

We have heard that members of a clan become holy through the con-
sumption of the totem and thereby also strengthen their identification
with it and with each other. The fact that they have absorbed the holy
life with which the substance of the totem is charged may explain the
holiday mood and everything that results from it.

Psychoanalysis has revealed to us that the totem animal is really a
substitute for the father, and this really explains the contradiction that
it is usually forbidden to kill the totem animal, that the killing of it
results in a holiday and that the animal is killed and yet mourned. The
ambivalent emotional attitude which today still marks the father com-
plex in our children and so often continues into adult life also extended
to the father substitute of the totem animal.

But if we associate the translation of the totem as given by psycho-
analysis, with the totem feast and the Darwinian hypothesis about the
primal state of human society, a deeper understanding becomes possible
and a hypothesis is offered which may seem fantastic but which has the
advantage of establishing an unexpected unity among a series of hith-
erto separated phenomena.

The Darwinian conception of the primal horde does not, of course,
allow for the beginning of totemism. There is only a violent, jealous
father who keeps all the females for himself and drives away the grow-
ing sons. This primal state of society has nowhere been observed. The
most primitive organization we know, which today is still in force with
certain tribes, is associations of men consisting of members with equal
rights, subject to the restrictions of the totemic system, and founded
on matriarchy, or descent through the mother.¹ Can the one have re-
sulted from the other, and how was this possible?

By basing our argument upon the celebration of the totem we are
in a position to give an answer: “One day ² the expelled brothers joined
forces, slew and ate the father, and thus put an end to the father horde.
Together they dared and accomplished what would have remained im-
possible for them singly. Perhaps some advance in culture, like the use
of a new weapon, had given them the feeling of superiority. Of course

¹For a recent contribution compare The Whole House of the Chilkat, by G. T.
Emmons (American Museum Journal, Vol. XVI, No. 7). [Translator’s note.]
²The reader will avoid the erroneous impression which this exposition may call forth
by taking into consideration the concluding sentence of the subsequent chapter.

916

these cannibalistic savages ate their victim. This violent primal father
had surely been the envied and feared model for each of the brothers.
Now they accomplished their identification with him by devouring him
and each acquired a part of his strength. The totem feast, which is per-
haps mankind’s first celebration, would be the repetition and commemo-
ration of this memorable, criminal act with which so many things began,
social organization, moral restrictions and religion.¹

In order to find these results acceptable, quite aside from our sup-
position, we need only assume that the group of brothers banded to-
gether were dominated by the same contradictory feelings towards the
father which we can demonstrate as the content of ambivalence of the
father complex in all our children and in neurotics. They hated the father
who stood so powerfully in the way of their sexual demands and their
desire for power, but they also loved and admired him. After they had
satisfied their hate by his removal and had carried out their wish for
identification with him, the suppressed tender impulses had to assert
themselves.² This took place in the form of remorse, a sense of guilt

¹The seemingly monstrous assumption that the tyrannical father was overcome and
slain by a combination of the expelled sons has also been accepted by Atkinson as a
direct result of the conditions of the Darwinian primal horde. “A youthful band of
brothers living together in forced celibacy, or at most in polyandrous relation with
some single female captive. A horde as yet weak in their impubescence they are, but
they would, when strength was gained with time, inevitably wrench by combined
attacks, renewed again and again, both wife and life from the paternal tyrant”
(Primal Law, pp. 220–1). Atkinson, who spent his life in New Caledonia and had
unusual opportunities to study the natives, also refers to the fact that the conditions
of the primal horde which Darwin assumes can easily be observed among herds of
wild cattle and horses and regularly lead to the killing of the father animal. He then
assumes further that a disintegration of the horde took place after the removal of the
father through embittered fighting among the victorious sons, which thus precluded
the origin of a new organization of society; “An ever recurring violent succession to
the solitary paternal tyrant by sons, whose parricidal hands were so soon again
clenched in fratricidal strife” (p. 228). Atkinson, who did not have the suggestions of
psychoanalysis at his command and did not know the studies of Robertson Smith,
finds a less violent transition from the primal horde to the next social stage in which
many men live together in peaceful accord. He attributes it to maternal love that at
first only the youngest sons and later others too remain in the horde, who in return
for this toleration acknowledge the sexual prerogative of the father by the restraint
which they practise towards the mother and towards their sisters.

²So much for the very remarkable theory of Atkinson, its essential correspondence
with the theory here expounded, and its point of departure which makes it necessary
to relinquish so much else.

I must ascribe the indefiniteness, the disregard of time interval, and the crowding
of the material in the above exposition to a restraint which the nature of the subject
demands. It would be just as meaningless to strive for exactness in this material as it
would be unfair to demand certainty here.

This new emotional attitude must also have been responsible for the fact that the
deed could not bring full satisfaction to any of the perpetrators. In a certain sense it
had been in vain. For none of the sons could carry out his original wish of taking the
place of the father. But failure is, as we know, much more favourable to moral
reaction than success.

917

THE INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM

was formed which coincided here with the remorse generally felt. The
dead now became stronger than the living had been, even as we observe
it today in the destinies of men. What the fathers’ presence had for-
merly prevented they themselves now prohibited in the psychic situa-
tion of “subsequent obedience” which we know so well from psycho-
analysis. They undid their deed by declaring that the killing of the father
substitute, the totem, was not allowed, and renounced the fruits of their
deed by denying themselves the liberated women. Thus they created
two fundamental taboos of totemism out of the sense of guilt of the son,
and for this very reason these had to correspond with the two repressed
wishes of the Œdipus complex. Whoever disobeyed became guilty of the
two only crimes which troubled primitive society.¹⁾

The two taboos of totemism with which the morality of man begins
are psychologically not of equal value. One of them, the sparing of the
totem animal, rests entirely upon emotional motives; the father had
been removed and nothing in reality could make up for this. But the
other, the incest prohibition, had, besides, a strong practical foundation.
Sexual need does not unite men; it separates them. Though the brothers
had joined forces in order to overcome the father, each was the other’s
rival among the women. Each one wanted to have them all to himself like
the father, and in the fight of each against the other the new organiza-
tion would have perished. For there was no longer any one stronger than
all the rest who could have successfully assumed the rôle of the father.
Thus there was nothing left for the brothers, if they wanted to live to-
gether, but to erect the incest prohibition—perhaps after many difficult
experiences—through which they all equally renounced the women whom
they desired, and on account of whom they had removed the father in the
first place. Thus they saved the organization which had made them
strong and which could be based upon the homo-sexual feelings and
activities which probably manifested themselves among them during
the time of their banishment. Perhaps this situation also formed the
germ of the institution of the mother right discovered by Bachofen,
which was then abrogated by the patriarchal family arrangement.

On the other hand the claim of totemism to be considered the first
attempt at a religion is connected with the other taboo which protects
the life of the totem animal. The feelings of the sons found a natural
and appropriate substitute for the father in the animal, but their com-
pulsory treatment of it expressed more than the need of showing remorse.
The surrogate for the father was perhaps used in the attempt to assuage
the burning sense of guilt, and to bring about a kind of reconciliation

¹⁾“Murder and incest, or offences of like kind against the sacred law of blood are in
primitive society the only crimes of which the community as such takes cogni-
zance…” Religion of the Semites, p. 419.

918

TOTEM AND TABOO

with the father. The totemic system was a kind of agreement with the
father in which the latter granted everything that the child’s phantasy
could expect from him, protection, care, and forbearance, in return for
which the pledge was given to honour his life, that is to say, not to repeat
the act against the totem through which the real father had perished.
Totemism also contained an attempt at justification. “If the father had
treated us like the totem we should never have been tempted to kill
him.” Thus totemism helped to gloss over the real state of affairs and
to make one forget the event to which it owed its origin.

In this connection some features were formed which henceforth deter-
mined the character of every religion. The totem religion had issued from
the sense of guilt of the sons as an attempt to palliate this feeling and to
conciliate the injured father through subsequent obedience. All later
religions prove to be attempts to solve the same problem, varying only
in accordance with the stage of culture in which they are attempted and
according to the paths which they take; they are all, however, reactions
aiming at the same great event with which culture began and which ever
since has not let mankind come to rest.

There is still another characteristic faithfully preserved in religion
which already appeared in totemism at this time. The ambivalent strain
was probably too great to be adjusted by any arrangement, or else the
psychological conditions are entirely unfavourable to any kind of settle-
ment of these contradictory feelings. It is certainly noticeable that the
ambivalence attached to the father complex also continues in totemism
and in religions in general. The religion of totemism included not only
manifestations of remorse and attempts at reconciliation, but also serves
to commemorate the triumph over the father. The gratification obtained
thereby creates the commemorative celebration of the totem feast at
which the restrictions of subsequent obedience are suspended, and makes
it a duty to repeat the crime of parricide through the sacrifice of the totem
animal as often as the benefits of this deed, namely, the appropriation of
the father’s properties, threaten to disappear as a result of the changed
influences of life. We shall not be surprised to find that a part of the son’s
defiance also reappears, often in the most remarkable disguises and in-
versions, in the formation of later religions.

If thus far we have followed, in religion and moral precepts—but little
differentiated in totemism—the consequences of the tender impulses
towards the father as they are changed into remorse, we must not over-
look the fact that for the most part the tendencies which have impelled
to parricide have retained the victory. The social and fraternal feelings
on which this great change is based, henceforth for long periods exercises
the greatest influence upon the development of society. They find expres-
sion in the santification of the common blood and in the emphasis upon

919

the solidarity of life within the clan. In thus ensuring each other’s lives
the brothers express the fact that no one of them is to be treated by the
other as they all treated the father. They preclude a repetition of the fate
of the father. The socially established prohibition against fratricide is
now added to the prohibition against killing the totem, which is based on
religious grounds. It will still be a long time before the commandment
discards the restrictions to members of the tribe and assumes the simple
phraseology: Thou shalt not kill. At first the brother clan has taken the
place of the father horde and was guaranteed by the blood bond. Society
is now based on complicity in the common crime, religion on the sense of
guilt and the consequent remorse, while morality is based partly on the
necessities of society and partly on the expiation which this sense of guilt
demands.

Thus psychoanalysis, contrary to the newer conceptions of the totemic
system and more in accord with older conceptions, bids us argue for an
intimate connection between totemism and exogamy as well as for their
simultaneous origin.

6

I am under the influence of many strong motives which restrain me from
the attempt to discuss the further development of religions from their be-
ginning in totemism up to their present state. I shall follow out only two
threads as I see them appearing in the weft with especial distinctness: the
motive of the totem sacrifice and the relation of the son to the father.¹

Robertson Smith has shown us that the old totem feast returns in the
original form of sacrifice. The meaning of the rite is the same: sanctifica-
tion through participation in the common meal. The sense of guilt, which
can only be allayed through the solidarity of all the participants, has
also been retained. In addition to this there is the tribal deity in whose
supposed presence the sacrifice takes place, who takes part in the meal
like a member of the tribe, and with whom identification is effected by the
act of eating the sacrifice. How does the god come into this situation which
originally was foreign to him?

The answer might be that the idea of god had meanwhile appeared—
no one knows whence—and had dominated the whole religious life, and
that the totem feast, like everything else that wished to survive, had been
forced to fit itself into the new system. However, psychoanalytic investi-
gation of the individual teaches with especial emphasis that god is in
every case modelled after the father and that our personal relation to god
is dependent upon our relation to our physical father, fluctuating and
changing with him, and that god at bottom is nothing but an exalted

1 Compare Transformations and Symbols of the Libido, by C. G. Jung, in which
some dissenting points of view are represented.

920

TOTEM AND TABOO

father. Here also, as in the case of totemism, psychoanalysis advises us
to believe the faithful, who call god father just as they called the totem
their ancestor. If psychoanalysis deserves any consideration at all, then
the share of the father in the idea of a god must be very important, quite
aside from all the other origins and meanings of god upon which psycho-
analysis can throw no light. But then the father would be represented
twice in primitive sacrifice, first as god, and secondly as the totem-animal-
sacrifice, and we must ask, with all due regard for the limited number of
solutions which psychoanalysis offers, whether this is possible and what
the meaning of it may be.

We know that there are a number of relations of the god to the holy
animal (the totem and the sacrificial animal): 1. Usually one animal is
sacred to every god, sometimes even several animals. 2. In certain, espe-
cially holy, sacrifices, the so-called “mystical” sacrifices, the very animal
which had been sanctified through the god was sacrificed to him.¹ 3. The
god was often revered in the form of an animal, or from another point of
view, animals enjoyed a godlike reverence long after the period of totem-
ism. 4. In myths the god is frequently transformed into an animal, often
into the animal that is sacred to him. From this the assumption was obvi-
ous that the god himself was the animal, and that he had evolved from
the totem animal at a later stage of religious feeling. But the reflection
that the totem itself is nothing but a substitute for the father relieves us
of all further discussion. Thus the totem may have been the first form of
the father substitute and the god a later one in which the father regained
his human form. Such a new creation from the root of all religious evolu-
tion, namely, the longing for the father, might become possible if in the
course of time an essential change had taken place in the relation to the
father and perhaps also to the animal.

Such changes are easily divined even if we disregard the beginning of
a psychic estrangement from the animal as well as the disintegration of
totemism through animal domestication. The situation created by the
removal of the father contained an element which in the course of time
must have brought about an extraordinary increase of longing for the
father. For the brothers who had joined forces to kill the father had each
been animated by the wish to become like the father and had given ex-
pression to this wish by incorporating parts of the substitute for him in
the totem feast. In consequence of the pressure which the bonds of the
brother clan exercised upon each member, this wish had to remain unful-
filled. No one could or was allowed to attain the father’s perfection of
power, which was the thing they had all sought. Thus the bitter feeling
against the father which had incited to the deed could subside in the
course of time, while the longing for him grew, and an ideal could arise
 

Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, Second Edition, 1907.

921

THE INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM

having as a content the fullness of power and the freedom from restriction
of the conquered primal father, as well as the willingness to subject them
selves to him. The original democratic equality of each member of the
tribe could no longer be retained on account of the interference of cultural
changes; in consequence of which there arose a tendency to revive the old
father ideal in the creation of gods through the veneration of those indi-
viduals who had distinguished themselves above the rest. That a man
should become a god and that a god should die, which today seems to us
an outrageous presumption, was still by no means offensive to the concep-
tions of classical antiquity.¹⁾ But the deification of the murdered father
from whom the tribe now derived its origin, was a much more serious at-
tempt at expiation than the former covenant with the totem.

In this evolution I am at a loss to indicate the place of the great mater-
nal deities who perhaps everywhere preceded the paternal deities. But
it seems certain that the change in the relation to the father was not re-
stricted to religion but logically extended to the other side of human life
influenced by the removal of the father, namely, the social organization.
With the institution of paternal deities the fatherless society gradually
changed into a patriarchal one. The family was a reconstruction of the
former primal horde and also restored a great part of their former rights
to the fathers. Now there were patriarchs again but the social achieve-
ments of the brother clan had not been given up and the actual difference
between the new family patriarchs and the unrestricted primal father was
great enough to ensure the continuation of the religious need, the preser-
vation of the unsatisfied longing for the father.

The father therefore really appears twice in the scene of sacrifice be-
fore the tribal god, once as the god and again as the totem-sacrificial-
animal. But in attempting to understand this situation we must beware
of interpretations which superficially seek to translate it as an allegory,
and which forget the historical stages in the process. The twofold presence
of the father corresponds to the two successive meanings of the scene.
The ambivalent attitude towards the father as well as the victory of the
son’s tender emotional feelings over his hostile ones, have here found
plastic expression. The scene of vanquishing the father, his greatest deg-
radation, furnishes here the material to represent his highest triumph.
The meaning which sacrifice has quite generally acquired is found in the
fact that in the very same action which continues the memory of this mis-
deed it offers satisfaction to the father for the ignominy put upon him.

¹⁾“To us moderns, for whom the breach which divides the human and divine has
deepened into an impassable gulf, such mimicry may appear impious, but it was
otherwise with the ancients. To their thinking gods and men were akin, for many
families traced their descent from a divinity, and the deification of a man probably
seemed as little extraordinary to them as the canonization of a saint seems to a mod-
ern Catholic.” Frazer, The Golden Bough, I; The Magic Art and the Evolution of
Kings, II, p. 177.

222

TOTEM AND TABOO

In the further development the animal loses its sacredness and the
sacrifice its relation to the celebration of the totem; the rite becomes a
simple offering to the deity, a self-deprivation in favour of the god. God
himself is now so exalted above man that he can be communicated with
only through a priest as intermediary. At the same time the social order
produces godlike kings who transfer the patriarchal system to the state.
It must be said that the revenge of the deposed and reinstated father has
been very cruel; it culminated in the dominance of authority. The sub-
jugated sons have used the new relation to disburden themselves still more
of their sense of guilt. Sacrifice, as it is now constituted, is entirely beyond
their responsibility. God himself has demanded and ordained it. Myths
in which the god himself kills the animal that is sacred to him, which he
himself really is, belong to this phase. This is the greatest possible denial
of the great misdeed with which society and the sense of guilt began.
There is an unmistakable second meaning in this sacrificial demonstra-
tion. It expresses satisfaction at the fact that the earlier father substitute
has been abandoned in favour of the higher conception of god. The super-
ficial allegorical translation of the scene here roughly corresponds with
its psychoanalytic interpretation by saying that the god is represented
as overcoming the animal part of his nature.¹

But it would be erroneous to believe that in this period of renewed
patriarchal authority the hostile impulses which belong to the father com-
plex had entirely subsided. On the contrary, the first phases in the domi-
nation of the two new substitutive formations for the father, those of gods
and kings, plainly show the most energetic expression of that ambiv-
alence which is characteristic of religion.

In his great work, The Golden Bough, Frazer has expressed the conjec-
ture that the first kings of the Latin tribes were strangers who played
the part of a deity and were solemnly sacrificed in this rôle on specified
holidays. The yearly sacrifice (self-sacrifice is a variant) of a god seems
to have been an important feature of Semitic religions. The ceremony of
human sacrifice in various parts of the inhabited world makes it certain
that these human beings ended their lives as representatives of the deity.
This sacrificial custom can still be traced in later times in the substitu-
tion of an inanimate imitation (doll) for the living person. The thean-
thropic god sacrifice into which unfortunately I cannot enter with the
same thoroughness with which the animal sacrifice has been treated

¹It is known that the overcoming of one generation of gods by another in mythology
represents the historical process of the substitution of one religious system by another,
either as the result of conquest by a strange race or by means of a psychological
development. In the latter case the myth approaches the “functional phenomena” in
H. Silberer’s sense. That the god who kills the animal is a symbol of the libido, as
asserted by C. G. Jung (l.c.), presupposes a different conception of the libido from
that hitherto held, and at any rate seems to me questionable.

923

THE INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM

throws the clearest light upon the meaning of the older forms of sacrifice.
It acknowledges with unsurpassable candour that the object of the sacri-
ficial action has always been the same, being identical with what is now
revered as a god, namely with the father. The question as to the relation
of animal to human sacrifice can now be easily solved. The original animal
sacrifice was already a substitute for a human sacrifice, for the solemn
killing of the father, and when the father substitute regained its human
form, the animal substitute could also be retransformed into a human
sacrifice.

Thus, the memory of that first great act of sacrifice had proved to be
indestructible despite all attempts to forget it, and just at the moment
when men strove to get as far away as possible from its motives, the un-
distorted repetition of it had to appear in the form of the god sacrifice.
I need not fully indicate here the developments of religious thought which
made this return possible in the form of rationalizations. Robertson Smith
who is, of course, far removed from the idea of tracing sacrifice back to
this great event of man’s primal history, says that the ceremony of the
festivals in which the old Semites celebrated the death of a deity were
interpreted as “a commemoration of a mythical tragedy” and that the
attendant lament was not characterized by spontaneous sympathy, but
displayed a compulsive character, something that was imposed by the fear
of a divine wrath.¹⁾ We are in a position to acknowledge that this interpre-
tation was correct, the feelings of the celebrants being well explained by
the basic situation.

We may now accept it as a fact that in the further development of re-
ligions these two inciting factors, the son’s sense of guilt and his defiance,
were never again extinguished. Every attempted solution of the religious
problem and every kind of reconciliation of the two opposing psychic
forces gradually fall to the ground, probably under the combined influ-
ence of cultural changes, historical events, and inner psychic transforma-
tions.

The endeavour of the son to put himself in place of the father god, ap-
peared with greater and greater distinctness. With the introduction of
agriculture the importance of the son in the patriarchal family increased.
He was emboldened to give new expression to his incestuous libido which
found symbolic satisfaction in labouring over mother earth. There came
into existence figures of gods like Attis, Adonis, Tammuz, and others,
spirits of vegetation as well as youthful divinities who enjoyed the favours
of maternal deities and committed incest with the mother in defiance of

¹⁾Religion of the Semites, pp. 412–413. “The mourning is not a spontaneous expression
of sympathy with the divine tragedy, but obligatory and enforced by fear of super-
natural anger. And a chief object of the mourners is to disclaim responsibility for the
god’s death—a point which has already come before us in connection with the
anthropic sacrifices, such as the ‘ox-
murder at Athens.’ ”

924

the father. But the sense of guilt which was not allayed through these
creations, was expressed in myths which visited these youthful lovers of
the maternal goddesses with short life and punishment through castra-
tion or through the wrath of the father god appearing in animal form.
Adonis was killed by the boar, the sacred animal of Aphrodite; Attis, the
lover of Cybele, died of castration.¹ The lamentation for these gods and
the joy at their resurrection have gone over into the ritual of another son
which divinity was destined to survive long.

When Christianity began its entry into the ancient world it met with
the competition of the religion of Mithras and for a long time it was
doubtful which deity was to be the victor.

The bright figure of the youthful Persian god has eluded our under-
standing. Perhaps we may conclude from the illustrations of Mithras
slaying the steers that he represented the son who carried out the sacrifice
of the father by himself and thus released the brothers from their oppress-
ing complicity in the deed. There was another way of allaying this sense
of guilt and this is the one that Christ took. He sacrificed his own life and
thereby redeemed the brothers from primal sin.

The theory of primal sin is of Orphic origin; it was preserved in the
mysteries and thence penetrated into the philosophic schools of Greek
antiquity.² Men were the descendants of Titans, who had killed and dis-
membered the young Dionysos-Zagreus; the weight of this crime op-
pressed them. A fragment of Anaximander says that the unity of the
world was destroyed by a primordial crime and everything that issued
from it must carry on the punishment for this crime.³ Although the fea-
tures of banding together, killing, and dismembering as expressed in the
deed of the Titans very clearly recall the totem sacrifice described by St.
Nilus—as also many other myths of antiquity, for example, the death
of Orpheus himself—we are nevertheless disturbed here by the variation
according to which a youthful god was murdered.

In the Christian myth man’s original sin is undoubtedly an offence
against God the Father, and if Christ redeems mankind from the weight
of original sin by sacrificing his own life, he forces us to the conclusion

¹The fear of castration plays an extraordinarily big rôle in disturbing the relations
to the father in the case of our youthful neurotics. In Ferenczi’s excellent study we
have seen how the boy recognized his totem in the animal which snaps at his little
penis. When children learn about ritual circumcision they identify it with castration.
To my knowledge the parallel in the psychology of races to this attitude of our
children has not yet been drawn. The circumcision which was so frequent in primor-
dial times among primitive races belongs to the period of initiation in which its
meaning is to be found; it has only secondarily been relegated to an earlier time of
life. It is very interesting that among primitive men circumcision is combined with
or replaced by the cutting off of the hair and the drawing of teeth, and that our
children, who cannot know anything about this, really treat these two opera-
tions as
equivalents to castration when they display their fear of them.

² Reinach, Cultes, Mythes, et Religions, II, p. 75.

³ “Une sorte pe péché proethnique,” l.c., p. 76.

925

that this sin was murder. According to the law of retaliation which is
deeply rooted in human feeling, a murder can be atoned only by the sacri-
fice of another life; the self-sacrifice points to a blood-guilt.¹ And if this
sacrifice of one’s own life brings about a reconciliation with god, the
father, then the crime which must be expiated can only have been the
murder of the father.

Thus, in the Christian doctrine mankind most unreservedly acknowl-
edges the guilty deed of primordial times because it now has found the
most complete expiation for this deed in the sacrificial death of the son.
The reconciliation with the father is the more thorough because simultane-
ously with this sacrifice there follows the complete renunciation of woman,
for whose sake mankind rebelled against the father. But now also the psy-
chological fatality of ambivalence demands its rights. In the same deed
which offers the greatest possible expiation to the father, the son also at-
tains the goal of his wishes against the father. He becomes a god himself
beside or rather in place of his father. The religion of the son succeeds the
religion of the father. As a sign of this substitution the old totem feast
is revived again in the form of communion in which the band of brothers
now eats the flesh and blood of the son and no longer that of the father,
the sons thereby identifying themselves with him and becoming holy
themselves. Thus through the ages we see the identity of the totem feast
with the animal sacrifice, the theanthropic human sacrifice, and the Chris-
tian eucharist, and in all these solemn occasions we recognize the after-
effects of that crime which so oppressed men but of which they must have
been so proud. At bottom, however, the Christian communion is a new
setting aside of the father, a repetition of the crime that must be expiated.
We see how well justified is Frazer’s dictum that “the Christian commu-
nion has absorbed within itself a sacrament which is doubtless far older
than Christianity.”²

7

A process like the removal of the primal father by the band of brothers
must have left ineradicable traces in the history of mankind and must
have expressed itself the more frequently in numerous substitutive forma-
tions the less it itself was to be remembered.³ I am avoiding the tempta-
tion

¹The suicidal impulses of our neurotics regularly prove to be self-punishments for
death wishes directed against others.

²Eating the God, p. 511. Nobody familiar with the literature on this subject will
assume that the tracing back of the Christian communion to the totem feast is an
idea of the author of this book.

³Ariel in The Tempest:

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange. . . .

926

tion of pointing out these traces in mythology, where they are not hard
to find, and am turning to another field in following a hint of S. Reinach
in his suggestive treatment of the death of Orpheus.¹

There is a situation in the history of Greek art which is strikingly
familiar even if profoundly divergent, to the scene of a totem feast dis-
covered by Robertson Smith. It is the situation of the oldest Greek
tragedy. A group of persons, all of the same name and dressed in the same
way, surround a single figure upon whose words and actions they are de-
pendent, to represent the chorus and the original single impersonator of
the hero. Later developments created a second and a third actor in order
to represent opponents in playing, and off-shoots of the hero, but the
character of the hero as well as his relation to the chorus remains un-
changed. The hero of the tragedy had to suffer; this is today still the
essential content of a tragedy. He had taken upon himself the so-called
“tragic guilt,” which is not always easy to explain; it is often not a guilt in
the ordinary sense. Almost always it consisted of a rebellion against a
divine or human authority and the chorus accompanied the hero with
their sympathies, trying to restrain and warn him, and lamented his fate
after he had met with what was considered fitting punishment for his
daring attempt.

But why did the hero of the tragedy have to suffer, and what was the
meaning of his “tragic” guilt? We will cut short the discussion by a
prompt answer. He had to suffer because he was the primal father, the
hero of that primordial tragedy the repetition of which here serves a cer-
tain tendency, and the tragic guilt is the guilt which he had to take upon
himself in order to free the chorus of theirs. The scene upon the stage
came into being through purposive distortion of the historical scene or,
one is tempted to say, it was the result of refined hypocrisy. Actually, in
the old situation, it was the members of the chorus themselves who had
caused the suffering of the hero; here, on the other hand, they exhaust-
themselves in sympathy and regret, and the hero himself is to blame for
his suffering. The crime foisted upon him, namely, presumption and re-
bellion against a great authority, is the same as that which in the past
oppressed the colleagues of the chorus, namely, the band of brothers.
Thus the tragic hero, though still against his will, is made the redeemer
of the chorus.

When one bears in mind the suffering of the divine goat Dionysos in the
performance of the Greek tragedy and the lament of the retinue of goats
who identified themselves with him, one can easily understand how the
almost extinct drama was revived in the Middle Ages in the Passion of
Christ.

In closing this study, which has been carried out in extremely con-

¹ La Mort d'Orphée, Cultes, Mythes, et Religions, Vol. II, p. 100.

927

THE INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM

densed form, I want to state the conclusion that the beginnings of re-
ligion, ethics, society, and art meet in the Œdipus complex. This is in
entire accord with the findings of psychoanalysis, namely, that the nucleus
of all neuroses as far as our present knowledge of them goes is the Œdipus
complex. It comes as a great surprise to me that these problems of racial
psychology can also be solved through a single concrete instance, such as
the relation to the father. Perhaps another psychological problem must
be included here. We have so frequently had occasion to show the ambiv-
alence of emotions in its real sense, that is to say the coincidence of love
and hate towards the same object, at the root of important cultural forma-
tions. We know nothing about the origin of this ambivalence. It may be
assumed to be a fundamental phenomenon of our emotional life. But the
other possibility seems to me also worthy of consideration: that ambiva-
lence, originally foreign to our emotional life, was acquired by mankind
from the father complex,¹ where psychoanalytic investigation of the indi-
vidual today still reveals the strongest expression of it.²

Before closing we must take into account that the remarkable con-
vergence reached in these illustrations, pointing to a single inclusive rela-
tion, ought not to blind us to the uncertainties of our assumptions and to
the difficulties of our conclusions. Of these difficulties I will point out only
two which must have forced themselves upon many readers.

In the first place it can hardly have escaped any one that we base every-
thing upon the assumption of a psyche of the mass in which psychic proc-
esses occur as in the psychic life of the individual. Moreover, we let the
sense of guilt for a deed survive for thousands of years, remaining effec-
tive in generations which could not have known anything of this deed.
We allow an emotional process such as might have arisen among gener-
ations of sons that had been ill-treated by their fathers, to continue to new
generations which had escaped such treatment by the very removal of the
father. These seem indeed to be weighty objections and any other ex-
planation which can avoid such assumptions would seem to merit prefer-
ence.

But further consideration shows that we ourselves do not have to carry
the whole responsibility for such daring. Without the assumption of a
mass psyche, or a continuity in the emotional life of mankind which per-
 

¹That is to say, the parent complex.

²I am used to being misunderstood and therefore do not think it superfluous to state
clearly that in giving these deductions I am by no means oblivious of the complex
nature of the phenomena which give rise to them; the only claim made is that a new
factor has been added to the already known or still unrecognized origins of religion,
morality, and society, which was furnished through psychoanalytic experience. The
synthesis of the whole explanation must be left to another. But it is in the nature of
this new contribution that it could play none other than the central rôle in such a
synthesis, although it will be necessary to overcome great affective resistances before
such import¿ce will be conceded to it.

928

mits us to disregard the interruptions of psychic acts through the trans-
gression of individuals, social psychology could not exist at all. If psychic
processes of one generation did not continue in the next, if each had to
acquire its attitude towards life afresh, there would be no progress in
this field and almost no development. We are now confronted by two new
questions: how much can be attributed to this psychic continuity within
the series of generations, and what ways and means does a generation use
to transfer its psychic states to the next generation? I do not claim that
these problems have been sufficiently explained or that direct communi-
cation and tradition, of which one immediately thinks, are adequate for
the task. Social psychology is in general little concerned with the manner
in which the required continuity in the psychic life of succeeding gener-
ations is established. A part of the task seems to be performed by the
inheritance of psychic dispositions which, however, need certain incen-
tives in the individual life in order to become effective. This may be the
meaning of the poet’s words: Strive to possess yourself of what you have
inherited from your ancestors. The problem would appear more difficult
if we could admit that there are psychic impulses which can be so com-
pletely suppressed that they leave no traces whatsoever behind them.
But that does not exist. The greatest suppression must leave room for
distorted substitutions and their resulting reactions. But in that case we
may assume that no generation is capable of concealing its more important
psychic processes from the next. For psychoanalysis has taught us that in
his unconscious psychic activity every person possesses an apparatus
which enables him to interpret the reactions of others, that is to say, to
straighten out the distortions which the other person has affected in the
expression of his feelings. By this method of unconscious understanding
of all customs, ceremonies, and laws which the original relation to the
primal father had left behind, later generations may also have succeeded
in taking over this legacy of feelings.

There is another objection which the analytic method of thought itself
might raise.

We have interpreted the first rules of morality and moral restrictions
of primitive society as reactions to a deed which gave the authors of it
the conception of crime. They regretted this deed and decided that it
should not be repeated and that its execution must bring no gain. This
creative sense of guilt has not become extinct with us. We find its asocial
effects in neurotics producing new rules of morality and continued re-
strictions, in expiation for misdeeds committed, or as precautions against
misdeeds to be committed.¹⁾ But when we examine these neurotics for the
deeds which have called forth such reactions, we are disappointed. We do
not find deeds, but only impulses and feelings which sought evil but which

¹ Compare Chapter II.

929

THE INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM
were restrained from carrying it out. Only psychic realities and not actual
ones are at the basis of the neurotics’ sense of guilt. It is characteristic of
the neurosis to put a psychic reality above an actual one and to react as
seriously to thoughts as the normal person reacts only towards realities.
May it not be true that the case was somewhat the same with primitive
men? We are justified in ascribing to them an extraordinary over-
valuation of their psychic acts as a partial manifestation of their narcistic or-
ganization.¹ According to this the mere impulses of hostility towards the
father and the existence of the wish phantasy to kill and devour him may
have sufficed to bring about the moral reaction which has created totem-
ism and taboo. We should thus escape the necessity of tracing back the
beginning of our cultural possession, of which we rightly are so proud, to
a horrible crime which wounds all our feelings. The causal connection,
which stretches from that beginning to the present time, would not be
impaired, for the psychic reality would be of sufficient importance to ac-
count for all those consequences. It may be agreed that a change has really
taken place in the form of society from the father horde to the brother
clan. This is a strong argument, but it is not conclusive. The change might
have been accomplished in a less violent manner and still have conditioned
the appearance of the moral reaction. As long as the pressure of the primal
father was felt, the hostile feelings against him were justified and repent-
ance at these feelings had to wait for another opportunity. Of as little
validity is the second objection, that everything derived from the ambiv-
alent relation to the father, namely taboos, and rules of sacrifice, is char-
acterized by the highest seriousness and by complete reality. The cere-
monials and inhibitions of compulsion neurotics exhibit this characteristic
too and yet they go back to a merely psychic reality, to resolution and not
to execution. We must beware of introducing the contempt for what is
merely thought or wished which characterizes our sober world where there
are only material values, into the world of primitive man and the neurotic,
which is full of inner riches only.
We face a decision here which is really not easy. But let us begin by
acknowledging that the difference which may seem fundamental to others
does not, in our judgment, touch the most important part of the subject.
If wishes and impulses have the full value of fact for primitive man, it is
for us to follow such a conception intelligently instead of correcting it
according to our standard. But in that case we must scrutinize more closely
the prototype of the neurosis itself which is responsible for having raised
this doubt. It is not true that compulsion neurotics, who today are under
the pressure of over-scrupulousness, defend themselves only against the
psychic reality of temptations and punish themselves for impulses which
they have only felt. A piece of historic reality is also involved; in their

¹See Chapter III.

930

childhood these persons had nothing but evil impulses and as far as their
childish impotence permitted they put them into action. Each of these
over-good persons had a period of badness in his childhood, and a perverse
phase as a fore-
runner and a premise of the latter over-
morality. The anal-
ogy between primitive men and neurotics is therefore much more funda-
mentally established if we assume that with the former, too, the psychic
reality, concerning whose structure there is no doubt, originally coincided
with the actual reality, and that primitive men really did what according
to all testimony they intended to do.

But we must not let our judgment about primitive men be influenced
too far by the analogy with neurotics. Differences must also be taken into
account. Of course the sharp division between thinking and doing as we
draw it does not exist either with savages or with neurotics. But the neu-
rotic is above all inhibited in his actions; with him the thought is a com-
plete substitute for the deed. Primitive man is not inhibited, the thought is
directly converted into the deed, the deed is for him, so to speak, rather a
substitute for the thought, and for that reason I think we may well as-
sume in the case we are discussing, though without vouching for the abso-
lute certainty of the decision, that “In the beginning was the deed.”