 Part 2 of Chapter 4 of Totem and Taboo by Sigmund Freud. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 4, Infantile Recurrence of Totemism. Part 2. 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 guideposts and referring 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 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 likelihood that exogamy is an essential part of the totemic system while the other disputes such a connection and believes in an accidental combination of those two traits of the most ancient cultures. In his later work, Fraser has emphatically stood for this latter point of view. Quote, 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 1, preface 12. 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 has shown in his writing 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 defluration and menstruation forbids sexual intercourse with a woman of the same totem. 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. The general totem taboo, which for instance forbids anyone 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. Among the theories which seek to explain exogamy independently of totemism, only a few need be mentioned insofar as they illustrate different attitudes of the authors toward the problem of incest. MacLennan 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 gradually 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 investigating whether actual conditions 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. Other writers have on the contrary assumed, and evidently with more right, that exogamy is to be interpreted as an institution for the prevention of incest. If we survey the gradually increasing complication of Australian marriage restrictions, we can hardly help agreeing with the opinion of Morgan, Fraser, Hewitt and Baldwin Spencer that these institutions bear the stamp of deliberate design, as Fraser puts it, and that they are meant to do what they have actually accomplished. Quote, in no other way does it seem possible to explain in all its details a system at once so complex and so regular, end quote. It is of interest to point out that the first restrictions which the introduction of marriage classes brought about affected the sexual freedom of the young generation, in other words incest between brothers and 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 evidently 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 equate us with cases in which incestuous marriage of privileged persons was made the rule. Westermark advanced the following to explain the dread of incest, quote, 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 consanguinous, finds a natural expression in custom and law through the abhorrence of sexual intercourse between those closely related, end quote. Though Havelach Ellis disputed the instinctive character of this aversion in his studies in the psychology of sex, he otherwise supported the same explanation in its essentials by declaring, quote, 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 in these circumstances the antecedent conditions for arousing the mating instinct must be entirely lacking. For persons who have grown up together from childhood, Havelach 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 erythistic excitement required to produce sexual two-mesance, end quote. It seems to me very remarkable that Westermark 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 manifestation as to affect the companions of home and hearth which in this respect are quite harmless instead of the blood relatives which alone are injurious to procreation. And I cannot resist citing the excellent criticism which Fraser opposes to Westermark's assertion. Fraser finds it incomprehensible 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 nowadays grown to be so overpowering. But other remarks of Fraser'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 two on taboo. Quote, it is not easy to see why any deep human instinct should need reinforcement 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 penises 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 favor of it and 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 interests of society. To this valuable argument of phrasers I can add that the experiences of psychoanalysis make the assumption of such an innate aversion to incestuous relations altogether impossible. They have taught on the contrary that the first sexual impulses of the young are regularly of an incestuous nature and that such repressed impulses play a role 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 observed the dangers with which inbreeding threatened their race and that they therefore had decreed the incest prohibition with a conscious purpose. The objections to this attempted explanation crowd upon each other. 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 savages makes it very improbable that the thoughts of their far removed ancestors should already have been occupied with preventing injury to 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. 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 seems to be even more active and stronger among primitive races living today 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 sociological, 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 Fraser's resigned statement 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. 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 a historic explanation. This attempt is associated with the 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. Quote, 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 battling 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 communities 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, quote, agreed 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. End quote. Dr. Savage in the Boston Journal of Natural History Volume 5, 1845 to 47 the younger males being thus driven out and wandering about would also when at last successful in finding a partner prevent too close inbreeding within the limits of the same family. End quote. Atkinson seems to have been the first to recognize that these conditions 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 prohibition 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 advent of totemism the rule would have changed into a different form no sexual intercourse within the totem. Andrew Lane declared himself in agreement with this explanation of exogamy but in the same book he advocates the other theory of Durkheim 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. 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 unhesitatingly 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 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 psychoanerotic diseases of this age and perhaps the earliest form of such an ailment 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. Carl Abraham for the report of a case in which the child itself explained its fear of wasps by saying that the color 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 difficulties of analyzing 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 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 observation for instance I mention an author M. Wolf 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 quote when he saw a dog running by on the street he wept and cried dear dog don't touch me I will be good end quote by being good he meant not to play violin anymore to practice onanism the same author later sums up as follows quote his dog phobia is really his fear of the father displaced upon the dog for his peculiar expression I will be good that is to say I will not masturbate really refers to the father who has forbidden masturbation end quote 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 quote 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 revealed themselves in the analysis as a displacement of fear from one of the parents to animals I am not prepared to assert that the widespread mouse and rat phobia has the same mechanism end quote I reported the analysis of the phobia of a five year old boy 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 in the street he expressed his apprehension that the horse would come into the room and bite him it proved that this was meant to be the punishment for his wish that the horse should fall over die after assurances that relieved the boy of his fear of his father it proved that he was fighting against wishes whose content was the absence or death of the father he indicated only too plainly that he felt the father to be his rival for the favor 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 Oedipus complex in which we recognize the central complex of the neuroses in general we have learned 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 accidental 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 tenderness 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 was no doubt that little John had not only fear but respect and interest for horses as soon as his fear was moderated he identified himself with the feared animal he jumped around like a horse and now it was he who bit the father in another stage of solution of the phobia he did not scruple to identify his parents with other large animals we may venture the impression that certain traits of totemism return as a negative expression in these animal phobias of children for a beautiful individual observation of what must be called a case of positive totemism in the child it is true that with the little arpaid whom forensic reports the totemic interests do not awaken in direct connection with the Oedipus complex but on the basis of a narcissistic premise namely the fear of castration but whoever looks attentively 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 Oedipus as well as in the castration complex the father plays the same role of feared opponent to the infantile sexual interests castration and its substitute through blinding is the punishment he threatens when little arpaid 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 he geared 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 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 behavior towards his totem animal was subtly ambivalent expressing itself in immoderate hating and loving he loved best to play killing chickens quote, the slaughtering of poultry was quite a festival for him he could dance around the animal's body for hours at a time in a state of intense excitement but then he kissed and stroked the slaughtered animal and cleaned and caressed the chicken effigies which he himself had ill used arpaid 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 quote, now I am small, now I am a chicken when I get bigger I will be a fowl when I am bigger still I will be a cock end quote on another occasion he suddenly expressed the wish to eat a potted mother by analogy potted fowl he was 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 forensic there was no doubt as to the source of his interest in the activities of the chicken yard quote, the continual sexual activity between cock and hen the laying of eggs and the creeping out of the young brood and quote, 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 neighbor quote, 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 end quote 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 and the ambivalent effective 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 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 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 Oedipus who slew his father and took his mother to wife and also with the child's two primal wishes whose insufficient repression whose reawakening 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 Oedipus complex just as the animal phobia of little John the poultry perversion of little Arpad resulted from it in order to trace this possibility we shall in what follows study of peculiarity of the totemic system or as we may say of the totemic religion which until now could hardly be brought into the discussion section four W. Robertson Smith who died in 1894 was a physicist, philologist, Bible critic, and archeologist and he cited as well as keen and free thinking man expressed the assumption in his work on the religion of the Semites published in 1889 that a peculiar ceremony the so-called totem feast had from the very beginning formed an integral part of the totemic system 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 god-like person we are dealing here with an inference from a higher phase of religious right to its lowest phase in totemism I shall now cite from Robertson Smith's excellent book those statements about the origin and meaning of the sacrificial right which are of great interest to us I shall omit the only two 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 right of old religions it plays the same role in all religions so that its origin must be traced back to very general causes whose effects were everywhere at the same but the sacrifice, the holy action, catechsocane, sacrificium, hierogia 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 favorable 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 than, quote, an act of social fellowship between the deity and his worshipers, end quote things to eat and drink were brought as sacrifice man offered to his god the same things on which he himself lived flesh, cereals, fruits, wine, and oil only in regard to the sacrificial flesh did there exist restrictions and exceptions the god partakes to the animal sacrifices with his worshipers 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 corresponded to attribute to the lord of the soil and the land but animal sacrifices older than agriculture linguistic survivals make it certain that the part of the sacrifice destined for the god was looked upon as his real food this conception became offensive with the progressive dematerialization of the deity 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 worshipers ate together it was essential that both participants should receive their share 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 someone was at the same time a symbol and a confirmation of social community and of the assumption of mutual obligations the sacrificial eating gave direct expression to the fact that the God and his worshipers are communicants thus confirming all their other relations customs that today still are enforced 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 forever 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 common 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 severly 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 spilled but our blood has been spilled 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 the same substance as he no meal was therefore partaken with anyone recognized as a stranger the sacrificial repast was therefore originally a feast of the kin following 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 belong to various bonds of kinship the men married women of strange clans and the children 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 religious 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 animals 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 robertson smith that every sacrifice was originally a clan sacrifice and that the killing of the 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 holiness 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 member of the kin the rule that every guest of the sacrificial were passed 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 sacrificing community its god and the sacrificial animal were of the same blood and the members of a clan on the basis 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 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 worshipers in some way emphasize 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 in the rise of cattle breeding seems everywhere to have put an end to the pure and rigorous totemism of earlier times 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 right in several localities 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 Bofonia a formal trial to which all the participants were summoned was instituted 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 essence of sacrifice we have heard that in later times every eating in common the participation in the same substance which entered into their bodies established a holy bond between the communicants in oldest times this meaning seemed to be attached only to participation in the substance 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 this bond was nothing else than 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 instill later times became pledged to each other the thoroughly realistic conception of consanguinity as an identity of 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 unexplained 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 in sharing the guilt in order to furnish the holy substance through the eating of which the members of the clan assured themselves of their material identity with each other 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 St. Nylis tells of a sacrificial custom of the Bedouins in the desert of Sinai towards the end of the 4th century AD 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 then 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 speaks of 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 Robert Smith himself has referred to examples 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 Owata Uwaks in America and the bear festival of the Anus in Japan Fraser has given a full account of these and similar cases in the two divisions of his great work that have last appeared an Indian tribe in California which reveres the buzzard a large bird of prey kills it once a year with solemn ceremony where upon 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 Intichuma ceremonies of central Australian tribes a trade has been observed which fits it excellently with the assumptions of Robert Smith every tribe that practices 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 Fraser the best example of the sacramental consumption of the otherwise forbidden totem is to be found among the beanie in West Africa in connection with the burial ceremony of this tribe but we also follow Robert Smith in the assumption that the sacramental killing and the common consumption of the otherwise forbidden totem animal was an important trait of the totem religion End of Part 2 of Chapter 4 read by Mary Schneider Part 3 of Chapter 4 of Totem and Taboo by Sigmund Freud this LibriVox recording is in the public domain Chapter 4 infantile recurrence of totemism Part 3 Section 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 slaying but after the morning there follows loud festival gaiety accompanied by the un-chaining of every impulse and the permission of every gratification 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 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 holiday 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 consumption 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 today still marks the father complex 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 psychoanalysis 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 which has the advantage of establishing an unexpected unity among a series of hitherto separated phenomena the Darwinian conception of the primal horde does not of course allow for the beginnings of totemism there is only a violent jealous father who keeps all the females for himself and drives away the growing sons this primal state of society has nowhere been observed the most primitive organization we know which today is still enforced 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 can the one have resulted from the other and how is this possible by basing our argument upon the celebration of the totem we are in a position to give an answer one day 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 impossible for them singling perhaps some advance in culture like the use of a new weapon had given them the feeling of superiority of course 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 perhaps mankind's first celebration would be the repetition and commemoration of this memorable criminal act with which so many things began social organization moral restrictions and religion in order to find these results acceptable quite aside from our supposition we'd only assume that the group of brothers banded together were dominated by the same contradictory feelings toward 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 this took place in the former remorse a sense of guilt 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 father's presence had formerly prevented they themselves now prohibited in the psychic situation of subsequent obedience which we know so well from psychoanalysis they undid their deed by declaring that the killing of the father's substitute the totem was not allowed and renounced the fruits of their deed by denying themselves the liberated women thus they created the 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 Oedipus complex whoever disobeyed became guilty of the two only crimes which troubled primitive society 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 organization would have perished for there was no longer anyone stronger than all the rest who could have successfully assumed the role of the father thus there was nothing left for the brothers if they wanted to live together but to erect the incest prohibition perhaps after many difficult experiences through which 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 homosexual 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 Bachowen 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 compulsory treatment of it expressed more than a 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 with the father the totemic system was a kind of agreement with the father in which the latter granted everything that the child's fantasy could expect from him protection, care and forbearance in return for which the pledge was given to honor 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 attempted 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 determined 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 proved 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 whichever 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 unfavorable to any kind of settlement 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 parasite through the sacrifice of the totem animal as often as the benefits of this deed namely the appropriation of the father's properties threatened 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 inversions 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 overlook the fact that for the most part the tendencies which have impelled to parasite 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 expression in the sanctification of the common blood and in the emphasis upon 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 restriction 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 the psychoanalysis contrary to the newer conceptions of the totemic system and more in accordance with older conceptions bids us argue for an intimate connection between totemism and exogamy as well as for their simultaneous origin section six I am under the influence of many strong motives which restrain me from the attempt to discuss the further development of religions from their beginning in totemism up to their present state I shall follow out only two threads as I see them appearing in the weft with a special distinctness the motive of the totem sacrifice and the relation of the son to the father Robertson Smith has shown us that the old totem feast returns in the original form of sacrifice the idea of the right is the same sanctification through participation in the common meal the sense of guilt which can only be elated 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 affected 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 investigation of the individual teaches with a special emphasis that God is in every case modeled 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 father here also is 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 psychoanalysis 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 one usually one animal is sacred to every God sometimes even several animals two in certain especially holy sacrifices the so-called mystical sacrifices the very animal which had been sanctified through the God was sacrificed to him three the God was often revered in the form of an animal or from another point of view animals enjoyed a God like reverence long after the period of totemism four in myths the God is frequently transformed into an animal often into the animal that is sacred to him from this the assumption was obvious 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 evolution 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 divine 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 expression 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 unfulfilled 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 as 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 themselves 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 individuals 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 conceptions of classical antiquity but the deification of the murdered father from whom the tribe now derived its origin was a much more serious attempt at expiation than the former covenant with the totem in this evolution I am at a loss to indicate the place of the great maternal deities who perhaps everywhere preceded the paternal deities but it seems certain that the change in the relation to the father was not restricted 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 achievements 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 this continuation of the religious need the preservation of the unsatisfied longing for the father the father therefore really appears twice in the scene of sacrifice before 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 degradation which is 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 misdeed it offers satisfaction to the father for the ignominy put upon him in the further development the animal loses its sacredness and the sacrifice its relation to the celebration of the totem it becomes a simple offering to the deity a self-deprivation in favor 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 god-like 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 subjugated 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 demonstration it expresses satisfaction at the fact that the earlier father substitute has been abandoned in favor of the higher conception of god the superficial 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 but it would be erroneous to believe that in this period of renewed patriarchal authority the hostile impulses which belong to the father complex had entirely subsided on the contrary the first phases in the domination of the two new substitutive formations for the father those of gods and kings plainly show the most energetic expression of that ambivalence which is characteristic of religion in his great work the golden bow Fraser has expressed the conjecture that the first kings of the Latin tribes were strangers who played the part of a deity and were solemnly sacrificed in this role on specified holidays the yearly sacrifice, self-sacrifice is a variant of a god seems to have been an important feature of the 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 substitution of an inanimate imitation doll for the living person the theanthropic god sacrifice into which unfortunately I cannot enter with the same thoroughness with which the animal sacrifice has been treated throws the clearest light upon the meaning of the older forms of sacrifice it acknowledges with unsurpassable candor that the object of the sacrificial 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's 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 undistorted repetition of it had to appear in the form of the god's 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 we are in a position to acknowledge that this interpretation 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 religions 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 falls to the ground probably under the combined influence of cultural changes historical events and inner psychic transformations the endeavor of the son to put himself in place of the father god appeared with greater and greater distinctness with the introduction of agriculture the importance of the son and the patriarchal family increased he was emboldened to give new expression to his incestuous libido which found symbolic satisfaction in laboring over mother earth there came into existence figures of gods like Atas Adanas Tamuz and others spirits of vegetation as well as youthful divinities who enjoyed the favors of maternal deities and committed incest with the mother in defiance of 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 castration or through the wrath of the father god appearing in animal form Adanas was killed by the boar the sacred animal of Aphrodite Atas the lover of Kaibiel died of castration the lamentation for these gods and the joy of 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 religions 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 understanding 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 oppressing 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 orific origin it was preserved in the mysteries and then penetrated into the philosophic schools of Greek antiquity men were the descendants of Titans who had killed and dismembered the young Dionysus Zagreus the weight of this crime oppressed 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 although the features of banding together, killing and dismembering as expressed in the deed of the Titans very clearly recall the totem sacrifice described by St. Nylis 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 a fence 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 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 sacrifice of another life the self-sacrifice points to a blood guilt 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 acknowledges 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 simultaneously with this sacrifice there follows the complete renunciation of woman for whose sake mankind rebelled against the father but now also the psychological fatality of ambivalence demands its rights in the same deed which offers the greatest possible expiation to the father the son also attains 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 Christian 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 Fraser's dictum that the Christian communion has absorbed within itself a sacrament which is doubtless far older than Christianity Section 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 innumerous substituted formations the less it itself was to be remembered I am avoiding the temptation of pointing out these traces in mythology where they are not hard to find and I'm turning to another field in following a hint of S. Reineck in his suggestive treatment of the death of Orpheus 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 discovered 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 dependent 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 offshoots of the hero but the character of the hero as well as his relation to the chorus remains unchanged 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 certain 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 rebellion 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 Dionysus 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 reviewed in the middle ages in the passion of Christ in closing this study which has been carried out in extremely condensed form I want to state the conclusion that the beginnings of religion ethics, society, and art meet in the Oedipus complex this is an 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 Oedipus 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 ambivalence 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 formations we know nothing about the origin of this ambivalence it may be assumed to be a fundamental phenomenon of our emotional life the other possibility seems to me also worthy of consideration that ambivalence originally foreign to our emotional life was acquired by mankind from the father complex where psychoanalytic investigation of the individual today still reveals the strongest expression of it before closing we must take into account that the remarkable convergence reached in these illustrations pointing to a single inclusive relation 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 anyone that we base everything upon the assumption of a psyche of the mass in which psychic processes 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 effective in generations which could not have known anything of this deed we allow an emotional process such as might have arisen among generations 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 explanation which can avoid such assumptions would seem to merit preference 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 of the emotional life of mankind which permits us to disregard the interruptions of psychic acts through the transgression 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 communication 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 generations is established a part of the task seems to be performed by the inheritance of psychic dispositions which however needs certain incentives 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 completely 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 restrictions in expiation for misdeeds committed or as precautions against misdeeds to be committed 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 were restrained from carrying it out only psychic realities and not actual ones are at the basis of the neurotic 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 overvaluation of their psychic acts as a partial manifestation of their narcissistic organization according to this the mere impulses of hostility towards the father and the existence of the wish fantasy to kill and devour him may have sufficed to bring about the moral reaction which has created totemism 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 account for all these 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 repentance at these feelings had to wait for another opportunity of as little validity is the second objection that everything derived from the ambivalent relation to the father namely taboos and rules of sacrifice is characterized by the highest seriousness and by complete reality the ceremonials 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 the compulsion neurotics who today are under the pressure of over morality 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 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 forerunner and a premise of the later over morality the analogy between primitive men and neurotics is therefore much more fundamentally established if we assume that with the former to 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 neurotic is above all inhibited in his actions with him the thought is a complete 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 assume in the case we are discussing the without vouching for the absolute certainty of the decision that in the beginning was the deed end of part three of chapter four end of chapter four end of totem and taboo by Sigmund Freud read by Mary Schneider