(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 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 the other of the totem theories. Some of these explanations of totemism lack all connexion 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 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[172]
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 bann (in
reference to defloration and menstruation) forbids sexual intercourse with a
woman of the same totem[173].
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[174].
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[175].
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[176]
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 investigation 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[177].
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[178].
If we survey the gradually increasing
complication of Australian marriage restrictions we can
hardly help agreeing with the opinion of Morgan Frazer, Hewitt and Baldwin
Spencer[179],
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”[180].
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 younger 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 acquaint us with cases in which incestuous marriage of privileged persons
was made the rule.
Westermarck[181]
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 related.” 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 erethistic excitement required to produce sexual
tumescence.”
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 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 Frazer opposes to Westermarck’s assertion. Frazer finds it
incomprehensible that sexual sensibility to-day 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 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 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 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
interests of society”[182].
To this valuable argument of
Frazer’s 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 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 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[183].
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 to-day 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[184].
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[185],
seems to be even more active and stronger among primitive 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 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 Frazer’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[186].
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
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
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. 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”[187].
Atkinson[188]
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 Lang[189]
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[190].
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 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 animal phobia, which is one of the
most frequent among the psychoneurotic 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 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 difficulties 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 observation. 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 practise onanism)[A].
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: ‘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”[191]
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 expressed
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 ‘Oedipus complex’ in which we recognize 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 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[192].
In another stage of solution of the phobia he did not scruple to identify his
parents with other large animals[193].
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[194].
It is true that with the little Arpád, whom Ferenczi reports, the totemic interests do not awaken in
direct connexion with the Oedipus complex, but on the
basis of a narcistic 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 rôle of feared opponent to the infantile
sexual interests. Castration and its substitute through blinding is the
punishment he threatens[195].
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[196].”
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 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 interest 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”[197]
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[198],
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 to-day, 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[199].
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 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
Oedipus 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 of
the totemic system or, as we may say, of the totemic religion, which until now
could hardly be brought into the discussion.