Totem and Taboo Resemblances Between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics

by Sigmund Freud

with the death of dear relatives such as parents and brothers and sisters will find that the same feeling of ambivalence is responsible for the fact that the dreamer, the child, and the sava...

The projection of inner perceptions to the outside is a primitive mechanism which, for instance, also influences our sense-perceptions, so that it normally has the greatest share in shaping our outer world.

Under conditions that have not yet been sufficiently determined even inner perceptions of ideational and emotional processes are projected outwardly, like sense perceptions, and are used to shape the outer world, whereas they ought to remain in the inner world.

This is perhaps genetically connected with the fact that the function of attention was originally directed not towards the inner world, but to the stimuli streaming in from the outer world, and only received rep...

Only with the development of the language of abstract thought through the...

remnants of word representations with inner processes, did the latter gradually beco...

Before this took place primitive man had developed a picture of the outer world through the outward projection of inner perceptions, which we, with our reinforced conscious perc...

The projection of their own evil impulses upon demons is only a part of what has become the world system (‘Weltanschauung’) of primitive man wh...

the analysis of these system formations will again bring us face to face with the neurosis.

For the present we merely wish to suggest that the ‘secondary elaboration’ of the dream content is the prototype of all these system formations [84].

beginning at the stage of system formation there are two origins for every act judged by consciousness, namely the systematic, and ...

Nothing testifies so much to the influence of mourning on the origin of belief in demons as the fact that demons were always taken to be the spirits of persons not long dead. Mourning has a very distinct psychic task to perform, namely, to detach the memories and expectations of the survivors from the dead.

When this work is accomplished the grief, and with it the remorse and reproach, lessens, and therefore also the fear of the demon.

But the very spirits which at first were feared as demons now serve a friendlier purpose; they are revered as ancestors and appea...

If we survey the relation of survivors to the dead through the course of the ages, it is very evident that the ambivalent feeling has extraordinarily abated. We now find it easy to suppress whatever unconscious hostility towards the dead ther...

Where formerly satisfied hate and painful tenderness struggled with each other, we now find piety, which appears like a cicatrice a...

Only neurotics still blur the mourning for the loss of their dear ones with attacks of compulsive reproaches which psychoanalysis reveals a...

the psychic impulses of primitive man possessed a higher degree of ambivalence than is found at present among civilized human beings.

With the decline of this ambivalence the taboo, as the compromise symptom of the ambivalent conflict, also slowly disappeared.

Neurotics who are compelled to reproduce this conflict, together with the taboo resulting from it, may be said to have brought with them an atavistic remnant in the form of an archaic constitution the compensation of which in the in...

efforts on the...

an original correspondence existed between what was holy and what was unclean, which only later became differentiated.

the taboo prohibition is to be explained as the result of an emotional ambivalence.

hope to be able to show that a tangible historic change is probably concealed behind the fate of this conception; that the word at first was associated with definite human relations which were characterized by great emotional ambivalence from which it expanded to other analogous relations.

Unless we are mistaken, the understanding of taboo also throws light upon the nature and origin of conscience.

Taboo conscience is probably the oldest form in which we meet the phenomenon of conscience.

Conscience is the inner perception of objections to definite wish impulses that exist in us; but the emphasis is put upon the fact that this rejection does not have to depend on anything else, that it is sure of itself.

This becomes even plainer in the case of a guilty conscience, where we become aware of the inner condemnation of such acts which realized some of our definite wish impulses.

But this same character is evinced by the attitude of savages towards taboo.

Taboo is a command of conscience, the violation of which causes a terrible sense of guilt which is as self-evident as its origin is unknown [89].

It is therefore probable that conscience also originates on the basis of an ambivalent f...

human relations which contain this...

In the first place the character of compulsion neurotics shows a predominant trait of painful conscientiousness which is a symptom of reaction against the temptation which lurks in the unconscious,

and which develops into the

highest degrees of guilty conscience as their ill...

Indeed, one may venture the assertion that if the origin of guilty conscience could not be discovered through compulsion neurotic patients, there wou...

In the second place we cannot help noticing that the sense of guilt contains much of the nature of anxiety; without hesitation it may be described as ‘conscience phobia’.

But fear points to unconscious sources.

The psychology of the neuroses taught us that when wish feelings undergo repression their libido beco...

In addition we must bear in mind that the sense of guilt also contains something unknown and unconscious, namely ...

If taboo expresses itself mainly in prohibitions it may well be considered self...

proof from the analogy with neurosis that it is based on a positiv...

For what nobody desires to do does not have to be forbidden, and certainly whatever is expressly forbidde...

And when we have learnt that the obsessive rules of certain neurotics are nothing but measures of self-reassurance and self-punishment erected against the reinforced impulse to commit murder, we can return with fresh appreciation to our previous hypothesis that every prohibition must conceal a desire. We can then assume that this desire to murder actually exists and that the taboo as well as the moral prohibition

are psychologically by no means superfluous but are, on the contrary, explained and justified through our ambivalent attitude towards the impulse to slay.

The nature of this ambivalent relation so often emphasized as fundamental, namely, that the positive underlying desire is unconscious, opens the possibility of showing furth...

The pyschic processes in the unconscious are not entirely identical with those known to us from our conscious psychic life, but have the benefit of certain notabl...

An unconscious impulse need not have originated where we find it expressed, it can spring from an entirely different place and may originally have referred to other persons and relations, but through the mechanism of disp...

Thanks to the indestructibility of unconscious processes and their inaccessibility to correction, the impulse may be saved over from earlier times to which it was adapted to later periods and conditions in...

Even if we insist upon the essential similarity between taboo and moral prohibitions we do not dispute that a psychological difference must exist between them. A change in the relations of the fundamental ambivalence can be the only reason why the prohibition no longer appears in the form of a taboo.