[In the following passages Freud summarizes his speculation]
p.201
Let us call up the spectacle of the totem meal of the kind we have been
discussing, amplified by a few probable features which we have not yet been
able to consider. The clan is celebrating the ceremonial occasion by the
cruel slaughter of its totem animal and is devouring it raw - blood, flesh
and bones. The clansmen are there, dressed in the likeness of the totem and
imitating it in sound and movement, as though they are seeking to stress
their identity with it.
p.202 Psychoanalysis has revealed that the totem animal is in reality a
substitute for the father; and this tallies with the contradictory fact
that, though the killing of the animal is as a rule forbidden, yet its
killing is a festive occasion - with the fact that it is killed and yet
mourned. The ambivalent emotional attitude, which to this day characterizes
the father-complex in our children and which often persists into
adult-life,
seems to extend to the totem animal in its capacity as substitute for the
father.
If, now, we bring together the psychoanalytic translation of the totem
with the fact of the totem meal and with
Darwin's theories of the
earliest state of human society, the possibility of a deeper
understanding emerges -
a glimpse of a hypothesis which may seem fantastic but which offers the
advantage of establishing an unsuspected correlation between groups of
phenomena that have hitherto been disconnected.
There is, of course, no place for the beginnings of totemism in Darwin's
primal
horde. All that we find there is a violent and jealous father
who
keeps all the females for himself and drives away his sons as they grow up.
The earliest state of society has never been an object of observation. The
most primitive kind of organisation that we actually come across - and one
that is in force to this day in certain tribes - consists of bands of
males; these bands are composed of members with equal rights and are
subject to the restrictions of the totemic system, including inheritance
through the mother. Can this form of organisation have developed out of the
other one? and if so along what lines?
p.203 If we call the celebration of the totem meal to our help, we shall be
able
to find an answer. One day the brothers who had been driven out came
together, killed and devoured their father and so made an end of the
patriarchal horde. United,
they had the courage to do and succeed in doing
what would have been impossible for them individually. (Some cultural
advance, perhaps, command over some new weapon, had given them a sense of
superior strength). Cannibal savages as they were, it goes without saying
that they devoured their victim as well as killing him. The violent primal
father had doubtless been the feared and envied model of each one of the
company of brothers: and in the act of devouring him they accomplished
their identification with him, and each one acquired a portion of his
strength. The totem meal, which is perhaps mankind's earliest festival,
would thus be a repetition and a commemoration of this memorable and
criminal deed, which was the beginning of so many things - or social
organisation, of moral restrictions and of religion.
p.204 In order that these latter consequences may seem plausible, leaving
their
premises on one side, we need only suppose that the tumultuous mob of
brothers were filled with the same contradictory feelings which we can see
at work in the ambivalent father-complexes of our children and our neurotic
patients. They hated their father, who presented such a formidable obstacle
to their craving for power and their sexual desires; but they loved and
admired him too. After they had got rid of him, had satisfied their hatred
and had put into effect their wish to identify with him, the affection
which had all this time been pushed under was bound to make itself felt. It
did so in the form of remorse. A sense of guilt made its appearance, which
in this instance coincided with the remorse felt by the whole group. The
dead father became stronger than the living one had been - for events took
the course we often see them follow in human affairs to this day. What had
up to then been prevented by his actual existence
[p.205]
was thenceforward
prohibited by the sons themselves, in accordance with the psychological
procedure so familiar to us in psychoanalysis under the name 'deferred
obedience'. They revoked their deed by forbidding the killing of the totem,
the substitute for their father; and they renounced its fruits by resigning
their claim to the women who had now been set free. They thus created out
of their filial sense of guilt the two fundamental taboos of totemism,
which for that very reason inevitably corresponded to the two repressed
wishes of the Oedipus complex. Whoever contravened those two taboos became
guilty of the only two crimes with which primitive society concerned
itself.
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p.219
At the conclusion, then, of this exceedingly condensed inquiry, I should
like to insist that its outcome shows that the beginnings of religion,
morals, society and art converge in the
Oedipus complex.
This is in complete agreement with the psychoanalytic finding that the same
complex constitutes the nucleus of all neurosis, so far as our present
knowledge goes. It seems to me a most surprising discovery that the
problems of
social psychology, too, should, prove soluble on the basis of
one single concrete point - man's relation to his father.
p.220
[Freud sees the following points as "difficulties involved in my
conclusions"]
I have taken as the basis of my whole position the existence of a
collective mind, in which mental processes occur just as they do in the
mind of an individual. In particular, I have supposed that the sense of
guilt for an action has persisted for many thousands of years and has
remained operative in generations which can have no knowledge of that
action. I have supposed that an emotional process, such as might have
developed in generations of sons who were ill-treated by their father, has
extended to new generations which were exempt from such treatment for the
very reason that their father had been eliminated.
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