Totem and Taboo

Sigmund Freud

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781134524754
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie en psychologie

Widely acknowledged to be one of Freud's greatest cultural works, when Totem and Taboo was first published in 1913, it caused outrage. Thorough and thought-provoking, Totem and Taboo remains the fullest exploration of Freud's most famous themes. Family, society, religion - they're all put on the couch here. Whatever your feelings about psychoanalysis, Freud's theories have influenced every facet of modern life, from film and literature to medicine and art. If you don't know your incest taboo from your Oedipal complex, and you want to understand more about the culture we're living in, then Totem and Taboo is the book to read.

1
The Horror of Incest

Prehistoric man, in the various stages of his development, is known to us through the inanimate monuments and implements which he has left behind, through the information about his art, his religion and his attitude towards life which has come to us either directly or by way of tradition handed down in legends, myths and fairy tales, and through the relics of his mode of thought which survive in our own manners and customs. But apart from this, in a certain sense he is still our contemporary. There are men still living who, as we believe, stand very near to primitive man, far nearer than we do, and whom we therefore regard as his direct heirs and representatives. Such is our view of those whom we describe as savages or half-savages; and their mental life must have a peculiar interest for us if we are right in seeing in it a well-preserved picture of an early stage of our own development.

If that supposition is correct, a comparison between the psychology of primitive peoples, as it is taught by social anthropology, and the psychology of neurotics, as it has been revealed by psycho-analysis, will be bound to show numerous points of agreement and will throw new light upon familiar facts in both sciences.

For external as well as for internal reasons, I shall select as the basis of this comparison the tribes which have been described by anthropologists as the most backward and miserable of savages, the aborigines of Australia, the youngest continent, in whose fauna, too, we can still observe much that is archaic and that has perished elsewhere.

The Australian aborigines are regarded as a distinct race, showing neither physical nor linguistic relationship with their nearest neighbours, the Melanesian, Polynesian and Malayan peoples. They do not build houses or permanent shelters; they do not cultivate the soil; they keep no domesticated animals except the dog; they are not even acquainted with the art of making pottery. They live entirely upon the flesh of all kinds of animals which they hunt, and upon roots which they dig. Kings or chiefs are unknown among them; communal affairs are decided by a council of elders. It is highly doubtful whether any religion, in the shape of a worship of higher beings, can be attributed to them. The tribes in the interior of the continent, who have to struggle against the hardest conditions of existence as a result of the scarcity of water, appear to be more primitive in all respects than those living near the coast.

We should certainly not expect that the sexual life of these poor, naked cannibals would be moral in our sense or that their sexual instincts would be subjected to any great degree of restriction. Yet we find that they set before themselves with the most scrupulous care and the most painful severity the aim of avoiding incestuous sexual relations. Indeed, their whole social organization seems to serve that purpose or to have been brought into relation with its attainment.

Among the Australians the place of all the religious and social institutions which they lack is taken by the system ‘totemism’. Australian tribes fall into smaller divisions, or clans, each of which is named after its totem. What is a totem? It is as a rule an animal (whether edible and harmless or dangerous and feared) and more rarely a plant or a natural phenomenon (such as rain or water), which stands in a peculiar relation to the whole clan. In the first place, the totem is the common ancestor of the clan; at the same time it is their guardian spirit and helper, which sends them oracles and, if dangerous to others, recognizes and spares its own children. Conversely, the clansmen are under a sacred obligation (subject to automatic sanctions) not to kill or destroy their totem and to avoid eating its flesh (or deriving benefit from it in other ways). The totemic character is inherent, not in some individual animal or entity, but in all the individuals of a given class. From time to time festivals are celebrated at which the clansmen represent or imitate the motions and attributes of their totem in ceremonial dances.

The totem may be inherited either through the female or through the male line. It is possible that originally the former method of descent prevailed everywhere and was only subsequently replaced by the latter. An Australian’s relation to his totem is the basis of all his social obligations: it overrides on the one hand his tribal membership and on the other hand his blood relationships.¹

The totem is not attached to one particular place. The clansmen are distributed in different localities and live peacefully side by side with members of other totem clans.² And now we come at last to the characteristic of the totemic system which has attracted the interest of psycho-analysts. In almost every place where we find totems we also find a law against persons of the same totem having sexual relations with one another and consequently against their marrying.¹ This, then, is ‘exogamy’, an institution related to totemism.

Strictly enforced as it is, this prohibition is a remarkable one. There is nothing in the concept or attributes of the totem which I have so far mentioned to lead us to anticipate it; so that it is hard to understand how it has become involved in the totemic system. We cannot, therefore, feel surprised that some investigators actually suppose that exogamy had originally—in the earliest times and in its true meaning—nothing to do with totemism, but became attached to it (without there being any underlying connection) at some time when marriage restrictions became necessary. However this may be, the bond between totemism and exogamy exists and is clearly a very firm one.

Some further considerations will make the significance of this prohibition clearer:

1. The violation of the prohibition is not left to what might be called the ‘automatic’ punishment of the guilty parties, as in the case of other totem prohibitions, such as that against killing the totem animal. It is avenged in the most energetic fashion by the whole clan, as though it were a question of averting some danger that threatened the whole community or some guilt that was pressing upon it. A few sentences from Frazer (1910, 1, 54) will show how severely such misdeeds are treated by savages who are otherwise far from being moral by our standards:
   ‘In Australia the regular penalty for sexual intercourse with a person of a forbidden clan is death. It matters not whether the woman be of the same local group or has been captured in war from another tribe; a man of the wrong clan who uses her as his wife is hunted down and killed by his clansmen, and so is the woman; though in some cases, if they succeed in eluding capture for a certain time, the offence may be condoned. In the Ta-ta-thi tribe, New South Wales, in the rare cases which occur, the man is killed but the woman is only beaten or speared, or both, till she is nearly dead; the reason given for not actually killing her being that she was probably coerced. Even in casual amours the clan prohibitions are strictly observed; any violations of these prohibitions “are regarded with the utmost abhorrence and are punished by death”.’ [Quoted from Cameron (1885, 351.)]
2. Since the same severe punishment is inflicted in the case of passing love-affairs which have not resulted in any children, it seems unlikely that the reasons for the prohibition are of a practical nature.
3. Since totems are hereditary and not changed by marriage, it is easy to follow the consequences of the prohibition. Where, for instance, descent is through the female line, if a man of the Kangaroo totem marries a woman of the Emu totem, all the children, both boys and girls, belong to the Emu clan. The totem regulation will therefore make it impossible for a son of this marriage to have incestuous intercourse with his mother or sisters, who are Emus like himself.1
4. But a little more reflection will show that exogamy linked with the totem effects more (and therefore aims at more) than the prevention of incest with a man’s mother and sisters. It makes sexual intercourse impossible for a man with all the women of his own clan (that is to say with a number of women who are not his blood-relatives) by treating them all as though they were his blood-relatives. It is difficult at first sight to see the psychological justification for this very extensive restriction, which goes far beyond anything comparable among civilized peoples. It may be gathered from this, however, that the part played by the totem as common ancestor is taken very seriously. All those who are descended from the same totem are blood-relations. They form a single family, and within that family even the most distant degree of kinship is regarded as an absolute hindrance to sexual intercourse.

We see, then, that these savages have an unusually great horror of incest, or are sensitive on the subject to an unusual degree, and that they combine this with a peculiarity which remains obscure to us—of replacing real blood-relationship by totem kinship. This latter contrast must not, however, be too much exaggerated, and we must remember that the totem prohibitions include that against real incest as a special case.

The riddle of how it came about that the real family was replaced by the totem clan must perhaps remain unsolved till the nature of the totem itself can be explained. At the same time, it is to be observed that if there were a certain degree of freedom of sexual intercourse outside marriage, blood-relationship, and consequently the prevention of incest, would become so uncertain that the prohibition would stand in need of a wider basis. It is therefore worth remarking that Australian customs permit the occurrence, in certain social situations and during certain festivals, of breaches in a man’s exclusive conjugal rights over a woman.

Linguistic usage in these Australian tribes¹ exhibits a peculiarity which is no doubt relevant here. For the terms used by them to express the various degrees of kinship do not denote a relation between two individuals but between an individual and a group. This is what L. H. Morgan [1877] named the ‘classificatory’ system of relationship. Thus a man uses the term ‘father’ not only for his actual procreator but also for all the other men whom his mother might have married according to tribal law and who therefore might have procreated him; he uses the term ‘mother’ not only for the woman who actually bore him but also for all the other women who might have borne him without transgressing the tribal law; he uses the terms ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ not only for the children of his actual parents but also for the children of all those persons who stand in the relation of parents to him in the classificatory sense; and so on. Thus the kinship terms which two Australians apply to each other do not necessarily indicate any consanguinity, as ours would do: they represent social rather than physical relationships. Something approaching the classificatory system is to be found among us when, for instance, children are encouraged to refer to all their parents’ friends as ‘Uncle’ or ‘Aunt’, or when we speak in a metaphorical sense of ‘brothers in Apollo’ or ‘sisters in Christ’.

Though this use of words strikes us as so puzzling, it is easily explained if we look on it as a survival of the marriage institution which the Rev. L. Fison has called ‘group marriage’ and which consists in a certain number of men exercising conjugal rights over a certain number of women. The children of such a group marriage would then justly regard one another as brothers and sisters (though they were not all born of the same mother) and would regard all the men in the group as their fathers.

Though some authors, such as Westermarck (1901), have disputed the conclusions which others have drawn from the existence of the classificatory system of relationship, those who have the closest acquaintance with the Australian natives are agreed in regarding that system as a survival from the days of group marriage. Indeed, according to Spencer and Gillen (1899 [64]), a certain form of group marriage exists to this day in the Urabunna and Dieri tribes. Group marriage thus preceded individual marriage among these peoples, and after its disappearance left definite traces behind both in language and customs.

But when once we have put group marriage in the place of individual marriage, the apparently excessive degree of avoidance of incest which we have come across among the same peoples becomes intelligible. Totemic exogamy, the prohibition of sexual intercourse between members of the same clan, appears to have been the appropriate means for preventing group incest; it thus became established and persisted long after its raison d'être had ceased.

It may seem that we have thus discovered the motives that led the Australian natives to set up their marriage restrictions; but we have now to learn that the actual state of affairs reveals a far greater, and at first sight a bewildering, complexity. For there are few races in Australia in which the totem barrier is the sole prohibition. Most of them are organized in such a way as to fall into two divisions, known as marriage-classes or 'phratries'. Bach of these phratries is exogamous and comprises a number of totem clans. As a rule each phratry is further subdivided into two 'sub-phratries', the whole tribe being thus divided into four, with the sub-phratries intermediate between the phratries and the totem clans.

The following diagram represents the typical organization of an Australian tribe and corresponds to the actual situation in a very large number of cases:

Here the twelve totem clans are divided into four sub-phratries and two pli rat ties. All the divisions are exogamous.¹ Subphratries c and e form an exogamous unit; and so also do subphratries d and f. The result (and therefore the purpose) of these arrangements cannot be doubted: they bring about a still further restriction on the choice of marriage and on sexual liberty. Let us suppose that each clan contains an equal number of members. Then, if only the twelve totem clans existed, each member of a clan would have his choice among

of all the women in the tribe. The existence of the two phratries reduces his choice to

or

, for then a man of totem a can only marry a woman of totems 1 to 6. With the introduction of the four subphratries his choice is still further reduced t...