A. A. Brill - Totem and Taboo (Chap. 4.3) lyrics

Into this darkness psychoan*lytic 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 bu*terflies. 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 an*lytical investigation, although they very much merit it. The difficulties of an*lysing children of so tender an age have probably been the motive of such neglect. It cannot therefore be a**erted 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 an*lysis 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 psychoan*lysis 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 a**ertion 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 an*lysis as a displacement of fear from one of the parents to animals. I am not prepared to a**ert that the wide-spread mouse and rat phobia has the same mechanism.” I reported the “an*lysis 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 a**urances 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 d**h) 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 s**ual 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 an*lysis, 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. an*lysis showed the paths of a**ociation, 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 a**umed 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 s**ual 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 k**ing 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 co*k.” On another occasion he suddenly expressed the wish to eat a “potted mother” (by an*logy, 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 s**ual activity between co*k and hen, the laying of eggs and the creeping out of the young brood”[197] satisfied his s**ual 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. Psychoan*lysis 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 k** the totem animal and not to use a woman belonging to the same totem for s**ual 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. Footnotes: [A] M. Wulff, Contributions to Infantile Sexuality, Zentralbl. f. Psychoan*lyze, 1912, II, No. I, p. 15. [191] Little Hans, trans. by A. A. Brill (Moffat, Yard & Co., N.Y.). [192] l.c., p. 41. [193] ‘The Phantasy of the Giraffe,' l.c., p. 30. [194] S. Ferenczi, Contributions to Psychoan*lysis, p. 204, translated by Ernest Jones (Badger, Boston, 1916). [195] Compare the communications of Reitler, Ferenczi, Rank, and Eder about the substitution of blindness in the Oedipus myth for castration. Intern. Zeitschrift f. ärtzl. Psychoan*lyze, 1913, I, No. 2. [196] Ferenczi, l.c., p. 209. [197] Ferenczi, l.c., p. 212. [198] Frazer finds that the essence of totemism is in this identification: “Totemism is an identification of a man with his totem.” Totemism and Exogamy, IV, p. 5. [199] I am indebted to Otto Rank for the report of a case of dog phobia in an intelligent young man whose explanation of how he acquired his ailment sounds remarkably like the totem theory of the Aruntas mentioned above. He had heard from his father that his mother at one time during her pregnancy had been frightened by a dog.