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

“No neurotic harbors thoughts of suicide which are not murderous impulses against others redirected upon himself.””

— Sigmund Freud

“psychoanalytic investigation of the individual teaches with especial emphasis that god is in every case modeled after the father and that our personal relation to god is dependent upon our relation to our physical father, fluctuating and changing with him, and that god at bottom is nothing but an exalted father.””

— Sigmund Freud

“the principle which controls magic, and the technique of the animistic method of thought, is “Omnipotence of Thought.””

— Sigmund Freud

“But we must not let our judgment about primitive men be influenced too far by the analogy with neurotics. Differences must also be taken into account. Of course the sharp division between thinking and doing as we draw it does not exist either with savages or with neurotics. But the neurotic is above all inhibited in his actions; with him the thought is a complete substitute for the dead. Primitive man is not inhabited, the thought is directly converted into the deed, the deed is for him so to speak rather a substitute for the thought, and for that reason I think we may well assume in the case we are discussing, though without vouching for the absolute certainty to the decision, that "in the beginning was the deed.””

— Sigmund Freud

“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 there may still exist without any special psychic effort on our part. Where formerly satisfied hate and painful tenderness struggled with each other, we now find piety, which appears like a cicatrice and demands : De mortuis nil nisi bene.Only neurotics still blur the mourning for the loss of their dear ones with attacks of compulsive reproaches which psychoanalysis reveals as the old ambivalent emotional feeling. How this change was brought about, and to what extent constitutional changes and real improvement of familiar relations share in causing the abatement of the ambivalent feeling, need not be discussed here.But this example would lead us to assume that the psychic impulses of primitive man possessed a higher degree of ambivalence than is found at present among civilized human beings. Withthe 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 interest of cultural demands entails the most prodigious psychic efforts on their part.””

— Sigmund Freud

“prohibición, porque sin ella hubiera penetrado la””

— Sigmund Freud

“1o La falta de motivación de las prescripciones; 2o Su imposición por una necesidad interna; 3o Su facultad de desplazamiento y contagio, y 4o La causación de actos ceremoniales y de prescripciones, emanados de las prohibiciones mismas.””

— Sigmund Freud

“y si no estuviese habituado a designar a tales personas con el nombre de neuróticos obsesivos hallaría muy adecuado el nombre de enfermedad del tabú para caracterizar sus estados.””

— Sigmund Freud