Chapter 4. The Return of Totemism in Childhood of Totem and Taboo - Study Guide by Sigmund Freud

(5) When the ceremonial cruel slaughter and devouring of the blood, flesh and bones of the totem animal, is done, the slaughtered animal is lamented and bewailed - this is obligatory, imposed by a dread of threatened retribution, since the main purpose of the group occasion of the slaughter, is to disclaim the responsibility for the crime from an individual. A festival is a permitted, even obligatory breach of a prohibition. However why rejoice and mourn over the killing of the totem? Freud explains this in terms of the theory that the totem animal is a substitute for the father; as such the ambivalent emotional attitude reflects that of the father complex in modern life.

Freud then compares these two taboos of totemism, and finds that they are not on a par psychologically - protection of the totem animal (father) is founded on emotional motives, whereas the prohibition of incest has practical motives as well. Freud analyses and compares these prohibitions further, to conclude that psychoanalysis, contrary to more recent views of the totemic system, but in agreement with earlier ones, requires us to assume that totemism and exogamy are connected and had a simultaneous origin.

(6) Freud then looks at the theme of the totemic sacrifice and the relation of the son to the father, in the development of religions from totemism to their condition today. He highlights the known relations between the god and the sacrificed animal - (1) each god usually has an animal (or several) sacred to him (2) the victim is often the precise animal sacred to the god (3) the god was often worshipped in the form of the animal and (4) in myths the god often transforms himself into the animal that is sacred to him. Therefore it seems plausible that the god himself was the totem animal, and that he developed out of it at a later religious feeling.

Freud discusses Frazer's great work - The Golden Bough - where kings of tribes were foreigners and executed as a god at a particular festival and looks at the transition from the original human sacrifice (of the father) to an animal substitution, and then back to the original human form. Thus in their relation to sacrificial ceremonies, it can be seen that religions such as Christianity, use communion as an essentially fresh elimination of the father - a repetition of the guilty deed. Furthermore Freud points out the way in which Christianity, with the characteristic ambivalence, sees the son's greatest possible atonement of his father, brought at the same time the attainment of his wishes against his father - he himself became god, in place of, the father.

(7) Freud then looks at this theme of the hero's suffering, which can be found in many religions and myths. Why has the hero of the tragedy got to suffer? In brief, Freud proposes that it is because, he, the hero, is the primal father, and therefore the tragic guilt that he had to take on himself, relieved the 'chorus' of theirs.

Therefore, Freud concludes that such outcomes as these show that the beginnings of religion, morals, society, and art converge in the Oedipus Complex. This ties in the psychoanalytic findings of the father complex, and emotional ambivalence. Freud discusses our ignorance of the origin of this ambivalence, suggesting a few possible areas for future research.

Having established these relations, between the Oedipus Complex, exogamy and totemism with other aspects of life, Freud then mentions the assumptions upon which his conclusions are based. Namely that he depends on the assumption of the existence of the collective mind, in which mental processes occur as they do in the individual - without which assumption social psychology in general cannot exist. Secondly he has supposed that the sense of guilt for an action has persisted for many thousands of years and has remained operative in a generation which can have had no knowledge of that action. If this assumption is to be held, it prompts further questions:

(i) how much can we attribute to psychical continuity in the sequence of generations?
(ii) what are the ways and means employed by one generation to hand on its mental states to the next one?

Another difficulty that Freud looks at is that from psychoanalytic areas, of neurotics, whose sense of guilt is based upon psychical realities, and never factual ones. Could this be the same in primitive men (as discussed in the second essay) that they narcissistically overvalue their psychical acts to become