Totem and Taboo
After Freud’s initial success, he was ready to start taking his early theories and advance them into other areas outside of Psychoanalysis, and to look deeply at the human condition. One of his most famous and influential books was Totem and Taboo which focused on comparing the mental life of primitive societies, their superstitions, their scapegoating, to that of modern individuals under his label of neurosis. With research from the then current anthropologists and Darwinism, Freud was able to connect his Oedipus theory to a psychoanalytic original sin, and began fleshing out early understandings of Narcissism which he later delved into. The book itself provides one of the best understandings of envy and human conflict in all literature.
Survival
In the ancient world being alone was the same as certain death. The need to be in a group ensured survival. Yet survival is also individual. With scarce resources and a short life span, it was necessary to get your food and sex all in a short period of time to ensure survival of the current generation and to create another generation. The cooperation of the different members of society required rules, regulations, punishments and rituals. The tribes and eventually civilizations were able to thrive when this balance was met and failed when weaknesses were exposed in wars and revolutions.
Self vs. Other
This friction between individual values and collective values becomes a major thread in Freud’s works until his death. How do we get our practical, sexual, and emotional needs satisfied without trampling on other people’s needs? Freud casts this in an emotional ambivalence. On one hand, we have veneration for people who are leaders that help us to survive, contrasted with the envy of their power to access privileges.
For example, when things are going well for me I like the leader more, even if there is no connection to their actions and my success. It changes quickly when my life is falling apart. The smiling leader just increases the envy of their privileges. The unconscious thought is that, “if the leader is doing good and I’m doing bad, then the leader is not doing a good job.”
Freud says, “savages are really behaving in just the same way with their kings when they ascribe to them power over rain and sunshine, wind and weather, and then depose them or kill them because Nature disappoints their hopes of a successful hunt or a rich harvest.”
Entitlement
As powerful as the leader was, their life or death was often on a thin edge when the supporters felt the leader’s magical powers were failing. Freud compares this idealization and devaluation to a paranoic who takes a person and puts all of their responsibility onto them to be a leader so they can blame all their misfortunes on them. It feels better to blame someone else than to take responsibility for your own success. That’s the difference between the hard work of making success and having it given to you.
With these insights it’s very easy to jump to the modern world of politics and backstabbing to see that very little has changed. When a politician fails to provide for their constituents, the envy of their privileges, and the contempt for their lack of success, leads to a regime change. In democracies the blame shifting leads to fights with words on TV, radio and social media. It was more aggressive in the past when blame shifting could include the leader trying to scapegoat someone with lesser power via human sacrifice, or involve a violent revolution to replace the current regime.
Temporary solidarity
The party afterwards was often a celebration of the new conquests that were made and also of the brief solidarity between the members of the new regime. The following crash into mournfulness was a grieving for the memories of success with the prior regime, and also the pressure that the new regime is now under. Can they do better than the last ones? If not, the new regime knows the consequences if they don’t.
Oedipus Complex
Here Freud tries to get at the heart of the earliest sin, which is children trying to replace their parents to access the rewards, and to gain their sexually desirable parent for themselves. The fighting creates a need for the Taboo. The Taboo of incest to Freud is a law to prevent inter-family fighting. To Freud this early taboo is the beginning of society and institutions. Individual desires can go any place, but to keep a society running smoothly, cultures and religions are created. Rituals of eating together, and sharing the same totem are rituals to establish cooperation and to prevent competition. Whether it is the Eucharist or an older ritual, people are trying to satisfy their private desires while making promises not to hurt or steal from each other. If we get enough of our desires met, it’s easier to cooperate. If we don’t, then there’s revolution.
Totem and Taboo
Freud’s example of how a Taboo works is a Totem and how it represents the spiritual and original father of the tribe. By refraining from having sex with people in the same totem group, conflict is reduced and cooperation increases. Another benefit for our ancestors is their avoidance of the consequences of incest and genetic weakness, even if this was achieved ignorantly. But this was the time of superstition and beliefs in magical powers.
Superstitions
One of the more outstanding parts of the book is Freud’s explanation of superstition, which is supported by animal experiments. How we come to magical thinking and superstition is partially our ignorance of science, but also the serendipity of results and our actions. In bird studies behaviourist psychologists were able to see birds performing strange rituals in hopes that food rewards would appear after such rituals. Every random behaviour that gets reinforced conditions the new ritual. A form of hope. With randomness in society it’s easy to see strange rituals regarding interpersonal relationships and what humans then believed was necessary for survival. Hope is transformed. It becomes a method to keep motivation to look for patterns of success in our world, even if there is no science behind the ritual.
Mental representations
Belief in spirits also enters the picture in how people feel neurotic about their evil private desires and how it competes with their need to belong to others. Because everything is impermanent, we need memories to make sense of the kaleidoscope of present moment existence. These memories of people can become our ghosts, Gods, curses, and saviours. We want to imitate the methods of survival from the leader, but we also want to depose them and take their place. We are conversing with mental representations in our minds as much if not more than the real people in our lives. See: The ‘Ratman’: https://rumble.com/v1gu9qj-case-studies-the-ratman-freud-and-beyond.html
Our neurosis can then be our guilt over hidden desires that are alive and well in our minds but we cannot share with others for fear of punishment. Our fear of imaginary crimes is reflected in the original fear of actual crimes. The mental representations of the dead in our minds can be alive with accusation and demands for justice. Curses can be a form of self-inflicted punishment. Our guilt over what we did or thought about doing can then cause the neurosis.
Projection and Introjection
The above is an example of introjection, but guilt can also be projected via suspicion. If we had guilty actions or thoughts in the past, that knowledge can help us detect guilt in others. With the understanding of transference, we can see that we take our memories and have emotional attitudes towards those memories. Then we can project those attitudes onto other people who we force into a memory pattern we recognize. The way this transference feels in the target is like the person who is talking to us is talking about someone else. They get your personal details wrong and harsh emotions are projected onto you.
Projection feels violating and has a tinge of lies and smears where you are put into a box of their memories of wrongdoing. The suspicion of one person increases the suspicion of others, magnifying the blame. The message the scapegoaters send is that “you are to blame for ALL the things not going well” in their lives. Targets in real life can be innocent or not so innocent. With the distortion of conflation, scapegoaters can take actual blame a target has and increase the blame further by adding suggestions of hidden guilt and add it to the judgment. The desire for revenge in the mob animates them further to essentially “burn the witch.”
Violence and the Sacred – René Girard: https://rumble.com/v1gsnwv-the-origin-of-envy-and-narcissism-ren-girard.html
How it starts
The predictable scenario of a target trying to get their individual needs met against some social mores or taboos IS the beginning. Because these individual desires reside in most other people, there is an envy and resentment of the unfairness. “If they get away with that, then why can’t I?” Leaders often struggle with this problem. They are afraid of the temptation there is to imitate the target, and that others might get their similar desires satisfied. Then the rules and taboos that keep the society together unravel and so does the leader’s power.
The taboo is ultimately something that tempts imitation, and following the taboo is renunciation of that desire to preserve peace in society. This is the origin of collective punishment where leaders punish the entire group for one person’s transgression. It is an attempt to prevent the imitation from being contagious. The threat of this punishment is the source of ostracism, where people don’t associate with the person who violated the taboo, because they are afraid they will automatically be associated by others as someone who wants to imitate the accused. The problem Freud sees with the leader enforcing the taboos is that all people, including the leader, have prohibited desires inside themselves.
Freud says, “In order to keep the temptation down, the envied transgressor must be deprived of the fruit of his enterprise; and the punishment will not infrequently give those who carry it out an opportunity of committing the same outrage under the colour of an act of atonement.” Modern examples would be lawmakers taking part in corruption they are supposed to fight against. The source of hypocrisy is this ambivalence between what I want and what is good for society.
Leadership
The value of the leader is their ability to maintain rules that support the group, and allow enough personal satisfaction so that it doesn’t destabilize the culture. The leader also has to enjoy their privileges without taking too much and neglecting the duties of the leader. Any weaknesses in a neglectful society leads to blame shifting and conflict.
Freud lays it out very clearly and points to some of the experiences victims have at the hands of narcissistic individuals. The superstition they have has a root in the belief of the omnipotence of thoughts. Believing that thoughts are reality and being constantly disappointed by nature, requires a shifting of blame to others. It’s a lower form of existence that hasn’t accepted realistic compromises. Until the acceptance of science happens, then people and objects become an easy target for blame. The need to use talismans, jewels and to ascribe magical properties to objects and leaders only gives way when the real life associations cannot be explained by magical powers. We have to put effort into looking at the real causes and effects to avoid magical thinking.
Worshiping who gets our needs met
Totem worship of a father is replaced by a Father God, and then science replaces God and the Father in the end for Freud. Here there is a divide between René Girard and Sigmund Freud. René looks to Christianity to understand scapegoating and early creations of institutions, whereas Freud puts Christianity into the same boat as the other religions.
We are ultimately looking for a God-Father figure to get our needs met. This fight itself is in Christianity as followers ironically scapegoat each other on which version of Christianity to follow with many of their own members as casualties. But in Girard’s Christian opinion, there is always worship. If we don’t worship a God we worship Experts. Worshiping experts doesn’t stop the violence, in his view, whereas a Christian example does. We are now back at the beginning where the question of getting our needs met is confronted with how we can live in harmony with others. Both atheism and Christianity are accused of failing to find this peace.
Petty conspiracies
What I particularly enjoyed about this book was how it clears up paranoid thoughts about conspiracies. Conspiracies do exist but they are petty and all about increasing consumption of every kind. Power allows for more sexual partners, more resources, special treatment and allies to defend your wealth. My earlier videos on narcissists and their informers shows that basic human society devolves into gangster-ism, and that every individual should realize that their presence and status is being measured by others at all times. See: Narcissistic Control: https://rumble.com/v1gti2z-narcissistic-control-narcissism-3-of-4.html
All the bigotry we see is about is trying to eliminate competition. Our identities are HOW we get our needs met. Competition towards those identities make us insecure, and we feel resentful that the world is unfair and demand vengeance. This leads to violence and war. If we are to aim for better, the highest form of society is one that flourishes with creativity giving a place to all types of people. How we can get our needs met is by meeting the needs of others in ever more creative ways and learning to relinquish our desires and find alternatives if we are tempted by violence towards other competitors.
Totem and Taboo – Sigmund Freud: Paperback: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780393001433/
Herrnstein, R.J. (1961) Superstition: A corollary of the principle of operant conditioning.
Great example of generational pressure:
Philosophy: https://psychreviews.org/category/philosophy03/