They are equally unable to explain the origin of these fears, and are therefore taken for granted, though they also construct elaborate rituals to allay the fear of touching these prohibited objects.

For the son-in-law’s part, his original repressed desire for his mother, the first object of his sexual desire, is displaced onto his wife, but the impulse towards mother-love always threatens to reestablish itself, such that he is prone to sexual desires towards his mother-in-law.įreud outlines a parallel between primitive and savage taboos and the actions of obsessive neurotics, who possess a fear, particularly of touching, certain objects, for fear that they may pollute or defile them. Freud speculates that this may be explained by reference to separate impulses in the son-in-law and the mother-in-law which in combination with each other foster feelings of sexual desire between the two that must be repressed: the mother-in-law, recognizing that her sexual life with her husband is ebbing, identifies with her daughter in order to vicariously experience sexual desire through her, thus feeling an impulse to fall in love with the son-in-law. In particular relations between sons and their mothers-in-law are stringently avoided. Freud goes through a litany of these avoidances, often going to extremes (for instance, in several cases if a man notices his sister walking down a road, one of the two has to hide out of sight until the other passes), but noting that prohibitions limiting the activities of men with women in their tribe/phratry are far more severe than those for women. Indeed, their whole social organization seems to serve that purpose or to have been brought into relation with its attainment.” (4)įurthermore, strict practices were undertaken to prevent even seeing an individual with whom one might have incest, called avoidances. none), one finds upon examination that these societies “set before themselves with the most scrupulous care and the most painful severity of avoiding incestuous relations. This tripartite equation Freud uses to resolve a paradox: although one might expect that primitive and savage societies would have fittingly primitive and savage sexual ethics (ie. Freud begins Totem and Taboo by postulating an equation between the psychological development of primitives (the earliest human societies, living in the simplest forms of social organization), savages (contemporary human societies who lack any sense of modern culture and live under similarly simple forms of social organization), and neurotic patients, particularly children (again, not doing scare quotes, too many instances of this and Freud uses them in a technical sense, but this starts off on a nice note, eh?).

Totem and taboo by sigmund freud