An enquiry that proceeds uninterruptedly, like a monologue, is not
altogether without its dangers. One is too easily tempted to push aside
thoughts that would interrupt it, and in exchange one is left with a
feeling of uncertainty which one will drown in the end by
over-decisiveness. I shall therefore imagine an opponent who follows my
arguments with mistrust, and I shall let him interject remarks here and
there.
I hear him saying: ‘You have repeatedly used the expressions “culture
creates these religious ideas”, “culture places them at the disposal of
its members”, which sounds strange to me somehow. I could not say why
myself, but it does not sound so natural as to say that culture has made
regulations about distributing the products of labour or about the
rights over women and children.’
I think, nevertheless, that one is justified in expressing oneself thus.
I have tried to show that religious ideas have sprung from the same need
as all the other achievements of culture: from the necessity for
defending itself against the crushing supremacy of nature. And there was
a second motive: the eager desire to correct the so painfully felt
imperfections of culture. Moreover, there is something particularly
apposite in saying that culture gives the individual these ideas, for he
finds them at hand, they are presented to him ready-made; he would not
be in a position to find them by himself. It is the heritage of many
generations which he enters into and which he takes over as he does the
multiplication table, geometry, etc. There is certainly a distinction in
this, but it lies elsewhere, and I cannot examine it at this point. The
feeling of strangeness that you mention may be partly accounted for by
the fact that this stock of religious ideas is generally offered as a
divine revelation. But that is in itself a part of the religious system,
and entirely leaves out of account the known historical development of
these ideas and their variations in different ages and cultures.
‘Another point which seems to me more important. You would derive the
humanization of nature from the desire to put an end to human perplexity
and helplessness in the face of nature’s dreaded forces, and from the
necessity for establishing relations with, and finally influencing,
these forces. But this explanation seems to be superfluous. For
primitive man has no choice, he has no other way of thinking. It is
natural to him, as if innate, to project his existence outwards into the
world, and to regard all events that come under his observation as the
manifestations of beings who fundamentally resemble himself. It is his
only method of comprehension. And it is by no means self-evident, on the
contrary it is a remarkable coincidence, that he should succeed in
satisfying one of his great wants by thus indulging his natural
disposition.’
I do not find that so striking. For do you suppose that men’s
thought-processes have no practical motives, that they are simply the
expression of a disinterested curiosity? That is surely very improbable.
I believe, rather, that when he personifies the forces of nature man is
once again following an infantile prototype. He has learnt from the
persons of his earliest environment that the way to influence them is to
establish a relationship with them, and so, later on, with the same end
in view, he deals with everything that happens to him as he dealt with
those persons. Thus I do not contradict your descriptive observation; it
is, in point of fact, natural to man to personify everything that he
wishes to comprehend, in order that later he may control it—the
psychical subjugation as preparation for the physical—but I provide in
addition a motive and genesis for this peculiarity of human thought.
‘And now yet a third point. You have dealt with the origin of religion
once before, in your book _Totem und Tabu_. But there it appears in a
different light. Everything is the son-father relationship; God is the
exalted father, and the longing for the father is the root of the need
for religion. Since then, it seems, you have discovered the factor of
human weakness and helplessness, to which indeed the chief part in the
formation of religion is commonly assigned, and you now transfer to
helplessness everything that was formerly father complex. May I ask you
to enlighten me on this transformation?’
With pleasure. I was only waiting for this invitation. But is it really
a transformation? In _Totem und Tabu_ it was not my purpose to explain
the origin of religions, but only of totemism. Can you from any
standpoint known to you explain the fact that the first form in which
the protecting deity revealed itself to men was that of an animal, that
a prohibition existed against killing or eating this animal, and that
yet it was the solemn custom to kill it and eat it communally once a
year? It is just this that takes place in totemism. And it is hardly to
the purpose to argue whether totemism should be called a religion. It
has intimate connections with the later god-religions; the totem animals
become the sacred animals of the gods; and the earliest, and the most
profound, moral restrictions—the murder prohibition and the incest
prohibition—originate in totemism. Whether or not you accept the
conclusions of _Totem und Tabu_, I hope you will admit that in that book
a number of very remarkable isolated facts are brought together into a
consistent whole.
Why in the long run the animal god did not suffice and why it was
replaced by the human—that was hardly discussed in _Totem und Tabu_, and
other problems of the formation of religion find no mention there at
all. But do you regard such a limitation as identical with a denial? My
work is a good example of the strict isolation of the share that
psycho-analytic observation can contribute to the problem of religion.
If I am now trying to add to it the other, less deeply hidden, part, you
should not accuse me of inconsistency, just as before I was accused of
being one-sided. It is of course my business to point out the connecting
links between what I said before and what I now put forward, between the
deeper and the manifest motivation, between the father complex and man’s
helplessness and need for protection.
These connections are not difficult to find. They consist in the
relation of the child’s helplessness to the adult’s continuation of it,
so that, as was to be expected, the psycho-analytic motivation of the
forming of religion turns out to be the infantile contribution to its
manifest motivation. Let us imagine to ourselves the mental life of the
small child. You remember the object-choice after the anaclitic type,
which psycho-analysis talks about? The libido follows the paths of
narcissistic needs, and attaches itself to the objects that ensure their
satisfaction. So the mother, who satisfies hunger, becomes the first
love-object, and certainly also the first protection against all the
undefined and threatening dangers of the outer world; becomes, if we may
so express it, the first protection against anxiety.
In this function the mother is soon replaced by the stronger father, and
this situation persists from now on over the whole of childhood. But the
relation to the father is affected by a peculiar ambivalence. He was
himself a danger, perhaps just because of that earlier relation to the
mother; so he is feared no less than he is longed for and admired. The
indications of this ambivalence are deeply imprinted in all religions,
as is brought out in _Totem und Tabu_. Now when the child grows up and
finds that he is destined to remain a child for ever, and that he can
never do without protection against unknown and mighty powers, he
invests these with the traits of the father-figure; he creates for
himself the gods, of whom he is afraid, whom he seeks to propitiate, and
to whom he nevertheless entrusts the task of protecting him. Thus the
longing-for-the-father explanation is identical with the other, the need
for protection against the consequences of human weakness; the child’s
defensive reaction to his helplessness gives the characteristic features
to the adult’s reaction to his own sense of helplessness, _i.e_. the
formation of religion. But it is not our intention to pursue further the
development of the idea of God; we are concerned here with the matured
stock of religious ideas as culture transmits them to the individual.