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.