Totem and Taboo

"'In the first place, the original totem, and the one which continues to remain most common, is the animal; and, secondly, the earliest totem animals are identical with soul animals.' [Wundt; English translation, 192.] Soul animal (such as birds, snakes, lizards and mice) are appropriate receptacles of souls which have left the body, on account of their rapid movements or flight through the air or of other qualities likely to produce surprise or alarm." [148]


"The secondary revision of the produce of dream-activity is an admirable example of the nature and pretensions of a system. The is an intellectual function in us which demands unity, connection and intelligibility from any material, whether of perception or thought, that comes within its grasp; and if, as a result of special circumstances, it is unble to establish a true connection, it does not hesitate to fabricate a false one. Systems constructed in this way are known to us not only from dreams, but also from phobias, from obsessive thinking and from delusions. The construction of systems is seen most strikingly in delusional disorders (in paranoia), where it dominates the symptomatic picture; but its occurrence in other forms of neuro-psychosis must not be overlooked. In all these cases it can be shown that a rearrangement of the psychical material has been made with a fresh aim in view; and the rearrangement may often have to be a drastic one if the outcome is to be made to appear intelligible from the point of view of the system. Thus a system is best characterized by the fact that at least two reasons can be discovered for each of its products: a reason based upon the premises of the system (a reason, then, which may be delusional) and a concealed reason, which we must judge to be the truly operative and the real one." [119]


"Every day of our lives our experience is in a position to show us the principal characteristics of a 'system'. We have dreams during the night and we have learnt how to interpret them during the day. Dreams may, without contradicting their nature, appear confused and disconnect. But they may, on the contrary, simulate the orderly impressions of a real experience, they may make one event follow from another and make one portion of their content refer to another. Such a result can be more of less successfully achieve; but it scarcely ever succeeds so completely as to leave no absurdity, no right in its texture, visible. When we come to submit a dream to interpretation, we find that the erratic and irregular arrangement of its constituent parts is quite unimportant from the point of view of our understanding it. The essential elements in a dream are the dream-thoughts, and these have meaning, connection and order. But their order is quite other than that remembered by us in the manifest content of the dream. In the latter the connection between the dream-thoughts has been abandoned and may either remain completely lost or be replaced by the new connection exhibited in the manifest content. The elements of the dream, apart from their being condensed, are almost invariably arranged in a new order more or less independent of their earlier arrangement. Finally, it must be added that whatever the original material of the dream-thoughts has been turned into by the dream-activity is then subjected to a further influence. This is what is know as 'secondary revision', and its purpose is evidently to get rid of the disconnectedness and unintelligibility produced by the dream-activity and replace it by a new 'meaning'. But this new meaning, arrived at by secondary revision, is not longer the meaning of the dream-thoughts." [118]



Totem and Taboo
Sigmund Freud