Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 22.djvu/66

 avowed instead of repressed, may have the utterance of their names gloated over.

Of very broad interest is the problem raised by Freud’s conjecture that the psychic impulses of primitive people possessed more ambivalence than our own except in the case of neurotics; that their mental life, like that of neurotics, is more sexualized and contains fewer social components than ours (pp. in, 121, 148). Neurosis would therefore usually represent an atavistic constitution. Whatever its complete significance, there exists no doubt a remarkable similarity between the phenomena of magic, taboo, animism and primitive religion in general, and neurotic manifestations. In both a creation that has only psychic validity is given greater or less preference over reality. As Freud says, the two are of course not the same, and the ultimate difference lies in the fact that neuroses are asocial creations due to a flight from dissatisfying reality (p. 123). This is certainly not to be denied on any ethnological grounds; yet the implication that savages are essentially more neurotic than civilized men may well be challenged, although it cannot be dismissed offhand.

The experience of first-hand observers will probably be unanimous that primitive communities, like peasant populations, contain very few individuals that can be put into a class with the numerous neurotics of our civilization. The reason seems to be that primitive societies have institutionalized such impulses as with us lead to neuroses. The individual of neurotic tendency finds an approved and therefore harmless outlet in taboo, magic, myth, and the like, whereas the non-neurotic, who at heart remains attached to reality, accepts these activities as forms which do not seriously disturb him. In accord with this interpretation is the fact that neurotics appear to become numerous and characteristic in populations among whom religion has become decadent and “enlightenment” active, as in the Hellenistic, Roman Imperial, and recent eras; whereas in the Middle Ages, when “superstition” and taboo were firmly established, there were social aberrations indeed, like the flagellants and children’s crusade, but few neurotics. Much the same with homosexuality, which the North American and Siberian natives have socialized. Its acceptance as