Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/30

18 conservatism while ceding to the opposing forces perhaps far more than it maintains, leading to new products which are now usually known as compromise-formations. Thus, when the father-ideal comes into conflict with opposing influences in later life, the outcome is usually a new formation which is a compromise between the old and deeply seated, often unconscious, set of dispositions determined by the father-ideal and the new forces which conflict with this ideal. Such new formation may have a symbolic or dramatic character which often serves to obscure, if not to disguise, the conflicting elements out of which it has arisen.

Let us now take these three concepts of modern psychology; the father-ideal, its capacity for transference, and the occurrence of compromise-formations as the result of conflict, and consider how far they help us to understand the difficulties raised by the co-existence of conservatism and receptivity for innovation in the social relations of Mankind. It will first be necessary to examine how far the concept of the father-ideal can be utilised when we are dealing with mankind in general, and I propose to take as an example such a people as the Melanesians who differ widely from ourselves in the nature of their social system.

The concept of the "father-ideal" formulated by modern psychology has been reached through evidence derived from people possessing the institution of the family in its most definite and simple form, hardly complicated at all by the presence of other forms of domestic organisation. We have to inquire into the modifications which are necessary when we consider Melanesian society. It is true that the institution of the family exists in Melanesia, but in a form often widely different from that of our own, and in all cases so complicated by the presence of social groupings of a different kind, that if there is anything corresponding with the father-ideal of our psychologists it must differ from it greatly in nature. In many parts of Melanesia one great difference is due to the fact that the