Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/34

22 positions occur among such people as the Melanesians, or for the view that, if they occur, they would be able to acquire any influence, though such a possibility cannot be absolutely excluded. Leaving this remote possibility on one side, however, let us return to the conditions which would be present if the arrival of people from outside gave openings for transference. I have elsewhere dealt at length with the state of affairs which is present when people of a superior culture, even in very small numbers, settle among a people inferior to themselves in mental and material endowment. The view that they would be capable of exerting a profound influence is based on our knowledge of the effect produced by representatives of our own civilisation who, during the last century, have settled among so many peoples of lowly culture. I have assumed that the process we can now observe, and have been observing for the last century, is only a repetition of a process which must always take place whenever a people of superior culture, and especially of superior material equipment, settle among those inferior in these respects to themselves. This view, based on the assumption that the features characterising the contact of peoples in the present day have also held good in the past, receives a psychological foundation if transference is a social as well as an individual process. In the case of the individual, transference of the father-ideal to another person only takes place under exceptional circumstances. It requires the special relation in which a physician stands towards a patient, the power of religious conversion, or the effect which the striking personality of a teacher is able to exert upon an adolescent, to bring the process of transference into action in its most definite forms. I have given reason to believe that the group-ideal is even stronger in the