Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/35

Rh Melanesian than is the father-ideal among ourselves, and we can only expect transference to occur in him under conditions even more exceptional. There is evidence of many kinds that the arrival of strangers among a people who have never before seen anyone unlike themselves gives just such an occasion as we should expect to produce the process of transference. There is even one piece of evidence which points to the reinforcement of transference by one of the forms in which, as we have seen, the group-ideal has found expression. When the white man first reached Melanesia and adjoining regions, such as Australia and New Guinea, he was supposed by the natives to be one of their own ghosts who, according to tradition, are lighter in colour than the living. It would not, of course, be justifiable to assume that a similar belief was held concerning earlier visitors, but the identification of strangers with the all-powerful dead in the present day shows a mental attitude towards mysterious visitors which would give a motive for transference of the most powerful kind. In view of the strength of the ancestor-ideal, reinforced by the religious cult of ancestral ghosts, we can be confident that transference would only take place under circumstances of the most exceptional kind, and the available evidence points to the arrival of strangers with a culture, and especially a material culture, greatly superior to their own as an occasion which would furnish just those exceptional conditions.

I have here used the concept of transference in a way which is open to criticism. As understood by the psycho- analysts to whom we owe the concept, transference is a process concerning individuals; the affects and dispositions centring round the father are believed to be transferred to another person, the physician or the analyst. I have extended the concept by supposing that transference may also be a social process, affects and dispositions arising out of the influence of one social group being transferred