Page:The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis III 1922 1.djvu/131

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REPORTS 123

represent compromise formations. On the one hand the libido wants to cling to the lost object, on the other hand the inimical impulses want to destroy the dead utterly, and thirdly, the psychical re- pression which is to overcome the coming into consciousness of the feelings of remorse connected with the death is at work. The stone which holds the corpse to the ground stands for the primi- tive material form of the repression: but already it also represents the return of the repressed. For the stone fulfils its original purpose to drive the corpse from sight and from memory in such an inadequate fashion that soon it is changed into an image of the dead man; yet other shapes are given to it also, it assumes phallic form. Herewith the cause of the conflict becomes clear: the primal father had to die because he wished to keep the women of the horde for himself. In the cult of the phallic tombstone R6heim sees the formation oi a reaction against the wish for the castration of the father. If the ancestor makes all the women of the horde pregnant and brings fruitfulness to the fields, then he really receives back after death everything for which he should have suffered death; now he possesses and makes pregnant the women of the horde — to the dead everything is granted for which the living had to fight in bloody battles.

Everywhere in Oceania a connection exists between the con- centric stone circles and human sacrifice on the one hand, and cannibalism and funeral rites on the other hand. This relation becomes intelligible as soon as one assumes that the first occasions for the erection of the stone heaps were the murder and the eating of the remains of the primal father. But Psycho-Analysis has recognised that the tomb is a symbol of the womb, death is therefore a return to the body of the mother, and the Churinga, therefore, signifies not only the corpse in the tomb but also the embryo (and the penis) in the mother's womb. Therefore children are born from rocks. In Central Australia this is the normal manner of coming into the world; in Indonesia this idea prevails only as regards the ancestors of the tribe, which facts permit us to con- ceive a time in which this belief of the Australians was also pre- dominant in Indonesia. The more prominent the member of the tribe, the more often the funeral ceremonies are repeated in his honour; yet no common mortal can compete in importance with those semi-animal heroes of earhest times. These impressions of the childhood days of humanity are the deepest, and therefore the