Page:The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis III 1922 1.djvu/133

 REPORTS 125

may be regarded as a third offshoot from the same root. The youths must obey the same commands as the mourners (absti- nence from food, silence and painting with white); the funeral ceremony of the primal father is thus repeated. No one is con- sidered a grown-up man who has not killed the father (mourned for him) and thereupon not consorted with the women of the horde (Intichiuma.). Urged by fear of reprisal (Reik) the brothers force the next generation to skip the murder stage and pass at once into the repentance period of the mourning rites; for that is the point of departure of the initiation. The farther the ancestors of the Central Australians were pushed from their primal home, the more difficult did it become for them to show the youths the real corpse and the grave of the fathers. A substitute arose for these in the sacred ceremonial ground and the boomerang. The spiral form of ornamentation of the Churinga comes from New Guinea where its origin may be traced to the human form. If all the links of the chain were at hand the evolution could be traced from the engraving of the human figure to its plastic repre- sentation and from this further on to the corpse itself.

The speaker continued in this connection with ethnological observations on the origin and the succession of different stages of culture in Australia. From the psychological point of view, the difference, according to him, between the Central and the Eastern tribes is based on the repression and the return of the repressed material. For the social organisation of the Central tribes may also be traced back to a two-class society with patrilineal descent. This is based on the victory of the fraternal horde (insurgent group) for this organisation makes marriage between son and mother possible while father and daughter as members of the same phratry are taboo for one another. This assumption is confirmed by the fact that the Central tribes trace all their institutions to the fraternal horde (Alcheringa-ancestors) while the Eastern peoples hark back to the primal father (heavenly deity).

Discussion: Dr. S, Pfeifer: As the report has shown, it is a most grateful task to dig out of ethnological material the traces of prehistoric periods in the evolution of mankind. Other psychic material also lends itself to this process, for instance the play of children, which, because of its regressive character, has retained the imprint of evolutionary stages long since past. For example, there are certain games which reveal the same content and the