Page:The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis II 1921 2.djvu/12

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inhibition of the primary desire for the undisturbed bliss of the maternal womb compels man to lead a roaming life and thus saves him from merging into his environment before he can master it, it is by a return of repressed elements, by a breaking through of the positive wish-fulfilment aspect, although transferred from the original object to a symbolic substitute (Mother Earth instead of the real mother), that mankind manages to get a firm grip on his immediate environment and to rise in social organi- sation from the wandering hunter to the sedentary husbandman. Taking again the Ertnatulunga, which are usually small caves, as

vSlker, 1891, S. 136; A. van Gennep: Tabou et Totesmisme a Madagaskar, 1904, p. 64, Instead of exposure of children which we are familiar with in European legends and tales we find (in North West America) that the hero is left on the spot alone and the whole camp moves to a distant place; F. Boas: Indianische Sagen von der Nord-Pazlfischen KUste Amerikas, 1895, S. 230, 288; S. T. Rand: Legends of the Micmacs, 1894, p. 270. This is the actual practice amongst the Bakairi: if they are dissatisfied with their chief they simply leave the village and ask him kindly to continue to rule, but without his subjects. K. von den Steinen: Unter den NaturvBlkern Zentral- Brasiliens. 1897, S. 406. Fixation to environment increases with growing civilisation: the custom of deserting the place where the corpse is, dis- appears with the beginnings of dwellings of a permanent type, with the introduction of agriculture. That the forest Indians always do this while those "of the savannah occasionally shirk the ceremony is probably due to the fact that the houses of the former, unlike those of the savannah, are so slightly built that but little provocation is sufficient to induce their owners to desert them and build anew". (E. F. im Thurn: Among the Indians of Guinana, 1883, p. 225.) The Besisi who have agriculture in addition to the chase are beginning to drop this custom which is in full vigour amongst the non- agricultural tribes. Skeat and Blagden: loc. cU., II, p. 106. The grave which is the object of veneration for the survivors and which is an alleged reason for sticking to a certain country is, at the same time, a part of environment avoided by the living and set apart for the use of the dead. In the attitude of humanity towards the graveyard we have the result of an unconscious compromise between the desire to remain in close contact with, and the impulse to flee from, the dead and the grave. The latest ingenious hypothesis of Prof. Freud teaches us to regard our psychic life in general as the result of a compromise between the life and the death-impulse; the latter being the psychic side of the general tendency in organic matter to return to an inorganic state. Thus we might perhaps regard the flight of savages fit)m the scene of death as a primary reaction of the life-impulse, whilst the morbid attraction which the grave and the graveyard exercises on some people may be understood as the expression of a desire to return to a pre- vious state of things (ante-natal life, inorganic existence) as a manifestation of the death-impulse. Cf. Freud: Jenseits des Lustprinzips, 1920.