Page:The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis II 1921 2.djvu/17

 PRIMITIVE MAN AND ENVIRONMENT 173

find the whole person perched on a tree, but we have a substitute for it in the tooth which is wedged into the bark of a young sapling. However here we come to the point we have to deal with. The tooth is either inserted into a tree with which a relation of sympathetic magic is, in this case, created, or given into the custody of the mother.^ In dreams as well as in poetry we often find the tree as a symbol of the mother, and here we can trace the phylogenetic development of this symboL As the Pithec- anthropus inhabited trees before he descended to the earth this descent is assimilated to the birth of the individual which is once more a repetition of the birth of the human race. The tree in which man lives bejore he is born is the maternal womb, and hence the sub- stitution of the tree for the mother in unconscious symbolism, is the breaking through of phylogenesis under the superstructure of ontO' genesis. And it is this interrelation between the history of the race (nation) and the individual which explains why primitive man is heedless of the category of time in his transformation-theories for ontogenesis is an extremely shortened repetition of phylogenesis in which an infinitely small section of time corresponds to a whole period of racial history and myth deals with phylogenesis not in its original aspect but with its repetition in the life of the individual. The Seven Sleepers think they have gone to sleep only yesterday in their cave and when they awake the world is older by many a century: this is really a reversal of the womb-' situation where the embryo passes through infinitely long periods of evolution in months which mean hardly a day in the history of the world.* Or, as Freud puts it, the category of time does not exist in the unconscious.

The next question we propose to deal with is the origin of certain concepts of space which belong to the common heritage of humanity. To be above somebody means to occupy a more favourable position in society. It is a privilege of the Patasiwa organisation — who seem to be the descendants of conquering races


 * R6heim: Spiegelzauber, 1919, S. 11.

» On the myth of the Seven Sleepers see above. The idea of years appearing as so many days to somebody who has been absent with super- natural beings (in the rock-house of the cannibal) is also found in North America. F. Boas: Indianische Sagen von der Nord-Pazifischen Kflste Amerikas, 1895, S. 87, 153, 192, 260, 292; S. T. Rand: Legends of the Micmacs 1891, p. 95.

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