Page:The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis II 1921 2.djvu/7

 PRIMITIVE MAN AND ENVIRONMENT 163

fire in a house, means to go a wooing. The Tami say to go under the roof of a foreign house, meaning to be after other men's wives.^ In ancient Greece if a man who had been reported dead turned up again he was made to come down through the chimney ^ a rite which symbolised re-birth, the house being a substitute for the womb. We must remember that this identi- fication of the dwelling with the universe, and the projection of the uterine impressions into the concept of the dwelling, leads us to the seemingly surprising conclusion tlmt primitive man unconsciously regarded the world which envelops him as a second womb, that his un- conscious apperception of space is based on the experiences of ante- natal life. If we can bring ourselves to accept this idea — which is really part and parcel of a general view of psychic life as a series of continual repetitions', — as a working hypothesis to colligate the facts, we shall find that primitive thought supplies us with just the materials we need to confirm us in this view.* On the Upper Congo among the Boloki it appears that every family has what is called a "loboma" which is a pool in the bush or in the forest, or on an island it may be a creek or it may be a cotton tree; it is regarded as the preserve of the unborn children of the family. If a man has only one child by a wife and no more, he thinks someone has bewitched the family child-preservoir by taking the family stock of children from it and hiding them.^

» G. Bamler: Tami; Neuhauss: Deutsch-Neu-Guinea III, 1911, p. S04, ' t>lutarch: Quaestioaes romanae. 5; E. Liebrecht: Zur Volkskuade, 1879, S. 397.

he must have derived it from his own prenatal experience, and it must al- ways retain the traces of having first been moulded on these impressions (or "engrams").
 * If man is bom with the concept of space it is natural to assume that

Sky was in close embrace with Mother Earth so that there was no room left for their children, and how these lifted the sky to its present height, con- tain (besides the (Edipus-complex) an "auto-symbolical" or "functional" account of the origin of the space concept which was first received in the cramped position of the embryo, the experiences of which were then pro- jected into the universe. Gruppe: Griechische Mythologie und Religions- geschichte, 1906, I, S. 425; G. Grey: Polynesian Mythology, 1865, p. 1; A, Bastian: Die Heilige*Sage der Polynesier, 1881, S. 36; Frobenius: Welt- anschauung der NaturvSlker, 1898, S. 350; Perry: The Megalithic Culture of Indonesia, 1918, p. 167; Ermann: Die Sgyptische Religion, 1909, S. 35.
 * The cosmogonical myths which relate how in the beginning Father

» John H. Weeks: Among Congo Cannibals, 1913, pp. 129, 130.

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