CRITICA

In Totem and Taboo (1913), Freud integrated clinical observations, libido theory, and his speculations on the prehistoric origins of universal symbolism and the Oedipus complex. He employed the psycho-Lamarckian assumption that the individual inherits cultural memories of repeated events in prehistory. These include a matriarchy preceding a patriarchy, a primal father who kept all the females to himself, the castration or expulsion of young men who threatened the primal father, the killing of the primal father by the fraternal clan, the totemic feast in celebration of and in atonement for the murder of the primal father, and so on. But modern science tells us events of the distant past are not inherited as memories by descendants of the species. What Freud knew, but chose to overlook, is that the Oedipal dynamics that he speculated on in the actions of the primal father and the fraternal clan need not be repeated many times to be remembered as a memory of the species, as they are embedded in the primate social instincts of alpha male dynamics.

Mother-infant observation is a kind of human ethological (study of animal behavior) investigation. The infant’s behavior is significantly influenced by primate social instincts or ritualizations. Such instincts continue throughout development, but language acquisition and culture tends to obscure them from direct observation. To attend to the ritualizations of the human animal, it is useful to observe our closest cousins––the chimpanzees, with whom we share 98.6 percent of our DNA. Erik Erikson suggested that the first human ritualization is greeting behavior (oral stage), and indeed much of the primatology literature is dedicated to this behavior. I have suggested that subsequent ritualizations are dominance and submission behavior (anal stage), copulation interference (Oedipal stage), and alpha male dynamics (genital stage; adolescence). Incidentally, copulation interference is when a chimpanzee mother copulates and her child instinctually climbs onto her back and tries to push off the male suitor. Similar behavior is seen in humans when young children intervene between parents who are hugging or kissing. Thus, the silent body of primate social instincts is always serving as a backdrop to the discourse of the metaphor-making speaking body.

While studying the literature on greeting behaviors among chimpanzees, I made a chimpanzee observation of my own. I discovered something that was not there! Chimpanzees do not signal good-bye. They grieve the deaths of loved ones but then just walk away. This is interesting because 100,000 years ago, when a woman and child died, they were intentionally buried. It was the first funeral––the first indication of a good-bye in the archeological record. There is no reason to think that chimpanzees have a concept of a soul that carries on beyond death. With humans, however, intentional burials often include food, tools, amulets, and fetal positioning, all for the purpose of life in the hereafter. By the Upper Paleolithic period (50,000 years ago), there was a mutation that granted us our superior symbolic function, resulting in an explosion of technological and spiritual advancements. The emerging concept of the soul became evident in funeral rituals, ritual cannibalism, amulets containing the souls of the ancestors, paintings carrying the souls of the represented, and female figurines representing the souls of motherhood. This led me to the conclusion that when our primate social instincts were processed through our symbolic function, they facilitated the emergence of technology, spiritual innovations, and a universe of metaphors on the threshold of psychological development and prehistoric cultural evolution.

In brief, I concluded that orality and the Paleolithic period are about oneness. Paleolithic culture was embedded in the unity of nature, just as the infant’s psyche is embedded in the unity of the early mother-infant relation. Anality and the Neolithic period are all about two-ness. The toddler separates from the mother, and in the Neolithic period human culture separates from nature by building walls around permanent houses and villages. The phallic stage and the High Neolithic period are about ambition, power, and sexual enlightenment. And the genital stage and the Urban Revolution period mark a new way of seeing the world.

This is highly schematized, but my point is that both the silent body of our primate social instincts and the vicissitudes of our psychosexual development informed our approach to the challenges of our prehistoric cultural evolution and metaphorized our universe in the voice of a speaking body. For more details, see my recently published Libido, Culture, and Consciousness: Revisiting Freud’s Totem and Taboo (2022).

https://www.amazon.com/Libido-Culture-Consciousness-Revisiting-Freuds-ebook/dp/B0B7XZDDWH