The psycho-analytic study of the family

by J. C. Flugel

CHAPTER XIII
FAMILY INFLUENCES IN RELIGION

We saw in the last chapter that the feelings with which The role of parent-regarding feelings in primitive notions concerning the Divine men tend to look upon the holders of the highest earthly dignity and power—the heads of churches, states and empires—are to a large extent derived from those which had originally shaped and coloured the child's attitude towards its parents. From the position of supreme human authority to that of superhuman power is, in imagination, but one further step; and accordingly we find that the tendencies and emotions connected with the parents can frequently and easily, by a further process of displacement, bridge over the gulf between kings and gods; and, by their association with the ideas of the Superhuman and the Divine, become important factors in moulding the religious feelings of mankind.

Apart from this however, reasons for the transfer of many of the parent-regarding emotions to the sphere of religion are not far to seek. There exists a close and obvious correspondence between the attitude of the young child towards his parents and that of man towards the superhuman powers which he personifies as God, the Divine Father. In both cases the individual's life and destiny are controlled by powers that seem, in comparison with his own puny capacity and understanding, to be immeasurable in their might and mystery. In both cases the health, happiness and even the very existence of the individual seem to be dependent upon the beneficence and approval of these powers; powers which can be terrible, and against which no effort will avail, if once aroused to wrath; but which nevertheless can be to some extent controlled and made to work in harmony with the individual's needs and desires, if the latter will but conduct himself towards them obediently and with due persuasiveness and understanding.

Small wonder then that the adult human being, confronted with the mighty forces of nature, the laws of which he is compelled to follow, if he would avoid destruction, but which—especially if he be ignorant or uncivilised—he cannot comprehend, tends to revert to the attitude of mind in which, in childhood, he looked upon his parents as the forces—equally powerful, as they then seemed, and equally inscrutable—that controlled his fate. In proportion as the child, with increasing age and experience, loses the delusions he had entertained as regards the all-powerfulness, all-knowingness and all-goodness of his parents, he begins to realise, both from his own experience and from instruction and tradition, that there are powers in the Universe which exceed the greatest human might, powers before whom the child's own parents—together with all other mortals—must acknowledge their own humility and impotence, powers so vast that it may seem only reasonable and befitting to regard the wielder of them as the possessor of those qualities of omnipotence and omniscience that were once, in the crude ignorance of infancy, vaguely attributed to the parents and to other adult persons of importance. The divine and superhuman forces, about which the child thus begins to have some notions, constitute in this way a very natural substitute for the exaggerated and idealised estimation of the parents which the child's increasing knowledge of human life compels him to abandon, but which he nevertheless, as we have seen (cp. above p. [55]), gives up reluctantly.

The displacement of the parent-regarding emotions and The divine and the human parent tendencies in this direction is, in the case of the individual, often further facilitated in the three following ways:—(1) owing to the generally pronounced animistic tendency of the primitive mind, the child naturally and indeed inevitably conceives of natural forces in a personal and usually in a human form; (2) the child early learns to conceive of the supreme forces of the Universe as creative—creative on a large scale, just as his own parents and other human beings are creative on a small scale; further he learns that he owes his own creation to God as much as to his own parents—to God ultimately, to his parents proximately; (3) in both these respects the individual tendency to endow the Divinity with attributes derived from the parents is greatly stimulated and reinforced by the suggestive power of religious tradition, working through the channels of direct teaching or of representation in language, literature and art.

The correspondence between the divine and the human Remoter ancestors as divine parent substitutes parent is one that, for these reasons among others, is very deeply rooted in the human mind. In an advanced stage of culture it may find its most natural expression in the related concepts of an ultimate and an immediate creator respectively, but at a more primitive mental level it is usually brought into connection with the distinction between remoter ancestors and immediate parents. There can be no doubt that the most important aspects of the theory and practice of religion are very largely derived from, and influenced by, ancestor worship, even though they may not, as Herbert Spencer has contended[162], have entirely originated from this source. Granted the fundamental assumption of animism—the existence of an individual soul or spirit which is to some extent independent of the body and may survive bodily death—it becomes easy to attribute to one's dead parents or to one's remoter ancestors powers that exceed those of persons who are still alive. There is not, as in the case of the living, any obvious and well defined limit to their capacity, and it becomes possible therefore to displace freely on to them the exaggerated notions which it is no longer possible to hold with regard to parents who are still subject to the conditions of earthly existence. The tendency which thus arises is reinforced by the very general fear of the dead[163], which easily attributes to its objects an exaggerated power—especially for evil. The more remote the ancestors in time, the more easy does it become to assign to them a power which is manifestly superior to that of the living, though the ideas of the ancestors and of their power necessarily become at the same time more shadowy and vague.

The conditions are thus given for a religion of simple Unsatisfying features of simple ancestor worship ancestor worship, such as has existed in very many parts of the world[164] and has often continued to exist alongside of a wider state religion, as for instance in Rome. As a rule however a further step is involved, probably because a simple ancestor worship of this kind is both too indefinite and too individualistic to prove permanently satisfactory, either from the point of view of the individual himself or of the community of which he forms a part. It is too indefinite because it does not provide any sufficiently clear and characteristic object or objects upon which the displaced parent-regarding feelings can be directed; and it is too individualistic because, so long as each family is thrown back solely upon its own ancestors as objects of worship, the religious feelings and tendencies aroused lack the stimulating force which they derive from the co-operation of the herd instinct (in virtue of which the individual is particularly liable to be affected by the emotions to which his fellows give expression)[165] and through which alone, in many cases, religion is able to become a permanent and stable form of expression for the displaced parent-regarding tendencies of childhood and a social force which has proved to be of the greatest importance in the history and development of mankind.

For these and other reasons, ancestor worship is not often The All-Father found in its pure and simple form, but is usually complicated and modified in at least two important ways:—(1) a single ancestor is selected as the originator and founder of the family, the high patriarchal attributes being for the most part reserved for him alone; (2) this same ancestor is regarded as the founder, not merely of a single family, but of the whole clan, tribe, nation or other social unit, or, by a further extension, of the whole human race, of all living beings or, ultimately, of the whole Universe. There is thus created the notion of a single All-Father, who serves at once as the supreme and most satisfying embodiment of the father-ideal for the individual and as a potent means of strengthening and uniting the community through the sense of brotherhood and loyalty that attaches to a common worship and a common origin from a divine ancestor. The satisfying character of the religious concept that is here reached is apt to be still further increased by a complete or partial fusion of the notion of the divine father with that of the kingly father which we have already discussed. The mythical divine ancestor, the founder of the race, is frequently supposed to have been originally a king also, and it is usual for the reigning line of sovereigns to trace their descent more especially from him. Very often too the kings, or at any rate the greater ones among them, receive divine honours at their death, being then worshipped along with the other illustrious ancestors of the tribe, having but exchanged their earthly power for a more exalted throne in heaven.

It is in the early stages of tribal ancestor worship of the Totemism kind we have been here considering that we come across a widespread social and religious system so curious in nature that it may undoubtedly rank as one of the most remarkable discoveries brought about by the study of primitive man. I refer, of course, to Totemism. In Totemism the mythical ancestor takes on a non-human form, being as a rule some animal, but sometimes also a plant or even an inanimate object. All examples of the totem class are, as a rule, held sacred by those who belong to the respective totem, and must be treated with care and reverence, but (in the case of animal Exogamy totems at any rate) are sometimes killed and eaten at a solemn sacrificial feast. Combined with these religious or quasi-religious manifestations of Totemism there are usually to be found certain well marked features of social organization. A single totem is not, as a rule, common to a whole tribe, but each tribe consists of two or more (most often four, but sometimes as many as eight) totem clans, which are all strictly exogamous, no man being allowed to take a wife from his own clan; the field of choice being indeed sometimes still further restricted, in such a way that the women of only one small section of the total tribe are available for this purpose. The sociological and psychological influences that led to the creation of the totemic system in a number of widely separated parts of the world are still to a large extent a matter of dispute. A number of theories have been propounded on the subject, and although many of them are suggestive, there is perhaps no single one as that fully and satisfactorily accounts for all the facts[166]. Among The totem as a father the few points that emerge clearly from the investigations and discussions to which the matter has given rise is the connection of the totem with the father. It has been shown that the totem spirit regularly, either to a complete or to a partial extent, plays the father's part in the creation of the child; the substitution of totem for father being rendered easier by the existence of a confused and ignorant state of mind on the subject of paternity; which makes it conceivable that the spirit of an animal or other object should enter into the mother's womb and thus produce conception[167].

That this vagueness on the subject of paternity in the mind of primitive man finds its counterpart even in civilised societies[168] is shown by the many legends of a supernormal birth in which the father is dispensed with or is replaced by some non-human being[169]. The deep rooted and persistent nature Relics of Totemism in religion of the tendency to totemism is shown also by the very frequent occurrence at all stages of culture of theriomorphic gods, whose cult often leads to certain animals or classes of animals being regarded as sacred, just as in the case of totemic communities. Even when the gods are no longer habitually regarded as animals, they still occasionally take on animal form (cp. the frequent animal disguises of Zeus) or are connected with, or represented by, animal symbols (cp. the dove, the pelican, the and in the individual mind lamb, the fish and the ass in Christianity). In the individual mind of the civilised person animals are frequently utilised as symbols of the parents in dreams and other productions of the Unconscious[170]. There are indeed persons who experience a peculiar fascination for some kind of animal, which they regard with mixed feelings among which love, admiration, awe, disgust and hate are often to be found; those emotions usually predominating which are most prominent in the individual's relations to his father. Thus in one case well known to the present writer, in which the ideas connected with the father were chiefly those of goodness and wisdom, the hostile aspects being much repressed, the owl was looked upon very much in the light of an individual totem, the solemn stare and pouting figure of the bird appearing to symbolise the kindly beneficence and immense wisdom of the (earthly and heavenly) father—with just so much of mystery and possibility of evil as to add a tinge of awe and horror to the total attitude. Freud[171] and Ferenczi[172] have each reported interesting cases in this connection, in both of which the father-regarding tendencies and emotions had become displaced on to a particular kind of animal (in one case the horse, in the other the fowl) with the result that this animal exercised an intense and persistent fascination, in which opposing elements of love and hate could clearly be distinguished[173].