The psycho-analytic study of the family

by J. C. Flugel

If, as thus seems probable, we have in Totemism a peculiar The psychological connection between Totemism and Exogamy form of displacement of the feelings originally directed to the parents (and especially the father), it is not surprising that Totemism should be frequently accompanied by manifestations of the other, and sexual, aspect of the Œdipus complex. Such manifestations are, in effect, not far to seek and are in all probability to be found in the system of Exogamy which almost invariably accompanies the institution of Totemism. Whether or not Exogamy is co-eval with Totemism (some authorities think that it is of later origin), there is now a very fair measure of agreement that Exogamy has (consciously[174] or unconsciously) been created as a means of avoiding incest. If this view is correct it would appear that the connection between Totemism and Exogamy (a connection the nature of which had for long been anything but clear) is due to the fact that the two institutions have respectively come into being as the result of the operation of two closely-joined psychic factors, namely the two principal elements of the Œdipus complex. Just as in the individual mind, the presence in any high degree of one of these elements tends to bring about the presence of the other, so too in societies, the manifestations of the one element tend to be closely correlated with the manifestations of the other[175].

In touching on the subject of Exogamy, we have come very near to the most fundamental sociological problems connected with the main theme of this book. To these problems and to the whole question of the meaning of Exogamy we shall return in a later chapter. For the moment we must leave them, in order to pass on to the consideration of certain other aspects of the influence upon religion of psychic tendencies connected with the family.

We have seen that the child's attitude towards his father The ambivalent attitude towards the father as reflected in religion is usually an ambivalent one, i. e. it is determined partly by tenderness and affection and partly by hostility or fear. Naturally the relative predominance of one or other motive varies from one case to another, both as regards the religious life of individuals and as regards the beliefs and forms of worship adopted by various races, nations, sects or denominations. Thus the paternal qualities ascribed to the deity are sometimes derived chiefly from that attitude of the child towards its father in virtue of which it sees in him a being full of helpful wisdom and tender pity, to whom it can turn for encouragement, guidance and assistance in the difficult affairs of life, and especially in times of trouble; sometimes on the other hand more emphasis is laid upon those aspects of the father in which he appears as a severe and perhaps cruel master or tyrant who enforces strict obedience to his harsh commands and who inflicts dire penalties upon all who dare to oppose his wishes or defy his laws. In the higher forms of religion the more directly hostile relations between child and parent are seldom openly manifested, the conception of the father as wicked or immoral tending to disappear with increasing culture, though the notion of obedience to a stern, relentless authority may be maintained. This in its turn however frequently gives place to the idea of the kindly, helpful and forgiving father, according to a process of development which in many respects appears to resemble the evolution of thought as regards the relations of the individual to the state or the king, to which we have already drawn attention. It is a change of this nature for instance that, more perhaps than all else, marks the step from Judaism to Christianity; the latter giving promise of a reign of kindliness and forgiveness in place of the harsh and uncompromising exercise of paternal authority so characteristic of the former. It is for this reason that Christianity (at any rate in its primitive form) especially appealed to and encouraged the poor, the weak and the helpless, those who were most in need of kindness and assistance; and by so doing has encountered the opposition or contempt of those who see the paternal authority (and therefore its projection as the authority of the Universe) in a sterner shape[176], or of those who (like Nietzsche's Supermen), in their own sense of power and independence, despise all who, as though they were still children, require the assistance of a beneficent father to help them through their lives.

In polytheistic religions, or those with polytheistic tendencies, The splitting up of parental attributes among two or more divinities the different paternal qualities may be divided among a number of divinities; though as a rule there is a single heavenly father who combines in his person the most exalted aspects of creative and paternal power. Especially frequent is the splitting up of what appear to be the desirable and undesirable aspects of the father and the attribution of them to distinct deities, so that a kind, benevolent, forgiving and protecting divinity, upon the one hand, is contrasted with a stern, wicked and cruel one upon the other. The mediaeval conception of the Devil corresponds for instance, as has been shown by The Devil Ernest Jones[177] in his suggestive work upon this subject, to a deity thus obtained by the splitting off of the evil attributes of the father; a deity upon whom hatred, fear and even contempt may be freely poured and who can conveniently be made responsible for men's ill deeds and evil thoughts[178]; the attitude towards the heavenly father being correspondingly purged of these undesirable features. The process of duplication, which is frequently operative in other fields than that of religion, The dissociation of good and evil in theology and in the individual mind particularly in those of myth and legend[179] arises of course as a consequence of the psychical antagonism and resulting dissociation between the love and the hate attitudes towards the father, and can easily be made use of in religion owing to the general correspondence that may appear to exist between the benevolent and malevolent aspects of the all-powerful parent and the equally inexplicable and uncontrollable aspects of the natural forces to which the adult human being is exposed. In this way both the love and the hate elements in the primitive levels of the mind have relatively free play without becoming involved in moral or emotional conflicts or in intellectual contradiction; the double (ambivalent) mental attitude being projected so as to form a dualistic principle of the Universe.

Although of all the members of the family, the father, as The mother regarding feelings in religion its head, most frequently and regularly undergoes apotheosis, the other members of the family are not without considerable influence on the conceptions that are formed as to the nature and qualities of divine beings. Foremost as regards such influence, after the father, is of course the mother. In a strict monotheism the mother elements would seem to be almost always, if not invariably, subordinate to those of the father; the former, so far as they are represented at all, being submerged or incorporated into the latter[180]. But very few religions remain strictly and consistently monotheistic; and in most of those that show tendencies towards polytheism the mother elements are represented in a separate person or a separate principle. Thus, both in primitive and in more advanced forms of religion it is usual to find mother goddesses who bear the same relation to the earthly mother as does the father-god to the earthly father.

Nevertheless, it would appear that the mother-goddess is, The mother-son relationship and its repression at a certain stage of culture at any rate, liable to meet with opposition from which the corresponding father-god is usually exempt. This opposition would seem to be due to the admixture of incestuous passion which is brought over into religion from the original attachment of the child (and especially of course the son) to his earthly mother. The relations between mother and son fairly often find expression in religious stories, as in the cases of Cybele and Attis, Ishtar and Tammuz, Mary and Christ and (in the displaced form of brother and sister love) Isis and Osiris. As a rule however the mother-son relationship is not permanent but is disturbed and broken by evil plottings and brutal actions on the part of some third person (usually a father or a brother substitute), as a result of which the young son-god often meets with his death. The relations of Attis and of Christ to their mothers are of special interest in this connection, inasmuch as they plainly indicate the existence of an inner inhibition on the son's part as well as a separation brought about by interference from without. Attis according at least to some versions of his story, unmans himself on discovering the incestuous nature of his affection (as Œdipus himself had done, in a symbolic form, by putting out his eyes). In Christ the repression of the mother-regarding tendencies seems to have led to an attitude of aloofness towards his mother, and through her towards all women (cp. his words "Woman, what have I to do with thee?," John 2, 4)—an attitude that has profoundly affected his followers throughout the ages: for in the history of the Christian religion there is The struggle round the mother element in Christianity evidence—even apart from its notorious aversion from and distrust of women in general—of the existence of a constant struggle centering round the idea of the divine mother. In the early days of the Church there are accounts and rumours of sects which endeavoured to establish the worship of Mary alongside that of the Father and the Son, and there is evidence to show that the notion of the Holy Ghost corresponds in one of its aspects to that of a female deity who completes the natural trinity of Father, Mother and Son[181]. In the Roman Church Mary, as the mother of Christ, has received a widespread and often profound (though to some extent of course unofficial) adoration, being regarded perhaps especially as the helper in time of trouble, to whom men and women may go for comfort, protection, guidance or forgiveness in just the same way as they did to their earthly mother in their childhood: an adoration which has tended to call forth a feeling of disgust and horror in the Protestant Church, in which the more primite Christian tradition of the repression of the mother-regarding feelings has in this respect been kept alive[182].

The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, which has The Immaculate Conception played such a prominent part in Christian theology and theological discussion, is of course only one of the many similar instances of the notion of the supernatural birth[183]. Like many of these other instances, it is due, not merely to the fact of its being a relic from a time when there was little certainty or knowledge as to the nature of paternity, but to the fact that it constitutes an active expression of a strong (though usually unconscious) wish—a wish that is compounded from a number of separate, though of course related, elements, of which the chief are perhaps the following:—(1) the desire for "purity" on the part of the mother, in order that she may belong to the revered rather than to the sexually attractive but despised group of women (cp. above p. 110)—a desire which at the same time purifies the mother-regarding love of its grosser elements and renders it less liable to repression; (2) the desire to be independent of the father and to owe nothing to him (cp. above p. 109); (3) a desire to avoid sexual jealousy of the father together with the envy, hostility or contempt that would inevitably—especially in view of the general Christian attitude towards sex—accompany the notion of the father as a sexually active being. These factors combine to make the idea of sexual relations between the parents one that is peculiarly distasteful to their children, particularly when it is a question not of ordinary human parents with their admitted imperfections but of their heavenly and perfected counterparts, and the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception satisfactorily removes the necessity for this idea[184].

In more primitive forms of religion the correspondence of Open depiction of the parents and of the Œdipus complex in primitive religions the heavenly family to the earthly family and the projection on to the former of the feelings and tendencies aroused in connection with the latter (and particularly those which enter into the Œdipus complex) can as a rule be even more clearly and unmistakably observed. Thus in primitive cosmogonies[185] there are usually two world parents whose relations to each other are disturbed by their children, the son as a rule becoming hostile to the father, deposing him from his position of authority, killing or unmanning him or separating him from the mother. Of these world parents the father is very frequently regarded as a personification of the heavens, while the mother is identified with the Earth[186]; Heaven and Earth being sometimes considered as having been separated by their children from the close embrace in which they had previously been lying (as in the case of Atlas, who in this way keeps Heaven apart from Earth—a story which has many parallels, especially in Polynesian Mythology). In the Greek version Ouranos and Gaia (of whom the latter seems to have been the mother of the former, their union being thus incestuous) are separated by their son Cronos, who, at the instigation of his mother, deposes and castrates his father and marries his sisters Cybele, the mother of the gods. In the next generation these barbarous relations between parents and children are repeated. Cronos, fearing that he in his turn will become a victim to the same treatment as that which he himself had accorded to his father, endeavours to escape the threatened danger by eating his children as soon as they are born. Zeus however, being saved by a stratagem of his mother, performs the very act which his father had sought to prevent, and himself becomes firmly seated on the throne of Heaven and is married to his sister Hera.

In primitive myths of this kind we see the hostile relations Indications of mental conflict and repression between successive generations displayed crudely and nakedly, without any attempt at disguise or concealment. In others, probably dating from a more cultured epoch, there are signs of a mental conflict, the hostile actions being no longer performed with the same singleness of purpose and freedom from inhibition, but being accompanied by indications of a sense of guilt, or of an ability to understand or sympathise with the opponent's point of view. In the battle of the Titans against Zeus, some of the former fought on the side of the gods (i. e. Rebellion and punishment defended their parents) and those who rebelled against the paternal power were in the end defeated and punished (though the punishment itself may sometimes—by a piece of over-determination—constitute a continuation of the rebellious deed, as in the above-mentioned case of Atlas); Adam and Eve, on transgressing the divine prohibition to eat of the tree of knowledge (cp. the forbidden question motive, p. 104) are turned out of Eden; the builders of the Tower of Babel (cp. the attempt to storm Heaven by Otos and Ephialtes in Greek mythology) likewise meet with disaster; and in the noble story of Prometheus, who stole the fire[187] from Heaven to benefit mankind, the offender is brought into conflict with the father from the highest motives and bears his punishment with a resignation and fortitude that places him among the most splendid figures in Greek tragedy.