As on a former occasion[124], we want to avoid the problem as to the
origin of the tendency to project psychic processes into the outer
world. It is fair to assume, however, that this tendency becomes
stronger where the projection into the outer world offers psychic
relief. Such a state of affairs can with certainty be expected if the
impulses struggling for omnipotence have come into conflict with each
other, for then they evidently cannot all become omnipotent. The morbid
process in paranoia actually uses the mechanism of projection to solve
such conflicts which arise in the psychic life. However, it so happens
that the model case of such a conflict between two parts of an
antithesis is the ambivalent attitude which we have analysed in detail
in the situation of the mourner at the death of one dear to him. Such a
case appeals to us especially fitted to motivate the creation of
projection formations. Here again we are in agreement with those authors
who declare that evil spirits were the first born among spirits, and
find the origin of soul conceptions in the impression which death makes
upon the survivors. We differ from them only in not putting the
intellectual problem which death imposes upon the living into the
foreground, instead of which we transfer the force which stimulates
inquiry to the conflict of feelings into which this situation plunges
the survivor.
The first theoretical accomplishment of man, the creation of spirits
would therefore spring from the same source as the first moral
restrictions to which he subjects himself, namely, the rules of taboo.
But the fact that they have the same source should not prejudice us in
favour of a simultaneous origin. If it really were the situation of the
survivor confronted by the dead which first caused primitive man to
reflect, so that he was compelled to surrender some of his omnipotence
to spirits and to sacrifice a part of the free will of his actions,
these cultural creations would be a first recognition of the [Greek:
ἁνἁγκη anagkê], which opposes man’s narcism. Primitive man would bow to the
superior power of death with the same gesture with which he seems to
deny it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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