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DISKUS Vol. 8 (2007)
http://www.basr.ac.uk/diskus/diskus8/segal.htm

THE PLACE OF ETHICS IN MODERN THEORIES OF RELIGION

Robert A. Segal
Department of Divinity and Religious Studies
School of Divinity, History and Philosophy
University of Aberdeen
Aberdeen, Scotland

E-mail:  r.segal@abdn.ac.uk

Abstract
Despite the common assumption that ethics is central to religion, religions have often been classified into those that stress rituals rather than ethics and those that stress ethics rather than rituals.  Theories of religion have sometimes accepted this division, but as generalizations about all religions, they have sought uniformities among religions.  The divide within theories has been between those theories that deny centrality to ethics in religion and those theories that grant it.   This division corresponds, roughly, to that between nineteenth-century theories of religion and twentieth-century theories.  To illustrate this division, I compare one representative nineteenth-century theorist, E. B. Tylor, with one twentieth-century one, Sigmund Freud.

RITUALISTIC AND ETHICAL RELIGIONS

One might innocently suppose that ethics has always been seen as central to religion.  But in fact it has not.  In the nineteenth century, if one dare generalize, ethics occupied a secondary place in the study of religion.  Only in the twentieth century did ethics come to secure a primary place.  I want to trace this change of view. 

A distinction has often been drawn between those religions that are ritualistic and those that are ethical.  The Old Testament versus the New Testament, Judaism versus Christianity, Roman Catholicism versus Protestantism, Homer versus the Bible, ancient paganism versus Judaism and Christianity alike - so has the divide gone. 

“Ritualistic” has typically been associated with “magical”:  the performance of a ritual has been seen as a way of compelling a god to respond.  In turn, magical has regularly been associated with proto-scientific:  magic has been taken either as a “primitive” version of science or, more commonly, as the primitive counterpart to science, which has thereby been considered exclusively modern.  Like science, which means both theoretical and applied science, magic has been seen both as an explanation of the physical world and as a means of manipulating that world for physical ends, above all for food.  The magician either compels the god to act or manipulates the world directly, in which case there may be magic rather than religion; or, and here there ceases to be magic, the priest may offer sacrifices to the god, but the end is still the same practical one. 

Ethics is assumed to be absent from religions judged ritualistic.  The magician gets the crops to grow by knowing how to force either god or the world to act.  The ethical behavior of either the magician or the magician’s constituency plays no part, any more than the ethical standing of a scientist or a scientist’s community has any bearing on the scientist’s ability to succeed technologically.  The priest gets the crops to grow by making sacrifices to the gods, thereby either buying the crops from the god or bribing the god to provide them.  Again, the ethical status of either the priest or the priest’s community is of no relevance.

Religions typed as ritualistic, whether or not magical, are thus readily set against those typed as ethical.  For religions deemed ethical are beholden to the decision of god.  While god in ritualistic religions certainly decides whether to bestow crops, the basis on which the god decides is taken to be the worthiness of the sacrifice rather than the worthiness of the sacrificer.  Abel’s sacrifice was accepted by God and Cain’s was rejected (Genesis 4.1-16) because, so the common ritualistic argument goes, Abel’s was worthier.  By contrast, god in ethical religions decides whether to bestow crops on the basis of the worthiness of the sacrificer or of the sacrificer’s constituency. 

Just as there is no place for ethics in ritualistic religions, so there is no place, or at least no central place, for the primitive equivalent of science in ethical religions.  True, one must know that crops grow because god chooses to make them grow, but exactly how god proceeds to make them grow is either unknown or incidental.  In the first story of creation in the Bible (Genesis 1-2.4a), God simply declares “Let there be,” and there is.  In the second story of creation (Genesis 2.4b-3.25), God gets his hands dirty, but even here the process of creation remains vague.  In ethical religions the emphasis is on obedience to God as necessary, if not quite sufficient, for one’s bidding.

I myself am not assuming that this distinction between ritualistic and ethical religions holds, let alone that ethical religions should be touted over ritualistic ones.  After all, the Ten Commandments, to take a single example, combine both aspects of religion.  The first four commandments are ritualistic:  they prescribe things to be done or not to be done directly toward God.  The six remaining commandments are ethical:  they prescribe things to be done or not to be done toward other human beings, even if in the name of God.  The ritualistic commandments are not separated from the ethical ones.  And while the ritualistic commandments come first, the ones that follow are more numerous. 

In actuality, it is doubtful that any religions are either exclusively ritualistic or exclusively ethical.  Religions must surely tend both to relations between adherents and god and to relations among fellow adherents.  Still, religions have conventionally been divided up this way. 

THEORIES OF RELIGION

Modern theories of religion are themselves divisible into those that deny a central place to ethics in religions as a whole and those that assume it.  If one can generalize, nineteenth-century theories tended to accord ethics a secondary place in religion and twentieth-century theories tended to grant it a central one.  Theories that deny ethics a central place in religion do so because for them religions, in explaining and controlling, do not and maybe even cannot also prescribe.  Theories that grant ethics a central place in religion do so because for them religions, in prescribing, do not and maybe even cannot also explain and control.  For me, the epitome of nineteenth-century theories are those of E. B. Tylor, whose magnum opus, Primitive Culture, was published in 1871, and J. G. Frazer, whose famous The Golden Bough first appeared in 1890. <1>  For me, the epitome of twentieth-century theories are those of Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Sigmund Freud, and C. G. Jung.  I will take one theorist from each century:  Tylor and Freud.

TYLOR

The pioneering English anthropologist E. B. Tylor subsumes both religion and science under philosophy.  He divides philosophy into “primitive” and “modern.”  Primitive philosophy is identical with primitive religion.  There is no primitive science.  Modern philosophy, by contrast, has two subdivisions:  religion and science.  Of the two, science is by far the more important and is the modern counterpart to primitive religion.  Modern religion is composed of two elements - metaphysics and ethics - neither of which is present in primitive religion.  Metaphysics deals with nonphysical entities, of which “primitive” peoples have no conception.  Ethics is present in primitive culture, but it has nothing to do with religion.  Tylor uses the term “animism” for religion per se, modern and primitive alike, because he derives the belief in gods from the belief in souls (“anima” in Latin means soul).  In primitive religion souls occupy all physical entities, beginning with the bodies of humans.  Gods are the souls in all physical entities except humans, who themselves are not gods.

Primitive religion is the primitive counterpart to science because both are explanations of the physical world.  Tylor thus characterizes primitive religion as “savage biology” <2> and maintains that “mechanical astronomy gradually superseded the animistic astronomy of the lower races” and that today “biological pathology gradually supersedes animistic pathology”. <3> The religious explanation is personalistic:  the decisions of gods explain events.  The scientific explanation is impersonal:  mechanical laws explain events.  The sciences as a whole have replaced religion as the explanation of the physical world, so that “animistic astronomy” and “animistic pathology” refer only to primitive, not modern, animism.  Modern religion has surrendered the physical world to science and has retreated to the immaterial world, especially to the realm of life after death - that is, of the life of the soul after the death of the body.  Whereas in primitive religion the soul is deemed material, in modern religion it is deemed immaterial and is limited to human beings. <4>  

Similarly, whereas in primitive religion god is deemed material, in modern religion god is deemed immaterial.  God thereby cease to be an agent in the physical world - Tylor assumes that physical effects must have physical causes - and religion ceases to be an explanation of the physical world.  God is relocated from the physical world to the social world.  God no longer creates but now prescribes.  God either bestows ethics on humanity or embodies the scrupulous practice of them.  God becomes a model for humans, just as god should be for Plato.  One now reads the Hebrew Bible not for the story of creation but for the Ten Commandments and for the examples set by Abraham and Job.  One now reads the New Testament not for the prediction of the coming end of the world but for the Sermon on the Mount and for the example set by Jesus, just as for Plato a bowdlerized Homer would enable one to do.  Jesus is to be emulated as the ideal human, not as a miracle worker.  Religion and science are now compatible, but only by the surrender to science of what had been the domain of religion.

This irenic view of the relationship between religion and science is like that of the late evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, for whom science, above all evolution, is compatible with religion because the two never intersect.  Science explains the physical world;  religion prescribes ethics and gives meaning to life:  “Science tries to document the factual character of the natural world, and to develop theories that coordinate and explain these facts.  Religion, on the other hand, operates in the equally important, but utterly different, realm of human purposes, meanings, and values”. <5> But whereas for Gould religion has always served a function different from that of science, for Tylor religion has been forced to retrain upon having been made compulsorily redundant by science.  And its present function is a demotion.  The heart of religion is not ethics but explanation, and religion becomes ethics (as well as metaphysics) only when it can no longer serve as explanation.

In support of my take on Tylor, I note the following:

For Tylor, religion arises and functions for wholly explanatory ends, and intellectual curiosity is as strong in primitive peoples as in moderns:  “Man’s craving to know the causes at work in each event he witnesses, the reasons why each state of things he surveys is such as it is and no other, is no product of high civilization, but a characteristic of his race down to its lowest stages”. <6> More than idle curiosity, the quest for knowledge among even primitive peoples “is already an intellectual appetite whose satisfaction claims many of the moments not engrossed by war or sport, food or sleep”. <7>

For Tylor, primitive culture is not without ethics, but ethics fall outside religion:  “It is not that these races have no moral sense or no moral standard, for both are strongly marked among them….  It is that the conjunction of ethics and Animistic philosophy, so intimate and powerful in the higher culture, seems scarcely yet to have begun in the lower”. <8>

Undeniably, Tylor touts modern religion as “higher” than primitive.  Undeniably, he even declares that “one great element of religion, that moral element, among the higher nations forms its most vital part”. <9> But the “startling” fact that “the relation of morality to religion is one that only belongs in its rudiments, or not at all, to rudimentary civilization” <10> means that for Tylor ethics is not central to religion per se: 

“The essential connexion of theology and morality is a fixed idea in many minds.   But it is one of the lessons of history that subjects may maintain themselves independently for ages, till the event of coalescence takes place.  In the course of history, religion has in various ways attached to itself matters small and great outside its central scheme ….  Looking at religion … as a practical influence on human society, it is clear that among its greatest powers have been its divine sanction of ethical laws, its theological enforcement, its teaching of moral government of the universe ….  But such alliance belongs almost or wholly to religions above the savage level, not to the earlier and lower creeds.  It will aid us to see how much more the fruit of religion belongs to ethical influence than to philosophical dogma, if we consider how the introduction of the moral element separates the religions of the world, united as they are throughout by one animistic principle [viz., soul in gods] into two great classes, those lower systems whose best result is to supply a crude childlike natural philosophy, and those higher faiths which implant on this the law of righteousness and of holiness, the inspiration of duty and of love.”<11>

For Tylor, animism, again, means religion per se, not just primitive religion.  Ethics is an addition to religion.  It is not the core of religion.

For Tylor, religion as explanation is a wholly rational enterprise, one worthy of the keenest respect.  The postulation of first souls and then gods is a rational inference from the data:  “the primitive animistic doctrine is thoroughly at home among savages, who appear to hold it on the very evidence of their senses, interpreted on the biological principle which seems to them most reasonable”. <12> Rather than transforming heretofore dead and inert phenomena into living and mobile ones, primitive peoples hypothesize souls and gods to account for the life and activity - the data - that they already experience around them:

“The sense of an absolute psychical distinction between man and beast, so prevalent in the civilized world, is hardly to be found among the lower races.  Men to whom the cries of beasts and birds seem like human language, and their actions guided as it were by human thought, logically enough allow the existence of souls to beasts, birds, and reptiles, as to men.  The lower psychology cannot but recognize in beasts the very characteristics which it attributes to the human soul, namely, the phenomena of life and death, will and judgment, and the phantom seen in vision or in dream.” <13>

We moderns consider even more madcap the postulation of souls and gods in inanimate objects like “stocks and stones, weapons, boats, food, clothes, ornaments, and other objects.”  To us these objects “are not merely soulless but [underlying it] lifeless”. <14> But “if we place ourselves by an effort in the intellectual position of an uncultured tribe, and examine the theory of object-souls from their point of view, we shall hardly pronounce it irrational”. <15> A stone over which one trips can seem to have placed itself there.  Plants as well as animals do seem to be exercising their wills in their varying responses to human effort.  Animals, plants, and inanimate objects do appear as agents in dreams and visions.

Because moderns no less than primitive peoples see humans in their dreams, hear the human-like cries of beasts and birds, and trip over stones, Tylor is not distinguishing primitive senses from modern ones.  He is distinguishing primitive trust in the senses from modern wariness.  Less critical than moderns, primitive peoples accept unquestioningly not only their normal, waking impressions but even their dream and hallucinatory ones: 

“Even in healthy waking life, the savage or barbarian has never learnt to make that rigid distinction between subjective and objective, between imagination and reality, to enforce which is one of the main results of scientific education.  Still less, when disordered in body and mind he sees around him phantom human forms, can he distrust the evidence of his very senses.” <16>

Primitive peoples are uncritical but not illogical.  Like moderns, they work scrupulously inductively - from observations to inferences to generalizations.  Tylor thus preserves the parallel between primitive religion and modern science.

For Tylor, religion as explanation and religion as ethics are distinct.  Just as science ceases to be science once it prescribes rather than explains, so religion ceases to be primitive religion once it prescribes rather than explains.  Now one might say that I have thereby undermined my own argument:  religion does not cease to be religion, the way science ceases to be science, the minute it starts waxing ethical; it simply ceases to be primitive religion.  True, but religion starts waxing ethical - and metaphysical - only because it is threatened by science:

“In our own day and country, the notion of souls of beasts is to be seen dying out.  Animism, indeed, seems to be drawing in its outposts, and concentrating itself on its first and main position, the doctrine of the human soul....  The soul has given up its ethereral substance, and become an immaterial entity, “the shadow of a shade.”  Its theory is becoming separated from the investigations of biology and mental science, which now discuss the phenomena of life and thought, the senses and the intellect, the emotions and the will, on a ground-work of pure experience.  There has arisen an intellectual product whose very existence is of the deepest significance, a “psychology” which has no longer anything to do with “soul.”  The soul’s place in modern thought is in the metaphysics of religion, and its especial office there is that of furnishing an intellectual side to the religious doctrine of the future.” <17>

Conceived as immaterial rather than material and as exclusively human rather than universal, the soul may now seem to occupy a more elevated place than it did when it was considered material.  But the primitive postulation of a material soul in humans leads to a whole theory of the physical world - the counterpart to all of natural science.  Can modern religion, severed as it is from the domain of science and confined to the immaterial, otherworldly side of humanity, really be considered as impressive for Tylor as primitive religion?

FRAZER

Before turning to Freud, let me give one quotation from Frazer - not from The Golden Bough but from Folk-Lore in the Old Testament (1918), in which, in the fashion of The Golden Bough, he argues that all religion, here even Judaism, is a throwback to--or “survival” of--primitive magic (or magic and religion combined). <18> In the following quotation, which comes from the preface to Folk-Lore, Frazer seeks to anticipate the charge by critics that he has ignored the higher side of Israelite religion in favor of its lower side.  By the higher side he, just like Tylor, means ethics.  By the lower side he means scientific-like magic (or magic plus religion), which seeks to manipulate nature in order to secure food and other necessities:

“The scope of my work has obliged me to dwell chiefly on the lower side of ancient Hebrew life revealed in the Old Testament, on the traces of savagery and superstition which are to be found in its pages.  But to do so is not to ignore, far less to disparage, that higher side of the Hebrew genius which has manifested itself in a spiritual religion and a pure morality, and of which the Old Testament is the imperishable monument.  On the contrary, the revelation of the baser elements which underlay the civilization of ancient Israel, as they underlie the civilization of modern Europe, serves rather as a foil to enhance by contrast the glory of a people which, from such dark depths of ignorance and cruelty, could rise to such bright heights of wisdom and virtue, as sunbeams appear to shine with a greater effulgence of beauty when they break through the murky clouds of a winter evening than when they flood the earth from the serene splendour of a summer noon.” <19>

Yet for all Frazer's acknowledgment of a “higher” side to Israelite religion, he is still maintaining that the “primitive” side survived alongside the later one, and the primitive side alone is considered in Folk-Lore in the Old Testament.  Ethics is nowhere to be found in his fat, two-volume study of ancient Judaism.

FREUD

Freud offers not one but two theories of religion:  a far more “Freudian” one in Totem and Taboo and a far less Freudian one in The Future of an Illusion. <20> In Future Freud contends that religion arises and functions to fulfill wishes - above all the wish to make the world more comforting than in fact it is.  Antithetically to Tylor, Freud denies that religion arises from a need to explain the world.  Rather, it arises from a need to transform the world - by casting onto it a beneficent, father-like god to protect adult humans from an otherwise indifferent, even hostile world.  God protects his children in the same way that fathers protect theirs:

“Everything that happens in this world is an expression of the intentions of an intelligence superior to us, which in the end … orders everything for the best--that is, to make it enjoyable for us.  Over each one of us there watches a benevolent Providence which is only seemingly stern and which will not suffer us to become a plaything of the over-mighty and pitiless forces of nature….  Now that God was a single person, man’s relations to him could recover the intimacy and intensity of the child’s relation to his father.” <21>

What is true of Freud is, I think, true of most other twentieth-century theorists of religion:  whatever religion is, it is not, as for the nineteenth century, the primitive counterpart to science.  Religion is not an explanation of the world, or at least not primarily so.  But of course the decoupling of religion from explanation is not itself the coupling of religion with ethics.

It is in Totem and Taboo that ethics proves key to religion.  Whether one reads the work straightforwardly as history - as the origin of religion out of the killing of the primal father - or as recurrence - as the desire of sons everywhere to kill their own father - religion arises to alleviate the guilt felt over hatred of the father.  Where in Future the feeling felt by sons and daughters alike toward their own father is that of love for the protection provided, in Totem and Taboo the feeling felt by sons toward their father is conflicted:  it is of love mixed equally with hate.  No sooner does the hatred surface, either in the actual primal parricide or in the wished-for generational one, than the love surfaces as well, and from the love comes guilt.  (One cannot feel guilt toward someone wholly hated.)  In Totem and Taboo, as in Future, the love stems from the protection and nurturing that the primal father provided or that all fathers provide.  The hatred, which plays no part in Future, stems from the refusal of either the primal father or all fathers to share their wives with their sons.  In other words, the hatred stems from the Oedipus Complex. 

For Freud, guilt can be alleviated only by penance, and in the case of religion penance takes the dual form of renunciation and of a second chance.  Taken as history, Totem and Taboo reconstructs the renunciation by the primal sons of the very object of their deed:  access to the women of the horde, among whom are their mothers.  This renunciation is done in memory of the father.  Taken as history as well, Totem and Taboo reconstructs the subsequent restoration - one might say resurrection - of the father, initially in the guise of a totemic animal or plant but then, as religion evolves, in the manifestation of multiple female anthropomorphic gods, of multiple male anthropomorphic gods, and finally of a single male anthropomorphic god, who clearly is most akin to the primal father.  What is true of the first, totemic stage of religion is also true of all the following stages: 

“Totemic religion arose from the filial sense of guilt, in an attempt to allay that feeling and to appease the father by deferred obedience to him.  All later religions are seen to be attempts at solving the same problem.  They vary according to the stage of civilization at which they arise and according to the methods which they adopt;  but all have the same end in view and are reactions to the same great event with which civilization began and which, since it occurred, has not allowed mankind a moment’s rest.” <22>

For Freud, the methods used to alleviate guilt do not so much change as get intensified.  The initial prohibition against sex with women of the horde ultimately becomes in Roman Catholicism - Freud’s bête noire - the prohibition of almost all sex among lay persons and of sex altogether among priests, monks, and nuns.  The initial regret over the killing of the primal father becomes the prohibition of all killing and, more, even the love of enemies. 

            Religion for Freud clearly means ethics, even if the emphasis is more on what ought not to be done than on what ought to be done.  Hence Freud writes of the primal deed as “the beginning of so many things - of social organization, of moral restrictions and of religion”. <23> Lest the distinction between “moral restrictions” and “religion” be mistaken as a separation of the two a la Tylor, I quote Freud a little later:  “The two taboos on totemism with which human morality has its beginning …” <24> By those two taboos Freud means the taboo on killing the totem - save ritualistically, in the totemic gathering or in Christian Communion - and the taboo on some or all sex.
 
Where Tylor places ethics outside primitive religion, Freud places ethics at the heart of religion from the start.  Indeed, what spurs Freud to write Totem and Taboo is his own try at accounting for the surprising presence of two phenomena in the earliest extant stage of humanity:  totemism and the incest taboo.  Anthropologists of Freud’s day considered Australian aborigines “the most backward and miserable of savages”, <25> and so it was most striking to find among them both religion and ethics.  The presence of ethics, even if again qua prohibition, was especially surprising:

“We should certainly not expect that the sexual life of these poor, naked cannibals would be moral in our sense or that their sexual instincts would be subjected to any great degree of restriction.  Yet we find that they set before themselves with the most scrupulous care and the most painful severity the aim of avoiding incestuous relations.  Indeed, their whole social organization seems to serve that purpose or to have been brought into relation with its attainment.” <26>

The aboriginal taboo on incest is far wider than the modern one, which ordinarily considers incestuous only sex within the immediate family or at most with first cousins.  By contrast, the aboriginal taboo extends to all other members of the totemic group, or clan.

The coextensiveness of the prohibition of incest with totemic religion is what spurred many others before Freud to try to figure out the connection between them.  For Freud, the prohibition of incest, or exogamy, came first, and totemism arose to reinforce it.  While Freud, who is arguing for this causal connection, confusingly declares that “totemism and exogamy were intimately connected and had a simultaneous origin”, <27> it is the intimacy of their connection that counts more.

Where for Tylor ethics becomes part of religion only once religion, bested by science, can no longer serve as explanation, for Freud ethics is the core of religion from the outset and simply becomes ever more demanding.  For Freud, the grip that religion has over humanity lies not in its capacity to explain so persuasively why rain falls but in its capacity to instill ethics - more precisely, to instil guilt for the ineluctable falling short of ever tighter ethical prohibitions.  Religion arises to alleviate guilt but in practice exacerbates it.  The stranglehold that guilt, or sin, has on adherents is what makes religion a neurosis.

I am not assuming that ethics and explanation are the only elements of religion, and I am not claiming that religion cannot itself simultaneously prescribe and explain.  I am asserting only that in the history of modern theorizing about religion, religion does not do both, and certainly not in equal measure.  In their importance for religion the two have switched places.  For most nineteenth-century theorists – e.g. Tylor and Frazer - religion was foremost an explanation of the world and not primarily a prescription.  For most twentieth-century theorists - again, Jung, Durkheim, and Weber and many others besides Freud - religion was foremost almost anything but an explanation of the world.  I am not claiming that for twentieth-century theorists religion was foremost ethics, only that ethics was one of the things that religion was taken to be once it was no longer taken to be explanation.  Despite the commonplace association of nineteenth-century religion with ethics, such as in liberal theology, in the twentieth century, as far as theories are concerned, religion came to be seen as ever more tied to ethics.  In short, the place of ethics in modern theories of religion has been anything but uniform.

NOTES

<1> E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 2 vols., 1st ed.,  (London: Murray, 1871).  J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough, 1st ed., 2 vols., (London: Macmillan, 1911).

<2> Tylor, Primitive Culture, II, p. 20.

<3> Tylor, Primitive Culture, II, p. 229.

<4> See Tylor, Primitive Culture, II, p. 85.

<5> Stephen Jay Gould, Rocks of Ages, (London: Vintage Books, 2002 [1999]), p. 4.

<6> Tylor, Primitive Culture, I, pp. 368-69.

<7> Tylor, Primitive Culture, I, p. 369.

<8> Tylor, Primitive Culture, II, p. 11.

<9> Tylor, Primitive Culture, II, p. 11.

<10> Tylor, Primitive Culture, II, p. 446.

<11> Tylor, Primitive Culture, II, pp. 446-47 (italics added).

<12> Tylor, Primitive Culture, II, pp. 83-84.

<13> Tylor, Primitive Culture, II, p. 53.

<14> Tylor, Primitive Culture, II, p. 61.

<15> Tylor, Primitive Culture, II, p. 61.

<16> Tylor, Primitive Culture, II, p. 29.

<17> Tylor, Primitive Culture, II, p. 85.

<18> J. G. Frazer, Folk-lore in the Old Testament, 3 vols., (London: Macmillan, 1918).

<19> Frazer, Folk-lore in the Old Testament, I, pp. x-xi.

<20> Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, tr. James Strachey, (London: Norton, 1950);  The Future of an Illusion, tr. W. D. Robson-Scott, rev. James Strachey, (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1964 [1953]).

<21> Freud, The Future of an Illusion, pp. 26-27.

<22> Freud, Totem and Taboo, p. 145.

<23> Freud, Totem and Taboo, p. 142.

<24> Freud, Totem and Taboo, p. 144.

<25> Freud, Totem and Taboo, p. 2.

<26> Freud, Totem and Taboo, p. 146.

<27> Freud, Totem and Taboo, p. 146.