Taboo

Taboo, a Polynesian word difficult to translate, meaning a specific mindset of primitive thinking. Its value is connected with a person, animal, object, or place to which one cannot touch or approach, but it branches in two opposite directions: on the one hand, in the sense of holy, consecrated, on the other - frightful, dangerous, unclean. It is opposed to the ordinary, generally accessible. According to Wundt, taboo encompasses all customs in which fear of certain objects associated with cult representations or related actions is expressed, and it stems from fear of the action of demonic forces. Everywhere in one form or another, the taboo on corpses lies. For many tribes, tabooed are newborn children, women who have just given birth or are menstruating, youths being initiated into manhood, widowers and widows, the sick, etc. Particularly strong taboo among all peoples lies on chiefs, kings, and priests. Freud attempted to discover in the basis of taboo the operation of the same psycho-biological mechanisms that determine obsessive phenomena in neurotics suffering from fear of touch, infection, etc. In both cases he sought manifestations of affective thinking, primarily ambivalent attitude toward imposed prohibitions; and both taboo and neurosis prevent the fulfillment of what is the subject of a strong but unconscious desire; since fulfillment of this desire is dangerous, fear arises; hence - the dual emotional attitude toward tabooed objects. The analogy drawn by Freud is extremely superficial. First of all, the mechanism of the emergence of obsessive phenomena in neurotics is much more complex than it seems to Freud, then the customs and rites of taboo are of socio-psychological, not biological origin and cannot be explained by the same causes as pathological phenomena observed moreover in people living in conditions of a completely different culture (see also Psychoanalysis).