limited its
field, can disregard the studies of religion and magic made by the
contributors to L'Annee Sociologique, notably MM. Durkheim and
Levy-Bruhl, and in England by such writers as Sir Gilbert Murray, Miss
Harrison, Mr A.B. Cook, Mr F.M. Cornford, and others. In their studies
of "collective representations" these writers give us an account of the
development of the social obligation back of religion, law, and social
institutions. They posit the sacred as forbidden and carry origins back
to a pre-logical stage, giving as the origin of the collective emotion
that started the representations to working the re-enforcement of power
or emotion resulting from gregarious living. This study is concerned,
however, with a "social" rather than a "religious" taboo,--if such a
distinction can somewhat tentatively be made, with the admission that
the social scruple very easily takes on a religious colouring.]

It is worthy of note that the most modern school of analytical
psychology has recently turned attention to the problem of taboo. Prof.
Sigmund Freud, protagonist psychoanalysis, in an essay, Totem und Tabu,
called attention to the analogy between the dualistic attitude toward
the tabooed object as both sacred and unclean and the ambivalent
attitude of the neurotic toward the salient objects in his environment.
We must agree that in addition to the dread of the tabooed person or
object there is often a feeling of fascination. This is of course
particularly prominent in the case of the woman tabooed because of the
strength of the sex instinct. As Freud has very justly said, the tabooed
object is very often in itself the object of supreme desire. This is
very obvious in the case of the food and sex taboos, which attempt to
inhibit two of the most powerful impulses of human nature. The two
conflicting streams of consciousness called ambivalence by the
psychologist may be observed in the attitude of the savage toward many
of his taboos. As the Austrian alienist cannily remarks, unless the
thing were desired there would be no necessity to impose taboo
restrictions concerning it.

It is by a knowledge of the mana concept and the belief in sympathetic
magic, clarified by recognition of the ambivalent element in the
emotional reaction to the thing tabooed, that we can hope to understand
the almost universal custom of the "woman shunned" and the sex taboos of
primitive peoples. This dualism appears most strongly in the attitude
t