Lacan's Reconsideration of Totem and Taboo

chapter 3 Lacan’s Reconsideration of Totem and Taboo

The argument of this book is that the shared narrative of the literary works and Totem and Taboo takes on its full significance only in conjunction with the Lacanian reading or interpretation of Freud’s text, of which an outline will now be given. Freud’s narrative is also compared with another story of the murder of a father, itself crucial to psychoanalysis, that of the drama of Oedipus Rex by Sophocles, in order to elucidate Lacan’s concept of the ‘dead father’. What Totem and Taboo shows is that it is not any particular living father who contin- gently bars the incestuous enjoyment of the mother, as appears, at least at first sight, to be the case in the play, but an inherent impossibility. Furthermore, for Lacan, it is only the law rather than any kind of natural state outside of human culture which enables any possibility of enjoyment. This is what is called ‘surplus jouissance’, a residual jouissance both owing to and enabled by the fact that one speaks or is ‘in language’. In Lacan’s words ‘jouissance is prohibited to him who speaks, as such – or, put differently, it can only be said between the lines by whoever is a subject of the Law’.1 It is in the wake of this stipulation that we arrive at Lacanian concepts such as the Name-of-the-Father and the object a, which can be seen in terms of the problematic of surplus jouissance and the necessity, as will be discussed, of its symbolic mediation as a conse- quence of castration and the installation of the fundamental fantasy. It is these notions which appear avant la lettre in the literary texts. I begin with a brief introduction to and Lacanian contextualization of Freud’s account of the father of the horde story. This latter appeared in a book, Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics, published by Freud in 1913, which is a collection of four essays, first published in the journal Imago, a year previously. The essays are ‘The Sa vage’s Dread of Incest’, ‘Taboo and the Ambivalence of Emotions’, ‘Animism, Magic and the Omnipotence of Thoughts’, and ‘The Infantile Recurrence of Totemism’. Freud, in his attempt to understand modern European neuroses, turns, as can be seen from the titles, to anthropological studies of the customs of some remote, ‘primitive’ tribes. In the essay ‘The Infantile Recurrence of Totemism’, Freud notes that, in the case of some tribes, there is one particular animal, known as the totem animal,

1 Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. by Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2007), p. 696.

36 chapter 3 which, while normally sacred and taboo so that it can neither be harmed nor eaten, is, nonetheless, once a year killed and consumed at a feast. Freud’s con- jecture is that this violation of the taboo constitutes the commemoration of the killing of the primal father. Once, writes Freud, there was ‘a violent, jealous father who kept ‘all the females for himself’ and drove ‘away the growing sons’. However, ‘one day the expelled brothers joined forces, slew and ate the father, and thus put an end to the father horde.’2 It is this deed which is memorialized in the feast:

This violent primal father had surely been the envied and feared model for each of the brothers. Now they accomplished their identification with him by devouring him and each acquired a part of his strength. The totem feast, which is perhaps mankind’s first celebration, would be the repeti- tion and commemoration of this memorable, criminal act with which so many things began, social organization, moral restrictions and religion.3

Lacan thought that Freud regarded Totem and Taboo as pertaining to an actual event, something that must have happened sometime in the dawn of history. ‘Freud holds that it was real. He clings to it. He wrote the entire Totem and Taboo in order to say it – it necessarily happened’.4 Lacan, himself, on the other hand, considered Totem and Taboo as a myth. ‘The father of the horde – as if there has ever been the slightest trace of it, this father of the horde. We have seen orangutans. But not the slightest trace has ever been seen of the father of the human horde’.5 Lacan also noted that there is, in Totem and Taboo, an impossible time loop, in that there cannot be such a thing as a murder, an unlaw- ful killing for which one might feel guilty, before human society, which in the myth is the outcome of that same murder: ‘If it is true that there can only be an act in a context already replete with everything involving the signifier’s effect, its entry into the world, there can be no act in the beginning at least none that could be described a murder.’6 The murder is thus both effect and cause of the law. Hence, Lacan concludes that ‘This myth can have no other sense here than the one I have reduced it to, a statement of the impossible’.7 The impossibility

2 Freud, ‘Totem’, p. 915. 3 Ibid., p. 916. 4 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar, Book xvii, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 2008), p. 113. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., p. 129. 7 Lacan, Other Side, p. 125.