Some Notes on Smoking1

The opposition to smoking expressed by parents and parent substitutes, as a result of which the adolescent is compelled to smoke secretly, either in private or in the company of other transgressors, is a fact, which partly serves to determine its place as an onanistic activity.

It is also of importance, I think, that mutual masturbatory acts, smoking, discussion of tabooed subjects are indulged in within the same groups. It is impossible to overlook the relation of such to the bands of brothers who revolt against the father. Expansion of this matter in detail is unnecessary. Already one is forced to see in adolescent and juvenile smoking an expression of the death-wish against the father. We gain a view from another angle of the meaning of the ceremonial smoking of tobacco among the Red Indians, which brings this ceremony into line with totemic communion. Briefly, the ceremony appears to have been that a pipe was passed round and smoked by those who had talked matters over and were in agreement. It is likely also that the customs of betel chewing and ava drinking will, on examination, lead to a similar result. In which case ceremonial eatings, drinkings, chewings and smokings would appear as equivalents of one another, 2 and each to be the expression of the death-wish, e. g., the bond of union between the brothers of the primal horde.

I have in mind at the moment a man who was brought up by his father to believe that the use of tobacco was foolish, extravagant, and injurious to health. The father suffered from childhood from bronchitis, which became chronic, and to which as time went on, asthma and emphysema were added. The father used often to say, 'Smoking would kill me', or, 'If I had smoked, I should never have lived as long as I have': and also, 'If I had spent my money in smoking, I should never have been able to do for you what I have done'. (The reference here was to expenditure on the son's education).