A Psycho-Analytical Note on Palæolithic Art

The material Dr. Heilbronner adduces in the foregoing essay1 would seem fully to justify his conclusions that 'man in the Ice Age attributed an especial significance—at first unconsciously and later consciously—to composite representations of the male and female sexual organs'. This finding must forcibly remind psycho-analysts of the familiar observation that the same state of affairs is true also of the unconscious phantasies in early infancy. These are nowadays, following Melanie Klein, often referred to under the designation 'combined parental imago'. Two explanations have been proffered for them. One would account for the phantasies on the basis of congenital homosexuality. The other would regard them as an early expression of the Oedipus conflict and of the mingled love and hate this engenders. Both explanations may, of course, be correct, but some analysts would attach greater weight to the former one, others to the latter. It is at all events highly interesting to learn that similar forces were at work among men of the Old Stone Age to those among our young children of the present day—one more example of the resemblance between primæval mentality in phylogenesis and ontogenesis.

Archæologists are generally of opinion that the motives impelling early man to execute his remarkable drawings in remote and hardly accessible caves were not so much concerned with æsthetic feeling—in spite of the high artistic skill displayed at some epochs—as with what may broadly be called magic. This view was especially developed in respect of animal drawings, it being supposed that the craftsmen hoped thereby to acquire virtue and luck in their hunting activities, which afforded at that time a main source of food. It has also been suggested that an allied motive was what analysts would call one of restitution, an expression of guilt at the killing and a consequent desire to expiate it by re-creating the live animal in effigy. Since even nowadays, when feelings may be sup