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DISCUSSION: Dr. Charles Brenner suggested that the Egyptian taboo against eating swine was not only due to the fact that it symbolized to them devouring their ancestors. The unconscious reason for the taboo could also have been the wish to kill and eat the parents and to take their places, in a familiar oral version of the parricidal oedipal wish, with all its ambivalence and guilt. Instead of specifying that a taboo on cannibalism was so important to the establishment of a true superego, it might be more accurate to say that the role of cannibalism in mental life is determined by the fact that it is one aspect of the libidinal and aggressive wishes of the oedipal period, wishes whose vicissitudes are decisive in the individual and collective history of man.
Dr. Anna M. Burton expressed the belief that just as kinship and exogamy developed out of oedipal conflict, so the renunciation of cannibalism and the dietary laws developed out of preoedipal concerns. Citing contributions from Freud, Spitz, Jacobson, Anna Freud, and Róheim, she sketched the developmental framework for Dr. Schlossman's thesis.