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Some Similarities in the Mental Life of Primitive and Neurotic People—The Taboo and the Ambivalence of Emotional Excitations. Prof. Sigm. Freud.
Colored Audition; an Attempt to Explain the Phenomenon on the Basis of Psychoanalysis. Dr. H. V. Hug-Hellmuth.
The Cause of Chromesthesias Associated with Acoustic Impressions and the Meaning of Other Synesthesias. O. Pfeister.
Symbolic Representation of the Principles of Pleasure and Reality in œdipus Myth. S. Ferenczi.
Taboo and the Ambivalence of Emotional Excitations.—Taboo is a Polynesian word which cannot be rendered into an exact equivalent in any modern language; its meaning approaches that of the Latin sacer, also the agos of the Greeks and of the term kodausch of the Hebrews.
The term has a double meaning. It signifies: holy, consecrated; also, dangerous, forbidden, unclean. An additional shade of connotation may be gathered from the fact that the Polynesian autonym for taboo is noa, which means: ordinary, common.
Thus taboo relates to the character of persons or things which are either holy or the opposite; it also refers to certain proscriptions which follow from that character and to the consequences with which trespass of those proscriptions is bound up.
A Western mind accustomed to subtle classifications distinguishes readily a natural or direct taboo, due to some residual Mana or mysterious power and an acquired, or indirect taboo, derived from that Mana; the latter may be either inherited or delivered unto a person