The Psychoanalytic Quarterly

Supplement. Róheim, Géza. Primitive High Gods.—RÓheim offers a study he has made principally of the pygmies as represented by the Andaman Islanders and of some peoples in Central Australia. He finds that the greater part of the Andaman mythology is concerned with ritual offenses and the serious consequences associated with the breaking of taboos. The chief features of their myths and their variants as of Indonesian myths in general is that the ancestors have been punished in primeval times by supernatural beings. The wrong done is what psychoanalysis has shown to be connected with the Œdipus complex. It concerns the eating of food belonging to the god and interfering with his sacred animal form and probably symbolized tabooed intercourse, which in parallel with individual cases in psychoanalysis means touching or killing and having intercourse with the deity's wife. The crime of incest as punishable is among certain people admitted in so many words. The latent content of the Andamans is the jealousy of the sire in the olden time and the keeping of all the women of the horde to himself. If any of the brotherhood had intercourse the culprit was castrated, until the brothers united and killed the tyrant. The roundabout way of expressing incest in the various myths of these and other tribes is the mechanism of the return of the repressed material. The great sin at the bottom is incest. The anxiety is expressed toward both sexes, a castration anxiety. The sex totem, here a lizard, is the personification of the libido. The male sex totem is always phallic, the female totem is a duplicate of the male or represents the vagina as an organ which castrates the male. The association between the solar and the phallic element is close and they are found with the Œdipal motive. The mother figure may be displaced by the daughter. Since the lizard can grow a new tail it is the negation of the castration complex, just as neurotics symbolize the peni