the phantasies of return to the womb and of re-birth, the psychological significance of initiation with which we have just been concerned, are intimately connected with another phantasy which is met with surprisingly often in the investigation of dreams and other manifestations of the unconscious—that of initiation. the idea of initiation corresponds to a wish that is very deeply rooted in the human mind. in the psycho-analytic study of individuals it is found perhaps most frequently in the shape of a desire for sexual initiation at the hands of the parents (or of obvious substitutes for these); such initiation constituting (in the mind of the phantasy maker) at once a removal of the prohibition which the parents had formerly laid upon all manifestations of sexuality and an invitation to penetrate those mysteries of sexual, reproductive and adult life generally, which they have hitherto jealously guarded for themselves.
it thus appears that in certain minds initiation is regarded as a necessary preliminary to the exercise of the powers and privileges of maturity in the sexual or in any other sphere of life. at the same time, however, the phantasy of initiation is often made the means of surreptitiously bringing about a satisfaction of the old, prohibited, and largely superseded desires of infancy. thus there are frequently clear indications that it is not only initiation into sex life in general that is required, but initiation initiation and incest into the incestuous form of this life which was characteristic of the first object-love of the child. indeed the very persistence of these infantile desires constitutes one of the principal motives of the initiation phantasy; it is just the fact that all the sexual trends[80] are to an appreciable extent still tinged with the atmosphere of the repressed incestuous tendencies, which makes the removal of the inhibitions and prohibitions attaching to these tendencies to be felt as necessary, before sex life of any kind can be enjoyed with freedom. thus a boy may dream of "initiation" at the hands of his father, because this signifies to him a removal of the prohibition imposed by his father on all sexual activity on the part of the boy—a prohibition imposed (as is readily recognised by the unconscious) in virtue of the boy's original direction of his love towards the mother: without such sign of approval and change of attitude on the father's part[70], the boy may feel that the original prohibition is still too powerful to be overcome and that his sexual life will remain for[81] ever under the ban of the strong inhibitions aroused by a sense of parental disapproval[71].
similar considerations apply to the non-sexual aspects of life, in which at maturity the youth takes his place as an equal of the father, to whom he has hitherto looked up as a superior.
the important and far-reaching changes in general conduct initiation ceremonies and, more particularly, in the attitude to be adopted toward the elder members of an individual's own family, on the attainment of full growth—involving as they do the overcoming of many habits and inhibitions formed during the long period of human infancy and childhood—are not of a kind to be accomplished without difficulty and conflict. with a view to diminishing this difficulty and to overcoming the conflict of motives which the accomplishment of these changes necessarily involves, there exists a well nigh universal tendency to endow the transition from childhood to maturity with something of a solemn or religious character, calculated at one and the same time to reinforce the motives proper to maturity and to impress the now full grown members of the community with the privileges and responsibilities of their new condition. this tendency has found definite and elaborate expression in the rites and ceremonies of initiation which are to be found in societies of every stage of culture and in every part of the world. these ceremonies are of very considerable interest and importance for our present purpose, for here, as so often elsewhere, the results obtained from the study of racial and social customs on the one hand and from the investigation of the unconscious mental tendencies of the individual on the other, serve very largely to amplify and corroborate one another, leading ultimately to a degree of certainty and precision which it would be difficult or impossible to attain by the pursuit of either discipline alone.
since the change from childhood to maturity involves readjustments initiation and re-birth of such a fundamental kind as to constitute to some extent an entrance into a new phase of life, it is not surprising that the initiation ceremony has often in one or more[82] of its aspects taken the form of a symbolic process of re-birth; the re-birth phantasy, as we have seen, being closely associated with the idea of moral or spiritual conversion or regeneration. the process of re-birth in these ceremonies may indeed on occasion be represented by something actually approaching an imitation of the act of birth, as in the case of the kikuyu of british east africa, who "have a curious custom which requires that every boy just before circumcision must be born again. the mother stands up with the boy crouching at her feet, she pretends to go through all the labour pains and the boy on being reborn cries like a babe and is washed. he lives on milk for some days afterwards[72]." elsewhere the novice is swallowed by a monster and again disgorged, thus simulating the return to the womb and the re-birth therefrom[73]. in still other cases a drama of death and resurrection is enacted by the novices or played before them[74]. frequently an essential part of the process of initiation consists of a more or less prolonged period of seclusion about the time of puberty[75]; girls especially being often confined in small huts for weeks, months or in some cases years, at or before the time of their first menstruation[76].
these initiatory rites would seem, like the womb and birth general and sexual objects in initiation phantasies which we have already studied, to have in the main two principal objects in view; first, an introduction of the initiated into the rights and responsibilities belonging to an adult member of the community; secondly, an introduction into sexual life.
as a means to the former end, the novice usually receives instruction in the laws, customs, religious beliefs and ceremonial practices of his tribe, or undergoes certain (often very severe) trials of capacity and endurance with a view to ascertaining his fitness to enter into the privileges of maturity.
on the sexual side the novice receives permission to marry and generally to indulge his sexual tendencies (the process of initiation being often succeeded by a period of unusual licence), but at the same time is instructed in the numerous prohibitions[83] and taboos as regards persons, circumstances and occasions which are usually placed upon such indulgence.
many of the details of these initiation ceremonies have, the abandonment of infantile tendencies on the part of the initiated directly or indirectly, reference to the emotional attitude of the children towards their parents with which we have been concerned in the earlier chapters of this book[77]. a general effort to repress the mental attitude which the novice has at an earlier period adopted towards his parents is to be observed in the—real or feigned—amnesia[78] which so often occurs after the initiation, the newly initiated sometimes failing to recognise even their nearest relatives and being thus compelled to start life with them on a new footing. the same tendency to break loose from the old attitude is manifested in the actual separation from the parents which seems always to take place at the period of seclusion or at or before the ceremony of re-birth, the affectionate farewell which is taken before such separation (especially of the son from the mother) and in many of the symbolic prohibitions of the period of seclusion, such as that in virtue of which girls must, during their seclusion, neither touch the earth (a universal mother symbol), nor be exposed to the sun (an almost equally universal father symbol)[79].
in the cruel rites which are so often inflicted on the novices the attitude of the initiators towards the initiated by the elder members of the community it is possible to see a manifestation of that fear and hatred which fathers often feel towards their sons and which mothers often feel towards their daughters—feelings which often correspond in nature and intensity to the equivalent emotions in the children themselves (cp. below ch. xiv); the pretended killing or death of the novice being frequently of the nature of a punishment on the talion principle for the thoughts of parricide or matricide which the children may themselves have entertained towards their parents. before initiation youths are often not allowed to carry arms, probably because of the fear that they may be tempted to hurt or kill the father; sometimes, however, before[84] they can be admitted to the full privileges of maturity, they must have killed a man—in order, probably, to work off their hostile feelings on some third person who may serve as a substitute for the father who was the original object of these feelings.
the hostile attitude of the older members of the community towards the novices, which finds an outlet in the cruelties practised at initiation, does not however spring exclusively from sexual jealousy on the part of the elders, but also to some extent from the disinclination which they feel to admitting the youths—at any rate without some payment—into the numerous secrets and privileges from which they have hitherto excluded them, and from the general tendency to grudge the abandonment of that superiority over the youths which they themselves have hitherto enjoyed. the manifestation of these feelings in some form of cruelty is most often rationalised as a desire to prove that the novices are worthy of admission to the privileges and responsibilities of the initiated and to ensure, by adding to the impressiveness of the occasion, that they will remember what they have seen and heard during the initiation ceremonies[80]. similar motives, leading to similar manifestations, may often be observed even in highly civilised communities, where the initiation is usually one destined to introduce the individual not into adult life in general but into some special class, institution or society, or into some corporate body consisting of persons who have enjoyed some special kind of experience or mode of life. under this head, for instance, come many of the time honoured customs and ceremonies, to which boys on entering school or joining a "gang", students on going to college, or persons joining some professional society or guild, are made to submit[81].
[85]
in other aspects of the ceremonies, however, the motive of sexual jealousy stands unmistakably displayed. thus the rites of circumcision and subincision, the pulling out of hairs from the head, face or pubic region and the knocking out of teeth, which so frequently precede or accompany the process of initiation, are all symbols of castration; a penalty which it is desired to inflict—really or symbolically—from a number of distinct though closely connected motives, the most important being:—(1) as a means of rendering impossible the realisation of forbidden sexual cravings, (2) as a threat to show that the power of the elders still exists and that it will be exercised should the prescribed limits be overstepped, (3) as a punishment for past incestuous desires or acts (as is shown, for instance, in the superstition that if the wound caused by circumcision does not readily heal it is because the youth has already been guilty of incestuous connection[82]). the same object of preventing incest is sought in the stern "avoidances" which prohibition and licence are often practised at the same time; as, for instance, that by which a youth must keep very carefully from all contact with his mother, even to the extent of avoiding her footprints.
but if all love in the old direction is forbidden, sexual activity in other directions is often encouraged as a substitute, as in such instructions as the following: "thou, my pupil, art now circumcised. thy father and thy mother, honour them. go not unannounced into their house, lest thou find them together in tender embrace. but have no fear of maidens; sleep and bathe together with them"[83]. even so, however, there usually remain, as we might expect from the general nature of displacement, some remnants of the old incestuous fixation; such as those, for instance, which manifest themselves in the belief that after the first sexual connection of a youth, either he himself or his partner in the act must shortly die (as a punishment,[86] we must suppose, for the sin committed)—a belief which leads young men to fall upon and have forcible intercourse with old women (mother substitutes)[84]. here the youth is definitely permitted some degree of (symbolic) incestuous indulgence before he finally abandons his infantile desires. a still wider permission of the same kind is, however, granted in the fairly widespread practice of removing the usual sexual taboos on all or most of the prohibited persons during "the period of revelry which follows initiation, where the nearest relationships—even those of own brother and sister—seem to be no bar to the general licence," even though shortly afterwards these same "brothers and sisters may not so much as speak to one another".[85]
the monster from whose belly the novices are reborn re-birth and reconciliation would appear in many cases to represent the young men's grandfather, through him their dead ancestors and ultimately the ancestral founder of the tribe. this rather astonishing fact as regards the supposed sex of the monster is probably due in the first place to a psychic identification of the child with his grandfather—an identification of very frequent occurrence and considerable significance, the psychological foundations of which can however be more appropriately discussed in a later chapter. (ch. xiv). the novice in being born from the body of the grandfather becomes in a sense a re-incarnation of the grandfather and is endowed with all his powers and attributes.
in a secondary and "rationalised" sense, this process of re-birth from the grandfather has been interpreted as the expression of a desire to re-create the youth as the son of his tribe rather than as the son of his mother, i. e. to symbolise and emphasise the fact that he has now exchanged the narrow sphere of family rule and affection for the wider one of obedience and loyalty to the community; at the same time representing a means of obtaining freedom from the old fixation of love upon the mother (since he is now born not from her but from the tribal ancestor), and through this of becoming reconciled to the father. this same motive of reconciliation based on the renunciation of incestuous desire and on the[87] establishment of common love and interest between those of the same sex, is exemplified also in the age classes, men's clubs and secret societies found in so many primitive peoples, to membership of which women are in the majority of cases rigorously excluded.
thus it would appear that the ideas underlying the almost universal social custom of the initiation ceremony are those which we have already met with in the study of the development of the individual mind in relation to the family: showing thereby that these ideas are to be found not only in minds of a certain constitution or of a particular age, race, or type of culture, but represent a general human characteristic, having its foundations deeply rooted in the history of mankind; a part of our mental inheritance which has to be reckoned with in all efforts at social or individual improvement, a factor for good or evil which education, instruction or upbringing may perhaps modify but can scarcely hope to eradicate.
