Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle

a practice or belief, or a set thereof, which is prohibited and/or condemned because it is
perceived as potentially offensive, embarrassing, or harmful according to moral and
social guidelines. The exposure of certain taboos is more likely to produce shock and
arouse controversy because it directly involves the audience’s sensitivity and tolerance
for such violations.
In Totem and Taboo, pointing out that the word taboo is of Polynesian origin,
Freud claims that “for us the meaning of taboo branches off into two opposite directions.
On the one hand it means to us, sacred, consecrated: but on the other hand it means,
uncanny, dangerous, forbidden, and unclean” (821). Having clearly identified the origins
of taboo in the pre-religious age he points out that, ironically “[taboo] prohibitions
concerned actions for which there existed a strong desire” (831), and that as a result of
social and cultural norms, these desires undergo repression. In this process, repressed
desires—instinctual drives of sex and violence traditionally linked with prohibitions of
incest and murder—are screened, or “filtered,” by the Conscious as dictated by societal
morality, and are then safeguarded in the Unconscious. More precisely, in The
Interpretation of Dreams, Freud asserts that repressed wishes dwell in the unconscious
and that the conscious system opposes their fulfillment by suppressing them. He insists,
however, that the process of repression does not destroy such wishes: “[t]he doctrine of
repression … asserts that such wishes still exist, but simultaneously with an inhibition
which weighs them down. Language has hit upon the truth when it speaks of the
“`suppression’ (sub-pression, or pushing under) of such impulses” (288). Freud also
points out that humans entertain an ambivalent relationship with taboos, which is
maintained by our unconscious desires and the conscious processes that prohibit their
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