Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

Julius Caesar 67
effect suggestive of the savage notion that one’s name is “an essential
part and an important possession of his personality” (75).
The fundamental taboo in Freud’s scheme involves the vengeful
spirit of the slain father, wandering like Caesar’s ghost. Freud maintains
that taboos develop within animistic cultures and he traces
animism itself to primitive observations of the dead and to the experience
of dreaming. People for whom immortality is “self-evident”
(100) understand dreams to be adventures of the unencumbered soul,
prefigurations of the larger adventure of death. Believing human
beings to “have souls which can leave their habitation,” which are
“bearers of spiritual activities and are, to a certain extent, independent
of the ‘bodies’ ” (99), animists extrapolate that animals, plants, and
objects also have souls, and that some souls may become free, in which
case they are called spirits. Animists “do not conceal the fact that they
fear the presence and the return of the spirit of a dead person” (77).
After the murder of the primal father, taboos develop in the attempt
to exculpate the wrath of the father’s spirit. Yet this is only a partial
explanation, for taboo outlives the belief in spirits in the form of the
“sense of guilt of the son” (185). The spirit of the father is eventually
internalized as taboo or totem law, although according to Freud it was
not always so.
In order to account for a historical difference, Freud must posit a
fundamental change in human consciousness. Accordingly, he supposes
primitive experience to be directed outward, with “inner perceptions”
projected “to the outside” by a “primitive mechanism” (85), “perhaps
genetically connected” with the creature’s original attention to the
world outside the self. Hostile impulses were automatically projected
onto others, for the concurrent absence of language and of abstract
thought made introspection impossible.
Only within the development of the language of abstract
thought through the association of sensory remnants of word
representations with inner processes, did the latter gradually
become capable of perception. Before this took place primitive
man had developed a picture of the outer world through the
outward projection of inner perceptions, which we, with our
reinforced conscious perception, must now translate back into
psychology. (85–86)