Unspeakable Rites: Cultural Reticence and the Cannibal Question

No doubt, Freud's patients and his readers were more likely to have experienced the metaphorical forms of cannibalism (the oral phase, or narcissism, or whatever), than the literal ones. Still it is hard, as I said at the beginning, not to see in Freud's treatment of the subject an example of Freudian resistance. In Totem and Taboo (1913) and Moses and Monotheism (1939), Freud attempted what I think is his only account of a literal anthropophagous act. He retells in these two books the Darwinian myth of the "primal horde," in which, at the beginning of society, the sons kill and devour the father. This myth, largely discredited among ethnologists by Freud's time, caused Freud many problems. His writing on this topic is a panic-stricken mixture of unscientific speculation, bald assertion, and defensive footnoting, deteriorating in successive afterthoughts under pressure of criticism. It speaks eloquently of the subject's unspeakability, even for Freud, who knew about denial, and who prided himself on speaking out. But that is another story.

Notes

(1) See W. Arens, 1979 and the exchange between Arens and Marshall Sahlins, 1979. For surveys of the debate, see Gina Kolata, 1987 and Lawrence Osborne, 1997.

(2) The term cannibal made its way into Spanish, Italian, French, and English in ensuing years. See, for example, Raymond Arveiller, 1963, 142-46.

(3) See Claude Rawson, 1978, especially 310-13; Claude Rawson, 1984, II. 1159-87, especially 1164-68, 1179; and David Gordon White, 1991.

(4) Columbus' Journal of First Voyage, abstracted by Bartolome de las Casas, 4 November 1492, where the word caniba does not yet appear, and entries for 23 and 26 November, where we read again of the one-eyed men "and others called cannibals" (y otros que se llamavan canibales), and of people from Caniba or Canima.

(5) Homer, Odyssey, I. 69-71, IX. 105ff; Pliny, Natural History, VII. ii. 10, 23-24; Marco Polo, Travels, III. xiii, Complete Yule-Cordier Edition, New York, Dover, 1993, 3 vols., II.309-12 and nn., III. 109-10 nn (also II.228 n.3); Sir John Mandeville, Travels, trs. C.W.R.D. Mosely, Harmondsworth Penguin, 1983, p. 134; see White, Myths of the Dog-Man, esp. pp. 53-64, 184-85; for wider information on Cynocephali, as well as on the dog/cannibal connection, see the index to White's important book, under Cynocephali and Cannibals; also Lestringant, Cannibals, pp. 15, 192 n.3.

(6) For details of the event or supposed event, and its possible date, see E. Courtney, 1980, and Peter Green, 1974, pp. 289-90, especially nn. 6-10. For parallel events in Egypt, see Philo of Alexandria, Contemplative Life, V, who cites anthropophagous riots at drunken Egyptian gatherings, and Plutarch, "Isis and Osiris," Moralia, 380 BC. For an old tradition that Juvenal had personal experience of Egypt, which Courtney treats sceptically (pp. 8, 599), and its bearing on Satire XV, see especially Gilbert Highet, 1954, 1962, pp. 28-31, 149-53, 284-86 nn., and Lindsay, 1963, 109-21.

(7) I use Peter Green's translation (see previous note). The lineation given in the text is that of the Latin original, to which Green adheres closely. For historical background see, in addition to Green's notes (288-92), see Courtney, 1980, 590-612. On some classical literature of inter-communal enmity, see Courtney, 1980, 593.