Magical Thinking

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MAGICAL THINKING

Magic is the technique associated with an animist conception of the world. It seeks to impose on objects in the external world laws that are part of mental life and, more generally, to subject natural phenomena to human will. The magical practices of primitive peoples are compared by Freud to children's play, art, and neurosis.

In chapter three of Totem and Taboo (1912-1913a), Freud develops his ideas about magic and a modality of thought—"magical thought"—that he compares to the omnipotence of ideas. His remarks are taken directly from his reading of sociologists and anthropologists like Marcel Mauss, Salomon Reinach, Sir Edward Tylor, and Sir James Frazer. They reflect not only the utility of such ideas for psychoanalysis and psychopathology (obsessional neurosis, paranoia) but also the modifications that the psychoanalytic approach can provide to our understanding of the concept of magic. Returning to an idea already introduced concerning the epistemophilic drive in children, Freud stresses the fact that the practical need to subjugate the world together with simple speculative curiosity pushed humans to create their first cosmic systems.

Freud identifies sorcery as a tool to influence "spirits" by treating them as one would human beings, that is by appeasing and subjugating them through magic. Magic, which is more primitive, corresponds to a preanimist phase when nature is alive and spiritualization has not yet been concentrated in "spirits." Referring to Frazer, Freud distinguishes between imitative, or homeopathic, magic, which produces the desired phenomenon by carrying out a similar action with symbolic value, and "contagious" magic, whose efficacy is not tied to any similarity but temporal contiguity. However, regardless of the form magic assumes, it always satisfies the same need—human desire—and expresses mankind's overconfidence in the omnipotence of his desires and his ideas. Narcissism (1912-1913a) is the cause of this excessive confidence that the primitive and the neurotic attribute to mental activities, which is the foundation of magical practices and neurotic symptoms that simultaneously strive to counteract and to grant the bad wish, which is in fact the desire for death.

According to Freud, magic is situated within a preanimist system: "Whereas magic still reserves omnipotence solely for thoughts, animism hands some of it over to spirits and so prepares the way for the construction of a religion" (p. 95). The distinction between these two systems is associated with the affective conflict that death leaves with the survivors, leading them to create spirits through projection. In this sense magic can be seen to belong to a narcissistic system, while animism implies, with the recognition of the inevitability of death, the initial recognition of ananke.

Géza Róheim (1950) created a body of work based on the use of psychoanalysis as an explanatory instrument in anthropology, in contrast to the customary procedure of limiting anthropological explanation to a single culture, or even a single tribe. His research has provided considerable insight into magical thought in this field, as has the work of Georges Devereux.

Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor

See also: Animistic thought; Archaic; Leuba, John; Mythology and psychoanalysis; Omnipotence of thought; Primitive; Taboo; Thoughts; Undoing.