Taboo Ambivalence

1. Taboo Ambivalence

2. Wilhelm Max Wundt: Exerpts on the taboo from his Elements of Folk Psychology • “The history of taboo ideas leaves no doubt in this case awe and aversion sprang from the same source. That which aroused aversion at a later age was in the totemic period chiefly an object of awe, or, at any rate, of fear—that is,of a feeling in which aversion and awe were still undifferentiated.”

3. Sigmund Freud • In “the case of privileged persons, we shall realize that alongside of the veneration , and indeed idolization, felt towards them, there is in the unconscious an opposing current of intense hostility; that in fact, as we expected, we are faced by a situation of emotional ambivalence” (T&T, 62). • “The importance of one particular person is immensely exaggerated and his absolute power is magnified to the most improbable degree, in order that it may be easier to make him responsible for everything disagreeable that the patient may experience”(T&T, p.63).

4. “[M]uch of a savage’s attitude to his ruler is derived from an child’s infantile attitude to his father” (T&T, p. 64). • “His identification with his father then takes on a hostile colouring and changes into a wish to get rid of his father in order to take his place with his mother. Henceforward his relationship to his father is ambivalent. An ambivalent attitude towards his father and an object relationship of a solely affectionate kind towards his mother make up the content of the simple positive Oedipus complex in a boy” (From “The Ego and the Id”) .

5. King and Queen

6. The Killer Queen

7. http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/30/world/europe/margaret-rhodes-queen/http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/30/world/europe/margaret-rhodes-queen/

8. Celebrity Ambivalence