ABSTRACT
Each advance in psychology brings with it developments in every branch of mental science. If our knowledge of the human mind takes only one step forward we must revise every discipline whose objective is connected with the psychic life. Whosoever desires to understand the real nature of mental life must also abandon all romantic ideas about the ‘innocence’ of the child mind. The mind of the child is characterized by boundless and ruthless self-assertiveness, and by erotic tendencies which are usually dismissed with the euphemism ‘bad habits’. Just as totemism was the first religion, so the ‘taboos’ were the first unwritten laws that are, moreover, still to-day the basis for sentence in Central Australia. The ‘taboo’ forbids certain things to be touched: the person of the king, female blood-relations, children and the dead, and the property of strangers. Every infringement of the ‘taboo’, according to the belief of these races, is followed of itself by the death punishment.
