their purpose but others strike us as incomprehensible, foolish and senseless. We designate such commands as “ceremonials” and we find that taboo customs show the same variations.
Obsessive prohibitions possess an extraordinary capacity for displacement; they make use of almost any form of connection to extend from one object to another and then in turn make this new object “impossible,” as one of my patients aptly puts it. This impossibility finally lays an embargo upon the whole world. The compulsion neurotics act as if the “impossible” persons and things were the carriers of a dangerous contagion which is ready to displace itself through contact to all neighboring things. We have already emphasized the same characteristics of contagion and transference in the description of taboo prohibitions. We also know that any one who has violated a taboo by touching something which is taboo becomes taboo himself, and no one may come into contact with him.
I shall put side by side two examples of transference or, to use a better term, displacement, one from the life of the Maori, and the other from my observation of a woman suffering from a compulsion neurosis:
“For a similar reason a Maori chief would not blow on a fire with his mouth; for his sacred breath would communicate its sanctity to the
