"There is a great deal of resemblance between the relations of children and of primitive men towards animals"

"There is a great deal of resemblance between the relations of children and of primitive men towards animals. Children show no trace of the arrogance which urges adult civilized men to draw a hard-and-fast line between their own nature and that of all other animals. Children have no scruples over allowing animals to rank as their full equals."

I thought this quote was relevant for several reasons. Firstly, Freud seems to almost criticize modern man by referring to him as having "arrogance" and drawing "a hard and fast line" between the animal world and his world. It would seem that based on this criticism, he is subsequently glorifying the primitive man, as a sort of "noble savage", for valuing animals more than modern people do.

On the other hand, this quote hints at ethnocentrism, seeing as Freud is comparing a more primitive culture to that of a child's experience. One could argue that he considers primitive cultures to be childlike in nature, and that the modern man is in many ways the adult of society. Many anthropologists as well as sociologists in the past have had hierarchical ways of classifying cultures, and this could be in some ways related to Freud's theory of psycho-sexual development. For example, american economist Walt Whitman Rostow had a 5 staged model for classifying a nation's economy. These stages were "The traditional society", "pre-conditions for take-off", "take-off", "the drive to maturity", "high mass consumption". This almost seems analogous to the 5 staged theory of sexual development that Freud came up with. So, perhaps in this quotation, Freud is saying that primitive cultures in the "traditional society" (as Rostow would call it) are in the "oral stage" of their cultural development.

Either way, it is clear based on this quote that Freud is drawing information from anthropology and sociology and connecting it back to his own psychoanalytic theories.

-Dallas