Harald Haferland

The article tries to reconstruct a module of human cognition integrated in early forms of thinking e. g. in magic and taboo. The module consists in the creation of contiguous identities and entireties. Magical thinking supposes a kind of identity between an object and a person who has touched the object. All entities which are bound in such a relation of contiguity form an entirety and in a wider sense an identity. They can be conceptually identified with each other. The role of contiguity in this respect was discovered by the psychology of association and conveyed to the study of language. It can be shown that the conceptual identification or equation plays an important role in the history of mankind. Indeed, it seems possible that they distinguish the premodern from the modern mind.