Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics

In 1913, Sigmund Freud ventured into anthropology and emerged with a theory so daring it still provokes debate today. Totem and Taboo argues that the psychological processes governing "savage" societies and neurotics are fundamentally identical, that the incest taboo and totemic prohibitions we call primitive are the same unconscious compulsions operating in modern patients. Freud's centerpiece is the "primal horde" hypothesis: civilization, he proposes, was born from a collective guilt, the murder of the father by his sons, and every subsequent taboo, law, and moral prohibition is an echo of that original crime. The book remains electrifying not because it's settled science, but because Freud asked a question no one had thought to ask: What if the rituals of Australian aborigines, the obsessions of your Viennese analysand, and the Ten Commandments all stem from the same psychic source? Whether you accept his conclusions or not, Totem and Taboo is the text that made it impossible to think about religion, family, and morality without engaging psychoanalysis. It is Freud at his most ambitious and most provocative.