Totem and Taboo (Barnes & Noble Digital Library): Resemblances between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics

By Sigmund Freud and Aaron Esman

This edition includes a modern introduction and a list of suggested further reading.   Totem and Taboo (1913) stands as a characteristic example of Sigmund Freud's controversial genius. Written with his typical elegance of style, persuasive reasoning, and ingenuity of rhetoric, the book is at once a work of art and a pioneering effort to extend the reach of psychology into the broader realm of social science. Totem and Taboo remains a founding text for the field of psychoanalytic anthropology.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Mar 13, 2012
• ISBN: 9781411467101

Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was an Austrian neurologist and psychologist who founded the psychoanalytic school of psychology. Although his theories remain controversial until this day, Freud made a lasting impact on Western culture.

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INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW EDITION

TOTEM AND TABOO, published in 1913, was Sigmund Freud’s first major effort to apply his psychoanalytic methods to the study of society and culture—to venture, that is, into the realms of sociology and anthropology. His interest in such matters was, however, of long standing, expressed as early as 1900 in some of his letters to friends and colleagues, and in brief notations in some early publications. But it was only in 1911 that he began to turn his full attention to this task, undertaking a series of essays that he assembled into its final form as a contribution to the literature of the social sciences which, after almost a century, continues to reverberate today.

Freud was born in 1856 in Freiburg, a small city in Moravia, the eastern part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and moved with his parents to Vienna when he was three and a half years old. There he lived, obtained his classical Gymnasium education, graduated from medical school, raised his family and, after a period of laboratory research in neuro-anatomy, undertook the study and treatment of patients with neurological and emotional disorders. It was in that setting that, in the waning years of the nineteenth century, he began to develop the theory and technique of psychoanalysis, publishing, among other things, such major works as The Interpretation of Dreams, Three Essays in the Theory of Sexuality, and Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, as well as a number of extended clinical case studies that served to illustrate his ideas. Initially he worked alone and with little recognition, but gradually he gathered a group of colleagues and students as his writings, always controversial, gained increasing attention, acclaim, and criticism. A master of German prose style, he was awarded the Goethe Prize in 1930 by the City of Frankfurt for the literary quality of his voluminous writings on the workings of the human mind. Finally, after the German absorption of Austria in 1938, Freud, by then old and ill, was helped by some of his students and followers to move to London to escape the Nazis’ anti-Semitic persecution. The next year, after completing his final book Moses and Monotheism, he died, widely celebrated as the founder of what had by then become the international psychoanalytic movement.

The anthropologic literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in which Freud immersed himself was heavily influenced by Darwinian evolutionary concepts, transferred from the biological to the cultural sphere. Freud, himself a dedicated Darwinian, absorbed these views, which included not only such notions as universal psychic unity and the so-called biogenetic law (ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny; i.e., individual development echoes the development of the species), but also the Lamarckian idea of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. These concepts, which he never relinquished, came to be central to his thinking and proved to provide the nucleus for the controversies that have followed over the decades since the appearance of Totem and Taboo.

In his first chapter, Freud, relying largely on his readings about Australian aborigines, introduces the concept of totemism. The totem he defines as an animal. . .and more rarely a plant or a natural phenomenon. . .which stands in a peculiar relation to the whole clan. . .it is the common ancestor of the clan and at the same time its guardian spirit. At the same time it is said to be surrounded by elaborate patterns of avoidance. Freud contends that these avoidances are motivated primarily by the need to avert the possibility of incest; indeed, the chapter’s title is The Horror of Incest, a fear that he maintained to be universal. Intense defensive and ritualized prohibitions against incest are to be found not only in primitives, but also in the neurotics of civilized society, and their ubiquity shows that there must be a powerful, pan-human though unconscious wish in that direction, derived from early childhood relations with parents. Like Darwin, Freud concluded that only so profoundly rooted an impulse could account for so intense and universal an aversion.

Taboo, Freud says, means on the one hand ‘sacred’ ‘conse crated’ and on the other ‘uncanny’, ‘dangerous’, ‘forbidden’, ‘unclean’. He then goes on to analogize the restrictions and avoidances of taboo to those he has observed in patients with obsessional neuroses. He proposes that in both instances the basic psychological issue is ambivalence—that is, the simultaneous existence of feelings of love and hatred directed to the same person. In both the restrictions imposed by, say, the taboo against touching the chief of the tribe and the neurotic’s compulsive ritual the aim is to protect an important and beloved figure against an unconscious hostile, even murderous wish. Both the primitive and the neurotic believe in what Freud’s obsessional patient The Rat-Man called omnipotence of thought—that a thought or wish is equivalent to an action and will be magically fulfilled. To Freud, this sort of thinking constituted the foundation for religious belief, which he saw as a somewhat evolved cultural variant of the infantile belief in magic that underlies the institution of taboo.

Freud firmly linked totemism to exogamy—the categorical prohibition in primitive societies against sexual relations or marriage with a member of the totemic clan. This sanction served him as the bridge to his clinical—and self-analytic—discovery of what he considered the universal mental construction, the Oedipus complex; that is, the young child’s sexual longing for the parent of the opposite sex and rivalry with, and fear of, the same-sex parent. It was, he concluded, the failure to resolve this complex that leads to neurosis and to the defensive avoidances exemplified in primitive man by totemism, exogamy, and taboo.

Freud, again following Darwin, proposed that these patterns in contemporary cultures represented the perpetuation, through Lamarckian inheritance, of a prehistoric event in which a primal horde—a band of brothers—rose up against a tyrannical father, killed him, seized the women he had previously monopolized, and devoured his body in a cannibalistic feast. Then, consumed with guilt, they perpetuated him in memory as a totem figure and instituted the patterns of prohibition and avoidance that constituted the practices of taboo. Thus, he said, the crimes of Oedipus—murdering his father and marrying his mother—were illustrative of this prehistoric event and formed what he called the nuclear complex of the neurosis. Neurotics, of course, carry out these events in thought and fantasy; primitives tend to execute them in action. Thus, he concluded, In the beginning was the Deed.

It is important to bear in mind the political context in which Freud advanced these ideas. When in 1911 he began working systematically on broadening psychoanalysis to a social psychology, he was in close collaboration (and, some suggest, rivalry) with his then-favorite disciple, the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung who was deeply interested in magic, primitive thought, and spirituality. By 1913, however, Jung had defected, renouncing Freud’s sexual theories and, specifically, the primacy and universality of the Oedipus complex. Thus one of Freud’s motives in publishing Totem and Taboo was a polemical one—to assert in a definitive way what he regarded as the fundamental psychoanalytic principles that Jung had come to challenge.

Totem and Taboo attracted little critical attention for several years, perhaps because World War I tended to preempt attention and because it was not translated into English until 1918. By 1920, however, it was greeted by a storm of critical response and controversy that has continued to this day. Freud was, of course, not an anthropologist, and by the 1920s the literature he used as the basis for his arguments was considered by those in that profession to be hopelessly out of date at best and scientifically defective at worst. He was chided by his anthropological critics for his reliance on secondary sources, his belief in cultural evolution and of psychic universality, and for his use of analogical thinking as between neurosis and primitive mentality. Most of all, however, he was taken to task for his insistence on the primal horde theory, a wholly speculative and, to his critics, implausible event for which there was no evidence and, worse, which relied on the now-discredited notion of Lamarckian inheritance to account for its persistent influence. There was, besides, widespread challenge to the idea of the universality of the Oedipus complex, exemplified by the work of the British anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski who claimed to show, on the basis of his work in the Trobriand Islands, that the pattern Freud described was purely a function of the paternalistic European family and did not exist in the matrilineal culture he had studied.

With the passage of time, however, criticism began to soften. As Wallace (1983) points out in his valuable and comprehensive survey, the eminent American anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, who in 1920 had vilified the book, by 1939 had become conscience stricken. Kroeber himself had undergone a Freudian analysis, had accepted the universality of the incest taboo, and had concluded that, after all, with certain modifications Totem and Taboo might, as Wallace puts it, be serviceable to ethnology. A number of commentators acknowledged that Freud’s emphasis on the importance of childhood experience and his concepts of repression, sublimation, and reaction-formation were of heuristic value. Even the question of the Oedipus complex came to be reconsidered; Melford Spiro (1982), in his critical assessment of Malinowski’s work, concludes, Is the Oedipus complex universal? How could it possibly not be? White, a neo-evolutionist, even came close in 1959 to endorsing Freud’s primal horde theory (minus, of course, the notion of Lamarckian inheritance).

In the world of psychoanalysis, Totem and Taboo was initially received with the enthusiasm that greeted most of Freud’s publications. Analytically trained anthropologists sought, with mixed success, to validate his propositions or at least to subject them to empirical testing in the field. Gradually, however, many analysts came to share some of the critiques that had been leveled at the work, especially at Freud’s Lamarckianism and his uncritical acceptance of Darwin’s primal horde theory of the origin of social organization. Recently, however, Grossman (1998) has proposed that, whatever the merits and demerits of his ethnology, Totem and Taboo has value as a model of Freud’s ‘psychoanalytic mode of thought; an example of Freud’s application of psychoanalytic thinking that is much like the thinking employed in understanding clinical material. In both cases, his goal was the reconstruction of early mental life.

Today, in the early years of a new century, Totem and Taboo stands as a characteristic example of Freud’s controversial genius. Written with his typical elegance of style, persuasive reasoning, and ingenuity of rhetoric, the book is at once a work of art and a pioneering effort to extend the reach of psychology into the broader realm of social science. Despite the limitations and misconstructions pointed out by his critics, the book remains a founding text for the field of psychoanalytic anthropology, and certain of his most strongly challenged propositions (even the phylogenetic fantasy of the primal horde) have taken on new life and are being actively reevaluated by contemporary scholars. Both psychoanalysis and anthropology have evolved in many directions in the decades since Freud undertook his work on Totem and Taboo, but his ideas continue to serve as stimuli for their continuing growth and development.

Aaron H. Esman, M.D., is a psychoanalyst and Professor Emeritus at the Weill Medical College of Cornell University.

AUTHOR’S PREFACE

THE essays treated here appeared under the subtitle of this book in the first numbers of the periodical Imago edited by me. They represent my first efforts to apply view-points and results of psychoanalysis to unexplained problems of racial psychology. In method this book contrasts with that of W. Wundt and the works of the Zurich Psychoanalytic School. The former tries to accomplish the same object through assumptions and procedures from non-analytic psychology, while the latter follow the opposite course and strive to settle problems of individual psychology by referring to material of racial psychology.¹ I am pleased to say that the first stimulus for my own works came from these two sources.

I am fully aware of the shortcomings in these essays. I shall not touch upon those which are characteristic of first efforts at investigation. The others, however, demand a word of explanation. The four essays which are here collected will be of interest to a wide circle of educated people, but they can only be thoroughly understood and judged by those who are really acquainted with psychoanalysis as such. It is hoped that they may serve as a bond between students of ethnology, philology, folklore and of the allied sciences, and psychoanalysts; they cannot, however, supply both groups the entire requisites for such coöperation. They will not furnish the former with sufficient insight into the new psychological technique, nor will the psychoanalysts acquire through them an adequate command over the material to be elaborated. Both groups will have to content themselves with whatever attention they can stimulate here and there and with the hope that frequent meetings between them will not remain unproductive for science.

The two principle themes, totem and taboo, which gave the name to this small book are not treated alike here. The problem of taboo is presented more exhaustively, and the effort to solve it is approached with perfect confidence. The investigation of totemism may be modestly expressed as: This is all that psychoanalytic study can contribute at present to the elucidation of the problem of totemism. This difference in the treatment of the two subjects is due to the fact that taboo still exists in our midst. To be sure, it is negatively conceived and directed to different contents, but according to its psychological nature, it is still nothing else than Kant’s Categorical Imperative, which tends to act compulsively and rejects all conscious motivations. On the other hand, totemism is a religio-social institution which is alien to our present feelings; it has long been abandoned and replaced by new forms. In the religions, morals, and customs of the civilized races of today it has left only slight traces, and even among those races where it is still retained, it has had to undergo great changes. The social and material progress of the history of mankind could obviously change taboo much less than totemism.

In this book the attempt is ventured to find the original meaning of totemism through its infantile traces, that is, through the indications in which it reappears in the development of our own children. The close connection between totem and taboo indicates the further paths to the hypothesis maintained here. And although this hypothesis leads to somewhat improbable conclusions, there is no reason for rejecting the possibility that it comes more or less near to the reality which is so hard to reconstruct.

TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

WHEN one reviews the history of psychoanalysis¹ one finds that it had its inception in the study of morbid mental states. Beginning with the observation of hysteria and the other neuroses² Professor Freud gradually extended his investigations to normal psychology and evolved new concepts and new methods of study. The neurotic symptoms were no longer imaginary troubles the nature of which one could not grasp, but were conceived as mental and emotional mal-adjustments to one’s environment. The stamp of degeneracy impressed upon neurotics by other schools of medicine was altogether eradicated. Deeper investigation showed conclusively that a person might become neurotic if subjected to certain environments, and that there was no definite dividing line between normal and abnormal. The hysterical symptoms, obsessions, doubts, phobias, as well as hallucinations of the insane, show the same mechanisms as those similar psychic structures which one constantly encounters in normal persons in the form of mistakes in talking, reading, writing, forgetting,³ dreams and wit. The dream, always highly valued by the populace, and as much despised by the educated classes, has a definite structure and meaning when subjected to analysis. Professor Freud’s monumental work, The Interpretation of Dreams,⁴ marked a new epoch in the history of mental science. One might use the same words in reference to his profound analysis of wit.⁵

Faulty psychic actions, dreams and wit are products of the unconscious mental activity, and like neurotic or psychotic manifestations represent efforts at adjustment to one’s environment. The slip of the tongue shows that on account of unconscious inhibitions the individual concerned is unable to express his true thoughts; the dream is a distorted or plain expression of those wishes which are prohibited in the waking states, and the witticism, owing to its veiled or indirect way of expression, enables the individual to obtain pleasure from forbidden sources. But whereas dreams, witticisms, and faulty actions give evidences of inner conflicts which the individual overcomes, the neurotic or psychotic symptom is the result of a failure and represents a morbid adjustment.

The aforementioned psychic formations are therefore nothing but manifestations of the struggle with reality, the constant effort to adjust one’s primitive feelings to the demands of civilization. In spite of all later development the individual retains all his infantile psychic structures. Nothing is lost; the infantile wishes and primitive impulses can always be demonstrated in the grown up and on occasion can be brought back to the surface. In his dreams the normal person is constantly reviving his childhood, and the neurotic or psychotic individual merges back into a sort of psychic infantilism through his morbid productions. The unconscious mental activity which is made up of repressed infantile material forever strives to express itself. Whenever the individual finds it impossible to dominate the difficulties of the world of reality there is a regression to the infantile, and psychic disturbances ensue which are conceived as peculiar thoughts and acts. Thus the civilized adult is the result of his childhood or the sum total of his early impressions; psychoanalysis thus confirms the old saying: The child is father to the man.

It is at this point in the development of psychoanalysis that the paths gradually broadened until they finally culminated in this work. There were many indications that the childhood of the individual showed a marked resemblance to the primitive history or the childhood of races. The knowledge gained from dream analysis and phantasies,⁶ when applied to the productions of racial phantasies, like myths and fairy tales, seemed to indicate that the first impulse to form myths was due to the same emotional strivings which produced dreams, fancies and symptoms.⁷ Further study in this direction has thrown much light on our great cultural institutions, such as religion, morality, law and philosophy, all of which Professor Freud has modestly formulated in this volume and thus initiated a new epoch in the study of racial psychology.

I take great pleasure in acknowledging my indebtedness to Mr. Alfred B. Kuttner for the invaluable assistance he rendered in the translation of this work.

A. A. BRILL.

CHAPTER I

THE SAVAGE’S DREAD OF INCEST

PRIMITIVE man is known to us by the stages of development through which he has passed: that is, through the inanimate monuments and implements which he has left behind for us, through our knowledge of his art, his religion and his attitude towards life, which we have received either directly or