Totem and Taboo

Sigmund Freud's Totem and Taboo is a collection of four interconnected essays that applies the methods of psychoanalysis to questions typically addressed by social anthropology. The work seeks points of agreement between the mental lives of peoples Freud calls "primitive" and those of neurotic patients, building a cumulative argument from ethnographic observations about incest avoidance and taboo to a speculative reconstruction of the origins of religion, morality, and social organization.

In the first essay, "The Horror of Incest," Freud selects the Australian aborigines as his primary case study. Despite lacking permanent shelters, agriculture, or formal political leadership, they possessed an elaborate social system centered on totemism: a clan-based organization in which each clan takes its name from a totem, usually an animal, regarded as the clan's common ancestor and guardian spirit. Clansmen were forbidden to kill or eat their totem, and totemic identity, inherited through the maternal or paternal line, overrode tribal membership and blood relationships.

Freud identifies the feature of totemism most relevant to psychoanalysis: wherever totems existed, a law prohibited persons of the same totem from having sexual relations or marrying. This institution, called exogamy, was enforced with extreme severity and extended beyond preventing incest with one's actual mother or sisters, forbidding sexual contact with all women of one's clan. Freud argues that this apparatus was directed at the prevention of incest. He surveys avoidance customs across Melanesia, East Africa, and elsewhere, giving particular attention to prohibitions between men and their mothers-in-law. Rejecting non-psychoanalytic explanations, he proposes that this relationship is governed by emotional ambivalence: Because a man's choice of wife was originally modeled on his mother and sister, the mother-in-law reactivates the original incestuous attachment and must be avoided. The horror of incest displayed by these peoples, Freud concludes, is essentially infantile, matching the psychoanalytic finding that incestuous fixations of desire form the central complex of neurosis.

The second essay, "Taboo and Emotional Ambivalence," defines taboo as a Polynesian concept meaning both "sacred" and "dangerous" or "forbidden," with the common element of unapproachability. Taboo restrictions differ from religious or moral prohibitions in having no stated grounds. Persons and things charged with taboo possessed a dangerous transmissible power called mana, a mysterious magical force proportional to the status of its source.

Freud draws a systematic comparison between taboo and obsessional neurosis. Both prohibitions lack assignable motive, both are maintained by internal necessity, both are easily displaced from one object to another, and both give rise to ceremonial acts of expiation. In obsessional neurosis, a childhood desire meets a prohibition supported by love for the prohibiting parent; the desire is repressed but not abolished, creating permanent ambivalence. This model, Freud argues, applies equally to taboo: People obey taboos because they are afraid, and they are afraid precisely because they unconsciously wish to transgress.

Freud tests this thesis against three categories. Regarding slain enemies, rites of appeasement and purification expressed not only hostility but also remorse, evidence of ambivalence. Regarding rulers, veneration of chiefs masked unconscious hostility; taboo ceremonials simultaneously honored and punished the king. Regarding the dead, the widespread belief that a deceased relative becomes a hostile demon is explained by projection: Survivors harbor unconscious hostility toward the deceased, and this hostility is projected outward so that the dead person appears as the hostile agent. Freud extends this analysis to propose that taboo conscience is the earliest form of conscience, arising from emotional ambivalence in which one feeling is kept unconscious by the other.

The third essay, "Animism, Magic and the Omnipotence of Thoughts," introduces animism, the doctrine of spiritual beings, as humanity's first comprehensive worldview, preceding the religious and scientific stages. Freud analyzes magic as animism's technique, distinguishing imitative magic (working by similarity, such as making an effigy to injure an enemy) from contagious magic (working by physical contact, such as harming someone through their hair or clothing). Both follow principles of mental association, but the deeper factor is the overvaluation of psychical acts: Peoples Freud calls "primitive" ascribed to their wishes the power to alter reality. This attitude constitutes the "omnipotence of thoughts"—the conviction that wishes and mental acts can directly alter external reality—a term Freud borrows from one of his obsessional patients. He maps the three worldview stages onto stages of individual development: The animistic phase corresponds to narcissism (omnipotence ascribed to the self), the religious phase to the child's attachment to parents (omnipotence transferred to gods), and the scientific phase to maturity (resignation to reality).

The fourth and longest essay, "The Return of Totemism in Childhood," constructs a speculative hypothesis about the origins of religion and society. After surveying numerous competing theories of totemism and finding none satisfactory, Freud introduces the psychoanalytic key: children's animal phobias. In his case of "little Hans," a five-year-old boy's fear of horses concealed fear of the father as a rival for the mother's love, the configuration Freud calls the Oedipus complex (the child's desire for the opposite-sex parent and rivalry with the same-sex parent). A case reported by the psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi exemplifies what Freud calls positive totemism in a child: complete identification with a totem animal combined with ambivalent love and violence toward it. "Little Árpád," a boy preoccupied with poultry, identified with chickens, enacted ritual slaughter with excitement, and then tenderly caressed the slaughtered animals. Freud proposes that if the totem represents the father, the two principal taboos of totemism (not killing the totem and not marrying within the clan) coincide with the two crimes of Oedipus and the two central wishes of childhood.

To develop this insight, Freud draws on William Robertson Smith's Religion of the Semites (1894), which argues that a communal sacrificial meal, the killing and eating of the normally forbidden totem animal, was integral to early totemic religion. Combining this with the psychoanalytic identification of the totem as father-substitute and Charles Darwin's hypothesis that early humans lived in hordes dominated by a jealous patriarch who expelled maturing sons, Freud constructs his central speculation: The expelled brothers banded together, killed, and devoured their father. The totem meal commemorates this "memorable and criminal deed, which was the beginning of so many things, of social organization, of moral restrictions and of religion" (142). After the killing, the brothers' suppressed affection reasserted itself as remorse. Through "deferred obedience"—posthumous compliance with the father's prohibitions, driven by guilt—they forbade killing the totem and renounced the liberated women, creating the two fundamental taboos of totemism, which correspond to the two repressed wishes of the Oedipus complex.

Freud traces religion's further development from this origin. Totemic religion arose from filial guilt; over time, as longing for the father intensified, the totem animal evolved into an anthropomorphic god in the father's likeness. Christianity represents the culmination: Christ redeems mankind from original sin, which Freud identifies as the murder of the father, by sacrificing his own life, and the Eucharist revives the ancient totem meal. Freud also argues that Greek tragedy originated in re-enactment of the primal parricide, with the Hero suffering because he represents the slain primal father. In his concluding pages, Freud acknowledges two major difficulties: His argument assumes a "collective mind" in which guilt persists across generations, and the question remains whether the primal parricide actually occurred or was merely a wished-for fantasy. He favors the hypothesis that the deed occurred, reasoning that while neurotics substitute thought for action, uninhibited early humans substituted action for thought. He closes with a line from Goethe's Faust: "In the beginning was the Deed" (161).