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WorkSigmund Freud

Totem and Taboo

Freud's guess at the first crime: brothers who killed their father, and the guilt from which religion and morality grew.

by Sigmund Freud312 passages held

  • German, the original language
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Original title
Totem und Tabu
First published
(aged 57)
Original language
German

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Overview

In 1912 Carl Gustav Jung, the Zurich psychiatrist whom Freud had helped make the first president of the International Psychoanalytical Association, published a long book that used the myths of many peoples to explain the individual mind, and made plain how far his ideas had moved from Freud's. Freud's reply came as four essays in Imago, a journal he edited, gathered as a book by Hugo Heller in Vienna in 1913. His preface, signed in Rome that September, sets the essays against two rivals: Wilhelm Wundt, the Leipzig psychologist who had studied the minds of whole peoples without psychoanalysis, and the Zurich school, which used myth to explain the individual. Freud starts from the clans of Aboriginal Australia, each named after an animal or plant, whose members may not marry one another, and compares their taboos with the private rules of obsessional patients, who also forbid themselves what they most want. The last essay draws on Charles Darwin's guess that early humans lived in hordes ruled by one jealous male, and on William Robertson Smith's account of the sacrificial meal, and proposes that the excluded sons once killed and ate their father. Their remorse produced the two laws of the totem clan, not to kill the totem animal and not to take the clan's women, and with them the start of religion, morality and society. The break with Jung came while the essays were appearing. In 1920 the American anthropologist Alfred Kroeber reviewed the book in American Anthropologist and rejected nearly every assumption it rested on, and after that most ethnologists set it aside. When the book was translated into Hebrew, Freud wrote a new preface, dated December 1930, describing himself as a man who could not read the holy language, was estranged from his fathers' religion, and still felt himself Jewish in essence.

Key concepts

What is a taboo?

A taboo is a prohibition that gives no reason and needs none. The Polynesian word means two opposite things at once: sacred or consecrated, and uncanny, dangerous, unclean. Whatever is taboo may not be touched, and whoever breaks the rule becomes taboo himself, as if the prohibition were contagious. Freud stresses that the people who keep a taboo cannot say where it came from.

What is totemism?

Totemism is a way of organising a society around an animal, more rarely a plant, that a clan regards as its ancestor and protector. Members of the clan may not kill or eat the totem animal, and may not marry or have sex with anyone of the same totem. Freud builds the book on this pair of rules, which he notices are the same two crimes as in the Oedipus story.

What is emotional ambivalence?

Ambivalence is love and hostility felt towards the same person at the same time, with the hostility usually unconscious. Freud finds it behind taboo customs: a king is honoured and pampered, yet hedged with restrictions so severe that they look like punishment. Such a ceremonial, he argues, expresses both feelings at once, the devotion openly and the resentment in disguise.

What is animism?

Animism is the belief that the world is full of souls and spirits, in people, animals, things and the dead. For Freud it is the first complete world-view, a psychological theory of everything, and the basis of magic. It arises, he suggests, when people project their own mental life outwards and find intentions in nature like the ones they know in themselves.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Forbidding What We Want

Why do the strictest rules of so many peoples fall on what seems least likely to need forbidding? The first two essays read taboo as a ban on a wish that never went away.

Freud begins with Australian clans whose members may not marry inside the totem, and with avoidances like the ban on speaking to a mother-in-law. He compares taboo with the private prohibitions of obsessional patients: in both, the rule gives no reason, spreads by contagion and guards against a desire that persists underneath. Taboos on enemies, rulers and the dead all show ambivalence, love and hostility towards the same person. Here, he suggests, lies the oldest form of conscience.

  • taboo
  • incest taboo
  • exogamy
  • kinship
  • marriage
  • ambivalence
  • social norms
  • neurosis
  • fear
  • desire

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When Wishing Seemed Enough

What did people believe about their own minds before science? The third essay finds in magic an overestimation of thought that children and neurotics still share.

Magic treats an idea as if it were the thing: harm the image and you harm the person. Freud borrows a patient's phrase for this, the omnipotence of thoughts, and traces its fortunes. In the animist stage people claim the power for themselves; in the religious stage they hand it to gods without quite letting go; science gives it up and accepts death and necessity. Only art keeps a corner of it, where a wish can still produce real feeling through play.

  • magic
  • animism
  • spirits
  • projection
  • causality
  • religion

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The Murdered Father

Where did guilt, religion and the first laws come from? The last essay answers with a story about a single deed in prehistory and admits it is a hypothesis.

From Darwin, Freud takes a primal horde ruled by one jealous male; from Robertson Smith, the sacrificial meal at which a clan eats its sacred animal. He joins them: the expelled sons killed and ate their father, then, overcome by remorse, forbade killing the totem that stood for him and gave up the women they had fought for. Guilt made the dead father stronger than the living one. The child's fear and love of an animal, he argues, repeats the same feeling towards the father.

  • totemism
  • sacrifice
  • guilt
  • morality
  • death
  • ritual
  • anthropology

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Within this work

passages held
312
distinct concepts
317
by passages held, corpus-wide
#238

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “ritual” and “taboo”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 27 pairings. 83 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
ritualtaboo34
religionritual17
religiontotemism17
ambivalencetaboo16
kinshipsocial norms16
religiontaboo14
ritualtotemism14
taboototemism13
kinshiptotemism11
psychoanalysistaboo10
ambivalencepsychoanalysis9
kinshipreligion9
kinshipritual8
kinshiptaboo8
ambivalencereligion6
social normstaboo5
ambivalenceritual4
psychoanalysisreligion3
religionsocial norms3
ritualsocial norms3
ambivalencekinship2
ambivalencetotemism2
kinshippsychoanalysis2
psychoanalysistotemism2
ambivalencesocial norms1
psychoanalysisritual1
social normstotemism1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1900 The Interpretation of Dreams (Die Traumdeutung)

    Begun from his own dreams in the 1890s and enlarged in edition after edition, this is where Freud sets out the method of interpretation that his later books apply to slips of the tongue, jokes and myths.

     DE
  2. 1901 The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens)

    The dream book's method carried into waking life; its slips and forgettings became the opening part of the lectures Freud later gave to beginners in Vienna.

     DE
  3. 1905 Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten)

    Freud's only book-length study of comedy, and the one most built from borrowed material: puns, anecdotes and Jewish jokes, each taken apart in turn.

     DE
  4. 1907 Frühe Schriften zu Religion und Dichtung

    Two early excursions from the clinic, gathered here in one volume: the seed of Freud's later books on religion, and his short account of where a writer's stories come from.

     DE
  5. 1910 Zur Theorie des Unbewußten

    Four theoretical papers written between 1910 and 1915 and gathered here in one volume, on the road from the dream book to the metapsychological essays of 1915 — the last of the four is one of those essays.

     DE
  6. 1913 Spätere Schriften zu Dichtung und Mythos

    Two essays from 1913 and 1917, gathered here in one volume, that show Freud the reader of Shakespeare and Goethe: the dream-book method applied to a stage motif and to the first page of a famous autobiography.

     DE
  7. 1913 Totem and Taboo (Totem und Tabu) you are here DE
  8. 1914 On Narcissism: An Introduction (Zur Einführung des Narzißmus)

    A short essay written as Jung was breaking with Freud, and the hinge between his early theory of the drives and the later picture of ego and super-ego.

     DE
  9. 1915 Instincts and their Vicissitudes (Triebe und Triebschicksale)

    The paper that opens Freud's 1915 theoretical series by defining its basic term; the companion essays on repression and on the unconscious build on it.

     DE
  10. 1915 Schriften aus dem Weltkrieg

    Freud's direct responses to the First World War, gathered in one volume on this site: a long essay of 1915 on disillusionment and death, and a short one of 1916 on transience and mourning.

     DE
  11. 1915 The Unconscious (Das Unbewußte)

    Freud's fullest account of what he meant by the unconscious, written in wartime Vienna eight years before The Ego and the Id redrew his map of the mind.

     DE
  12. 1917 Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse)

    Freud's own introduction to his work, and the closest thing he wrote to a textbook: his books on dreams and on everyday slips retold for listeners, then carried on into a general theory of neurosis.

     DE
  13. 1919 The 'Uncanny' (Das Unheimliche)

    A rare venture by Freud into aesthetics, a field he says psychoanalysts seldom feel drawn to, written in 1919 beside the first draft of Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

     DE
  14. 1920 Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Jenseits des Lustprinzips)

    The hinge of Freud's later work: the 1920 book that introduces the death drive, followed within three years by the new map of the mind in The Ego and the Id.

     DE
  15. 1921 Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse)

    The bridge between Freud's speculations on prehistory and his new model of the mind: its chapter on a "grade in the ego" sets out the ego ideal that The Ego and the Id would rename two years later.

     DE
  16. 1923 The Ego and the Id (Das Ich und das Es)

    The book in which Freud's later model of the mind takes its final shape; the essays and books that follow it, on anxiety, religion and civilisation, all speak its language of ego, id and super-ego.

     DE
  17. 1924 Späte Schriften zur Ich-Psychologie

    Three short papers of the mid-1920s, gathered here in one volume, in which Freud tests the model of The Ego and the Id on psychosis, on memory and on laughter.

     DE
  18. 1926 Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (Hemmung, Symptom und Angst)

    Written three years after The Ego and the Id, it rebuilds the theory of neurotic symptoms in that book's terms, starting from the difference between a symptom and an inhibition, a restriction the ego places on itself.

     DE
  19. 1927 The Future of an Illusion (Die Zukunft einer Illusion)

    Freud's most direct case against religion, written fourteen years after Totem and Taboo had traced it to the murdered father, and the opening of the late cultural writings that continue in Civilization and Its Discontents.

     DE
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