Totem and Taboo by Sigmund Freud

First published:Totem und Tabu: Einige Ubereinstimmungen im Seelenleben der Wildren und der Neurotiker, 1912-1913, serial; 1913, book (English translation, 1918)

Type of work: Psychology

Form and Content

Totem and Taboo is a formal intellectual essay which elaborates on ideas fundamental to Sigmund Freud’s theories of the developmental structure of the personality and its relation to the nature of human society. Specifically, it examines the origins of modern social institutions (such as the family), religion, law, myth and totemism, the incest taboo, and exogamy. The essay is divided into four major sections which deal with various aspects of primitive society. In order to understand how Freud derived the themes contained in Totem and Taboo, a word concerning his overall theories of the psyche should be said first.

During the latter part of the nineteenth century, Freud, a Viennese neurologist, began to explore the phenomenon of the unconscious through techniques of hypnosis, free verbal association, and the analysis of his patients’ dreams. The unconscious is the repository of strong elemental desires which influence much of the individual’s behavior. The conscious, rational self is much like the tip of an iceberg; below the surface irrational urges dictate, he suggested, a large proportion of the choices a human being makes. In his Die Traumdeutung (1900; The Interpretation of Dreams, 1913), he theorized that certain elemental wishes and desires were unacceptable and were subsequently repressed or sublimated through the symbolism of the dream process.

Freud came to posit in his subsequent writings a genetic structure for the personality. The newborn infant is an organism dominated by the Id, a center of libidinal, or (broadly speaking) sexualized, energy that demands immediate gratification of its elemental desire for pleasure (the release of states of tension). This instinctive condition Freud called the pleasure principle (Lustprinzip). The constraints of human existence, as well as those of society, mean that such demands cannot always be met. A sense of identity, or self—the Ego—develops in the infant; the Ego is in part formed by such frustrations and the neurotic blocks that mark them.

These blocks (or cathexes) often accompany the socialization of the individual to what Freud called the reality principle (Vernunftsprinzip), the demands of physical and social existence that necessitate the sublimation or repression of libidinal desires. The reality principle is transmitted through the agents of socialization and civilization—that is, parents, teachers, religions, and governments. This transmission is accomplished primarily through commands, prohibitions, guilt, and punishment. A sense of conscience—the Superego—develops in the individual and serves to restrict prohibited behaviors.

The infant also undergoes a maturation process in which the locus of bodily pleasure changes in the organism. During infancy and early childhood, the anal and oral orifices are tension-charged areas because of the physical necessity to defecate and eat. As the child grows, pleasure centers shift to the genital region. There are, however, problematic areas during this stage of development, and here Freud introduced the Oedipus complex, an aspect of the neurotic male personality. The infant’s psychology is for Freud the most intense in the life of the individual, and the relationship of the male child to the mother is crucial. According to Freud, the son comes to perceive himself as being in competition with the father for the mother’s love. That produces anger and jealousy toward the father figure as well as fear and guilt because of the son’s desire to eliminate him. The Oedipus complex develops in all male children but is overcome by most men when love and sexuality are transferred to adult females outside the family unit. If this issue remains unresolved within the male personality, then a neurotic fixation develops. Freud focused for the most part on the development of the male personality and gave less attention to the female psyche and the possible neurotic fixations on the father—the Electra complex—that may develop. He called his method of investigation “psychoanalysis” and claimed that therapy based on his ideas could cure the problems of the neurotic personality.

Critical Context

Without such a system of symbolic displacement of violent emotions, social order—and therefore civilization—would have been impossible. The notion that civilization is based on the sublimation of instinctive urges represents a central Freudian idea that was developed at length in Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (1930; Civilization and Its Discontents, 1930). In Totem and Taboo, Freud sets out to illustrate how certain ideas fundamental to his early views of the personality— particularly that of the Oedipus complex—can be found within the ritual patterns of less developed cultures; the book is an application of psychoanalytic theory to the field of anthropology. This book was written to provide more evidence that psychoanalytical theories can account for all varieties and historical stages of human behavior. These ideas concerning the psychological origins of primitive religion presented in Totem and Taboo are also expanded upon (in the context of the Judeo-Christian tradition) in Freud’s later work Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion: Drei Abhandlungen (1937-1939; Moses and Monotheism, 1939). He clearly had realized relatively early that his ideas concerning the individual psyche were applicable to broader areas of human activity.

In Totem and Taboo, Freud broadens the scope of his work from the structure of the individual personality to the history of cultural and societal development. This book has had important ramifications for subsequent theories of unconscious psychological mechanisms operating within certain social institutions—such as politics and warfare, justice and the legal system, religious belief and ritual organization. For example, the philosopher Herbert Marcuse’s book Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (1955) is a good example of the application of Freudian ideas to political theories of social and economic development. Also, Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981) represents the use of Freudian concepts in the area of Marxist literary theory and interpretation.

Bibliography

Benjamin, Nelson, ed. Freud and the Twentieth Century, 1957.

Brown, J.A.C. “Psychoanalysis and Society,” in Freud and the Post-Freudians, 1961.

Huxley, Francis. “Psychoanalysis and Anthropology,” in Freud and the Humanities, 1985.

Levin, Gerald. “Neurosis and Culture,” in Sigmund Freud, 1975.

Roheim, Geza. Psychoanalysis and Anthropology, 1950.