Totem and Taboo by Dr. Sigmund Freud—Reviewed by Miguel A. Faria, MD

Totem and Taboo by Dr. Sigmund Freud was first published in 1918, and the Dover edition reviewed here was revised in 2018 and is unabridged. Totem and Taboo is a fascinating little book that compliments a previous book also read by this author, The Golden Bough by the Scottish anthropologist, Sir James G. Frazer. Indeed, Freud relied extensively on various naturalists and anthropologists for Totem and Taboo, especially Sir James Frazer.

Freud builds the case for his main thesis in Chapters 1 and 2 titled “The Savage’s Dread of Incest” and “Taboo and the Ambivalence of Emotions” in which he cites extensively the works of Frazer and the anthropologist Andrew Lang, who wrote the item “Totemism” for the Encyclopedia Britannica (1911).

In Chapter 3, “Animism, Magic and the Omnipotence of Thought,” Freud puts forth his main thesis, relying on Frazer and Lang as well as the works of sociologist Herbert Spencer, psychologist Wilhelm Wundt, and archaeologist and religious historian Salomon Reinach, among others, who are quoted extensively. The linchpin for Freud’s thesis is formulated, though, not only by the work of Lang but also thanks to the works of the philologist and archaeologist, W. Robertson Smith, J. J. Atkinson, and the naturalist Charles Darwin. Freud adds the psychoanalytic dimension.

Freud conceives the concept of the Darwinian primal horde, would not only bring about the conditions for exogamy of the young men but also the beginning of social organization and ultimately the beginning of religion. The Darwinian primal horde hypothesizes that men may not have been necessarily social animals but like the gorilla, the young adult male could have led a band won by winning the contest of leadership by being the strongest and killing and driving out the others. He then would have had all the females for himself:

One day the expelled brothers joined forces, slew and ate the father, and thus put an end to the father horde. Together they dared and accomplished what would have remained impossible for them singly… This violent primal father had surely been the envied and feared model for each of the brothers. Now they accomplished their identification with him by devouring him and each acquired a part of his strength. The totem feast, which is perhaps mankind’s first celebration, would be the repetition and commemoration of this memorable, criminal act with which so many things began, social organization, moral restrictions and religion.[p. 122]  

Therein Freud brings forth the psychoanalytic dimension to the anthropological and social matrix, especially his fundamental concept of ambivalence:

In order to find these results acceptable, quite aside from our supposition, we need only assume that the group of brothers banded together were dominated by the same contradictory feelings towards the father which we can demonstrate as the content of ambivalence of the father complex in all our children and in neurotics. They hated the father who stood so powerfully in the way of their sexual demands and their desire for power, but they also loved and admired him. After they had satisfied their hate by his removal and had carried out their wish for identification with him, the suppressed tender impulses had to assert themselves. This took place in the form of remorse, a sense of guilt was formed which coincided here with the remorse generally felt. The dead now became stronger than the living had been, even as we observe it to-day in the destinies of men. What the fathers’ presence had formerly prevented they themselves now prohibited in the psychic situation of ‘subsequent obedience’, which we know so well from psychoanalysis. They undid their deed by declaring that the killing of the father substitute, the totem, was not allowed, and renounced the fruits of their deed by denying themselves the liberated women. Thus they created the two fundamental taboos of totemism out of the sense of guilt of the son, and for this very reason these had to correspond with the two repressed wishes of the Oedipus complex. Whoever disobeyed became guilty of the two only crimes which troubled primitive society.[p. 122-123]

The two primal crimes of primitive men were parricide and incest. Therefore, Freud denied that the incest dread or incest prohibition was the result of genetic desirability but the need to preserve the patriarchal family arrangement. The brothers were all rivals against each other, and although they all wanted to possess the women and act like the father, a new combat among themselves would have destroyed their organization. None of them could possess the women of the band. They all had to go out and find their own women (exogamy), and this was the reason for the incest prohibition. Thus, Freud explains that the prohibition of parricide thereafter as a capital crime was the origin of totemism whereby an animal becomes the protector and mythological father of the band, clan, or tribe:

The feelings of the sons found a natural and appropriate substitute for the father in the animal, but their compulsory treatment of it expressed more than the need of showing remorse. The surrogate for the father [the totem animal] was perhaps used in the attempt to assuage the burning sense of guilt, and to bring about a kind of reconciliation with the father. The totemic system was a kind of agreement with the father in which the latter granted everything that the child’s phantasy could expect from him, protection, care, and forbearance, in return for which the pledge was given to honour his life, that is to say, not to repeat the act against the totem through which the real father had perished.[p. 124]   

And yet, ambivalence remains a centerpiece in psychoanalysis, for example, love and hate, pleasure and guilt, as well as in anthropology and the origin of religion:

The ambivalent strain was probably too great to be adjusted by any arrangement, or else the psychological conditions are entirely unfavourable to any kind of settlement of these contradictory feelings. It is certainly noticeable that the ambivalence attached to the father complex also continues in totemism and in religions in general. The religion of totemism included not only manifestations of remorse and attempts at reconciliation, but also serves to commemorate the triumph over the father. The gratification obtained thereby creates the commemorative celebration of the totem feast at which the restrictions of subsequent obedience are suspended and makes it a duty to repeat the crime of parricide through the sacrifice of the totem animal as often as the benefits of this deed, namely, the appropriation of the father’s properties, threaten to disappear as a result of the changed influences of life. We shall not be surprised to find that a part of the son’s defiance also reappears, often in the most remarkable disguises and inversions, in the formation of later religions.[p. 124-125]

The concept of the father, as divined by Freud, originated in the original sacrifice of the father of the band, subsequently transferred to the totem ancestor; the totem feast originated in the original cannibalistic act. The god of every religion originated in the murdered patriarch, who becomes “an exulted father.”

In the further development the animal loses its sacredness and the sacrifice its relation to the celebration of the totem; the rite becomes a simple offering to the deity, a self-deprivation in favour of the god. God himself is now so exalted above man that he can be communicated with only through a priest as intermediary. At the same time the social order produces godlike kings who transfer the patriarchal system to the state. It must be said that the revenge of the deposed and reinstated father has been very cruel; it culminated in the dominance of authority. The subjugated sons have used the new relation to disburden themselves still more of their sense of guilt. Sacrifice, as it is now constituted, is entirely beyond their responsibility. God himself has demanded and ordained it. Myths in which the god himself kills the animal that is sacred to him, which he himself really is, belong to this phase. This is the greatest possible denial of the great misdeed with which society and the sense of guilt began. There is an unmistakable second meaning in this sacrificial demonstration. It expresses satisfaction at the fact that the earlier father substitute has been abandoned in favour of the higher conception of god. The superficial allegorical translation of the scene here roughly corresponds with its psychoanalytic interpretation by saying that god is represented as overcoming the animal part of his nature.[p. 128-129]

The sense of guilt persisted and was transferred to mythology:

There came into existence figures of gods like Attis, Adonis, Tammuz, and others, spirits of vegetation as well as youthful divinities who enjoyed the favours of maternal deities and committed incest with the mother in defiance of the father. But the sense of guilt, which was not allayed through these creations, was expressed in myths which visited these youthful lovers of the maternal goddesses with short life and punishment through castration or through the wrath of the father god appearing in animal form. Adonis was killed by the boar, the sacred animal of Aphrodite; Attis, the lover of Kybele, died of castration. The lamentation for these gods and the joy at their resurrection have gone over into the ritual of another son which divinity was destined to survive long.[p. 131]

According to Freud the sense of guilt and redemption also extended to the doctrines and sacraments of Christianity:

In the Christian myth, man’s original sin is undoubtedly an offence against God the Father, and if Christ redeems mankind from the weight of original sin by sacrificing his own life, he forces us to the conclusion that this sin was murder. According to the law of retaliation, which is deeply rooted in human feeling, a murder can be atoned only by the sacrifice of another life; the self-sacrifice points to a blood-guilt. And if this sacrifice of one’s own life brings about a reconciliation with god, the father, then the crime which must be expiated can only have been the murder of the father.

Thus in the Christian doctrine mankind most unreservedly acknowledges the guilty deed of primordial times because it now has found the most complete expiation for this deed in the sacrificial death of the son. The reconciliation with the father is the more thorough because simultaneously with this sacrifice there follows the complete renunciation of woman, for whose sake mankind rebelled against the father. But now also the psychological fatality of ambivalence demands its rights. In the same deed which offers the greatest possible expiation to the father, the son also attains the goal of his wishes against the father. He becomes a god himself beside or rather in place of his father… As a sign of this substitution the old totem feast is revived again in the form of communion in which the band of brothers now eats the flesh and blood of the son and no longer that of the father, the sons thereby identifying themselves with him and becoming holy themselves. Thus, through the ages we see the identity of the totem feast with the animal sacrifice, the theanthropic human sacrifice, and the Christian eucharist, and in all these solemn occasions we recognize the after-effects of that crime… We see how well justified is Frazer’s dictum that “the Christian communion has absorbed within itself a sacrament which is doubtless far older than Christianity.”[p. 132-133]

Freud comes close to crediting Carl Jung for his theory of the collective unconscious, but he does not do so, except to say that Jung’s different concept of the libido (not necessarily sexual in origin) “seems questionable” to him. And yet, Freud wrote that although psychic processes are continued from one generation to the next, they do not have to carry the responsibility for the original parricide:

We are now confronted by two new questions: how much can be attributed to this psychic continuity within the series of generations, and what ways and means does a generation use to transfer its psychic states to the next generation? I do not claim that these problems have been sufficiently explained or that direct communication and tradition, of which one immediately thinks, are adequate for the task…[p. 135]

Freud transferred the responsibility for this continuity of forbidden knowledge, which Jung would have called the collective unconscious, to a poet, “Strive to possess yourself of what you have inherited from your ancestors.”[p. 136]

• Totem and Taboo is available online: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/41214/41214-h/41214-h.htm#Footnote_188_188

Reviewed by Dr. Miguel A. Faria

Dr. Miguel A. Faria is the author of numerous books, including, Cuba’s Eternal Revolution through the Prism of Insurgency, Socialism, and Espionage (2023); Stalin, Mao, Communism, and their 21st-Century Aftermath in Russia and China (2024); and Contrasting Ideals and Ends in the American and French Revolutions (2024)—the last four books by Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK.

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