He relates this to the idea of young children calling all of their parents' friends aunts and uncles. The relationship of father is also not just his father, but every man in the clan that, hypothetically, could have been his father. The totem is passed down hereditarily, either through the father or the mother. Freud examines this practice as preventing against incest. Every clan has a totem (usually an animal, sometimes a plant or force of nature) and people are not allowed to marry those with the same totem as themselves. 'The Horror of Incest' concerns incest taboos adopted by societies believing in totemism.įreud examines the system of Totemism among the Australian Aborigines. Freud was influenced by the work of James George Frazer, including The Golden Bough (1890).

The work was translated twice into English, first by Abraham Brill and later by James Strachey. Some authors have seen redeeming value in the work.įreud, who had a longstanding interest in social anthropology and was devoted to the study of archaeology and prehistory, wrote that the work of Wilhelm Wundt and Carl Jung provided him with his 'first stimulus' to write the essays included in Totem and Taboo.

Kroeber was an early critic of Totem and Taboo, publishing a critique of the work in 1920. Though Totem and Taboo has been seen as one of the classics of anthropology, comparable to Edward Burnett Tylor's Primitive Culture (1871) and Sir James George Frazer's The Golden Bough (1890), the work is now hotly debated by anthropologists. It is a collection of four essays inspired by the work of Wilhelm Wundt and Carl Jung and first published in the journal Imago (1912–13): 'The Horror of Incest', 'Taboo and Emotional Ambivalence', 'Animism, Magic and the Omnipotence of Thoughts', and 'The Return of Totemism in Childhood'. Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics, or Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics, ( German: Totem und Tabu: Einige Übereinstimmungen im Seelenleben der Wilden und der Neurotiker) is a 1913 book by Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, in which the author applies his work to the fields of archaeology, anthropology, and the study of religion.

Freud totem and taboo