Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics

1. Introduction

Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics (1913) is Sigmund Freud’s most sustained attempt to extend psychoanalytic concepts beyond the clinic into prehistory, religion, and social institutions. The work advances a speculative reconstruction of how totemism, taboo, and early forms of religion and morality might have arisen from unconscious conflicts that Freud believed to be universal in human development.

Freud’s central move is comparative: he juxtaposes ethnographic reports about so‑called “primitive” societies with clinical observations of his neurotic patients. On this basis, he proposes that phenomena such as totem animals, incest prohibitions, ritual purity rules, and magical thinking express the same underlying psychic mechanisms—especially repression, ambivalence of emotions, and the Oedipus complex.

The book thus occupies a hybrid position: part anthropological speculation, part cultural theory, and part extension of psychoanalytic metapsychology. It has been read as an early contribution to a psychology of culture, as a controversial myth of origins for religion and law, and as a key text in debates about the relationship between individual psychosexual development and collective symbolic forms.

2. Historical and Intellectual Context

2.1 Early 20th‑Century Anthropology and Religion

Freud wrote Totem and Taboo at a time when European anthropology and the comparative study of religion were dominated by evolutionary schemas and armchair theorizing. He drew extensively on:

These currents encouraged the view that contemporary “primitive” societies preserved traces of earlier stages in universal human development, a premise Freud adapted to psychoanalytic ends.

2.2 Psychoanalysis in Formation

Within Freud’s own discipline, Totem and Taboo followed foundational clinical works such as The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905). It appeared amid internal psychoanalytic debates about sexuality, repression, and the scope of psychoanalysis beyond neurosis.

Freud’s move into prehistory and culture reflected an emerging ambition to make psychoanalysis a general theory of the human mind and society, not only a therapeutic method. The text also responds indirectly to contemporaries such as Carl Jung and his growing interest in myth and religion, while staking out a specifically Freudian emphasis on the father complex and repressed patricide.

2.3 Broader Intellectual Climate

The work emerged in a period marked by confidence in grand syntheses and speculative reconstructions of origins, yet before the methodological self‑criticism that later transformed anthropology and historiography. Scholars note that its assumptions about cultural “primitiveness,” linear evolution, and universal psychic structures mirror the broader scientific and colonial context of early 20th‑century Europe.

3. Author and Composition

3.1 Freud’s Position in His Career

By 1912–1913, Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) was an established, though still contested, figure in European psychiatry. He had formulated the basic tenets of psychoanalysis and gathered a circle of collaborators, but also experienced significant schisms, notably with Alfred Adler and soon with Carl Jung. Totem and Taboo belongs to a middle phase in which Freud began to apply clinical insights to ever wider cultural domains.

3.2 Circumstances and Process of Composition

The four essays that make up Totem and Taboo were first published separately in the psychoanalytic journal Imago:

In 1913, these were collected and slightly revised as a book by Hugo Heller in Vienna. Freud worked largely from secondary ethnographic compilations (especially Frazer), German‑language sources on totemism, and his own case material.

3.3 Aims as Stated by Freud

Freud presented the project as an exploration of “certain agreements in the mental life of savages and neurotics,” aiming to show that:

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“the psychological problems of ethnology may be approached with the help of psycho‑analysis.”

— Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo (Standard Edition, vol. 13)

He openly acknowledged the speculative character of the anthropological reconstruction, while maintaining that psychoanalytic theory gave it systematic plausibility.

4. Structure and Central Arguments

4.1 Overall Structure

The work consists of four interconnected studies, each building on the last:

4.2 Main Lines of Argument

Across these parts, Freud develops several linked claims:

• Parallel between “savages” and neurotics: Ethnographic practices (totemism, taboo, ritual) and neurotic symptoms share a structure of unconscious wishes, repression, and displacement.
• Totemism and the father: The totem animal functions as a symbolic substitute for the father; prohibitions on killing the totem and on incest within the totem group echo the ambivalence of love and hate toward the paternal figure.
• Taboo and obsessional neurosis: Taboo rules resemble the compulsive prohibitions of obsessional patients, both rooted in repressed hostile or erotic impulses defended against by ritual.
• Omnipotence of thoughts: Animistic and magical beliefs embody a stage where inner wishes are experienced as directly efficacious in the external world.
• Primal horde hypothesis: A speculative primordial event—sons killing and devouring a dominant father—allegedly gives rise to guilt, totem worship, the incest taboo, and ultimately religion and moral law.

These arguments together aim to show that core social and religious institutions may derive from universal psychosexual dynamics, especially the Oedipus complex.

5. Key Concepts and Theoretical Innovations

5.1 Totem, Taboo, and Ambivalence

Freud systematizes totemism and taboo as psychologically intelligible institutions. The totem is treated as a displaced paternal figure; taboo is analyzed as a prohibition charged with both desire and fear, illustrating what he calls the ambivalence of emotions—simultaneous love and hate toward significant persons, especially parents. This ambivalence had appeared in earlier case studies but is here elevated to a principle of cultural explanation.

5.2 The Oedipus Complex as Cultural Key

A major innovation is the extension of the Oedipus complex from individual development to collective history. Freud proposes that incest taboos and exogamy norms in totemic systems symbolically regulate unconscious sexual wishes toward kin. This move underpins later attempts, both supportive and critical, to read kinship and myth through psychoanalytic lenses.

5.3 Omnipotence of Thoughts, Animism, and Magic

Freud introduces the notion of the omnipotence of thoughts, describing a mental stage in which wishes and ideas are imagined to have direct causal power. He links this to animism (the attribution of soul or agency to objects) and magic (ritual techniques to influence reality), and draws analogies with children’s thinking and neurotic symptom‑formation.

5.4 The Primal Horde and Collective Guilt

The hypothesis of the primal horde—a dominant father slain by his sons—provides a speculative origin for religion, totemism, and morality. The notion of collective guilt and its transgenerational transmission represents an effort to fuse phylogenetic narrative with psychoanalytic theory, anticipating later discussions of inherited trauma and cultural memory, though in a very different conceptual framework.

Collectively, these concepts mark a shift from purely intrapsychic models toward a psychoanalytic anthropology of culture.

6. Legacy and Historical Significance

6.1 Influence Across Disciplines

Totem and Taboo has exerted wide, if often indirect, influence:

Some later thinkers have treated Freud’s primal horde as a mythic narrative rather than a literal prehistory, yet still found its structure suggestive for analyzing power, law, and identification.

6.2 Main Lines of Criticism

Anthropologists and historians of religion have challenged Freud’s reliance on secondary, often outdated sources, his generalizations from selected totemic societies, and the untestable character of the primal patricide hypothesis. Many argue that he imposes Western Oedipal categories on diverse cultures and conflates ritual symbolism with neurotic pathology.

From within psychoanalysis and social theory, critics contend that the work underestimates economic, political, and material factors, and over‑privileges father–son relations while marginalizing women’s roles. Feminist and post‑colonial scholars particularly emphasize its androcentric and ethnocentric framing.

6.3 Continuing Relevance

Despite these objections, Totem and Taboo remains a touchstone in debates about the origins of religion, the psychology of taboo, and the relationship between individual psyche and collective institutions. It is often cited as an early, striking example of how psychoanalytic ideas can be extended to cultural phenomena, and as a historical document illuminating the ambitions and limits of early 20th‑century theory‑building about “civilization.”