Robertson Smith) and with reference to the native tribes of Australia, his main object of research, is a kind of prereligious system of belief and the basis of prehistoric and “primitive” social organization. Totemism, Freud explains on the basis of the anthropological theories of his day (especially those of J. Central to this aim are two key elements of prehistoric and, in Freud's terminology, “primitive” societies, totems and taboos. Totem und Tabu aims to apply the findings of psychoanalysis to certain unsolved problems of anthropology. Before assessing its merits and demerits, however, let us look at its main ideas. Moreover, although the theory it develops may be untenable, the book has proved a source of thought-provoking social critique. This text describes a certain type of transference. Yet Totem und Tabu has had a strong influence on literary circles, in particular on German writers of the first half of the twentieth century. Sigmund Freuds book, Totem and Taboo, speaks about the origin of language as Pierre Kaufmann reads it. Academic opinion of the book has hardly improved since. Kroeber, who was by no means unsympathetic towards psychoanalysis, considered it to be so weak that he compared demolishing it to breaking a butterfly on the wheel. 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, 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. In Moses and Monotheism, Freud proposed that Moses had been a priest of Akhenaten who fled Egypt after the pharaoh's death and perpetuated monotheism through a different religion. One of its early critics, the American anthropologist A. Freud calls this internalizing process an advance in intellectuality, and he credits it directly to religion.

Totem und Tabu ranks as one of Freud's least convincing works. My point of departure will be Freud's Totem und Tabu (Totem and Taboo, 1913). In the present chapter, I wish to examine the application of psychoanalysis to a number of social phenomena. IN THE PREVIOUS CHAPTER, the focus was on the interpretation of individual works of fiction.

Totemism freud