Totem and Taboo

Totem and Taboo came out in 1913 and is one of Freud's boldest works. Instead of discussing patients in Vienna, he turns to peoples whom Europeans of his time called primitive and uses psychoanalytic ideas to try to explain where prohibitions, religion, and morality come from.

The book contains four essays. The first two explore the horror of incest and taboo. The third discusses magic and what Freud called the omnipotence of thoughts. The fourth, the most famous, presents the story of the original crime and the totem.

The underlying idea is that the minds of people in these societies function as magnified reflections of the mind of a child or a neurotic person. Today, that comparison sounds problematic, and we'll return to it in the critique. For now, it's worth understanding his reasoning.

A totem is generally an animal or plant that a clan considers its ancestor and protector. Clan members feel connected to it through kinship and cannot kill or eat it, except on very special occasions. Think of fans who treat their team's mascot with something close to devotion, and you have a faint image of the idea.

According to the scholars Freud draws on, the most important rule of totemism is exogamy: people belonging to the same totem cannot marry or have sexual relations with one another. The kinship that matters is membership in the clan, more than blood ties.

Freud is interested in the totem because it brings together two very old prohibitions: not killing the sacred animal and not having sexual relations with members of one's own group. For him, these rules match the two great repressed desires of childhood, and that is the book's central clue.

In the first essay, Freud shows that many peoples surround incest with elaborate rules. In certain groups, a man cannot even speak to his mother-in-law or be alone with his sister. These barriers go far beyond what would be necessary simply to prevent marriages between close relatives.

Anyone who grew up in a family may recognize milder versions: the endless mother-in-law jokes, the awkwardness of discussing sex in front of your parents, the care taken not to let an older male cousin share a bedroom with his female cousins. It seems like mere custom, but it echoes the logic of taboo.

For Freud, so much caution indicates that the desire exists and must be restrained. Nobody makes a law against something nobody wants to do. If the prohibition is so strict, the temptation must be powerful, and children already harbor this unconscious desire for their own parents.