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

by Sigmund Freud

Overview

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THE essays treated here appeared under the subtitle of this book in the first numbers of the periodical Imago edited by me. They represent my first efforts to apply view-points and results of psychoanalysis to unexplained problems of racial psychology. In method this book contrasts with that of W. Wundt and the works of the Zurich Psychoanalytic School. The former tries to accomplish the same object through assumptions and procedures from non-analytic psychology, while the latter follow the opposite course and strive to settle problems of individual psychology by referring to material of racial psychology. I am pleased to say that the first stimulus for my own works came from these two sources.

I am fully aware of the shortcomings in these essays. I shall not touch upon those which are characteristic of first efforts at investigation. The others, however, demand a word of explanation. The four essays which are here collected will be of interest to a wide circle of educated people, but they can only be thoroughly understood and judged by those who are really acquainted with psychoanalysis as such. It is hoped that they may serve as a bond between students of ethnology, philology, folklore and of the allied sciences, and psychoanalysts; they cannot, however, supply both groups the entire requisites for such co-operation. They will not furnish the former with sufficient insight into the new psychological technique, nor will the psychoanalysts acquire through them an adequate command over the material to be elaborated. Both groups will have to content themselves with whatever attention they can stimulate here and there and with the hope that frequent meetings between them will not remain unproductive for science.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781495228261
Publisher:	CreateSpace Publishing
Publication date:	05/13/2014
Pages:	188
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Sigmund Freud was born in 1856 in Moravia, Austrian Empire (now the Czech Republic). Between the ages of four and eighty-two his home was in Vienna; in 1938 Hitler's invasion of Austria forced him to seek asylum in London, where he died in the following year.His career began with several years of brilliant work on the anatomy and physiology of the nervous system. He was almost thirty when, after a period of study under Charcot in Paris, his interests first turned to psychology, and another ten years of clinical work in Vienna (at first in collaboration with Breuer, an older colleague) saw the birth of his creation, psychoanalysis. This began simply as a method of treating neurotic patients by investigating their minds, but it quickly grew into an accumulation of knowledge about the workings of the mind in general, whether sick or healthy. Freud was thus able to demonstrate the normal development of the sexual instinct in childhood and, largely on the basis of an examination of dreams, arrived at his fundamental discovery of the unconscious forces that influence our everyday thoughts and actions. Freud's life was uneventful, but his ideas have shaped not only many specialist disciplines, but the whole intellectual climate of the last half century.

Table of Contents

CONTENTS
I The Savage's Dread of Incest 1
II Taboo and the Ambivalence of Emotions 16
III Animism, Magic and the Omnipotence of Thought 64
IV The Infantile Recurrence of Totemism 86

Editorial Reviews

Reprints a translation by A.A. Brill, which was originally published in 1918 (Dodd, Mead & Company). Freud's classic work applies psychoanalysis to aboriginals, paralleling aboriginal practice and neurotic patterns of behavior. For example, Freud compares aboriginal incest taboos with scrupulous rituals of compulsion neurotics who, Freud finds, also wrestle with incest taboos. Culture is itself theorized as a reaction-formation to taboos prohibiting potentially destructive social behavior. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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