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When I saw that the subtitle was “Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics,” I had a pretty good sense that this book was going to be awful. But I wanted to give it a fair shot. On page one of Chapter One (“The Horrors of Incest”), I read, “I shall select as the basis of comparison the tribes which have been described by anthropologists as the most backward and miserable of savages, the aborigines of Australia.” At that point I just gave it up as a lost cause. I flipped through the rest and basically his point is that psychologically people in traditional societies are just like children. I think in general the non-fiction of a century ago is not going to stand up as well as the fiction. I do grant this book the third most porn-y name of all the books of 1913, which seems only right. ( )

In the beginning was the Deed.

Basically, we collectively killed the dad, felt sorry-not sorry, reenacted the crime over and over until we forgot exactly what we did in the first place, and eventually invented religion to make sense of it all. The end! ( )

Totem and Taboo is an investigation into the links between Neurosis and the religious / social Totem tradition, and the Taboos found in pre and post-totemic societies. In large part this work is inspired by the anthropological work of James George Frazer, with Freud bringing in his interests in the subconscious and the Oedipus complex to explain the genesis of the Totem system of beliefs, and the wide-spread existence of certain taboos.

This use of psychoanalytic thinking to solve some of the puzzles of anthropology seems to be a sensible approach. Though Freud discusses several theories here, some of which are much more convincing than others, we are left without any definite conclusions. Which is only to be expected as this sort of work can only ever be theoretical, peering as it is into the distant mists of time. However it does yield several testable hypotheses which are backed up by anthropological findings, giving some credibility to the ideas being thrown around here.

Probably best appreciated by those who are already familiar with Freud, and Frazer's Golden Bough, however Freud does a fairly good job at explaining to concepts so it would not be too much to pick up from scratch. ( )

Totem e Tabu é um Freud que vale a pena, acima de tudo um trabalho antropológico, Freud cita logo na introdução que seu estímulo para escrever tal livro foram as obras de Jung e Wundt, perpassando todo o livro com citações da obra de James Frazer, The Golden Bough que nos dá as linhas gerais do nascimento da sociedade patriarcal primitiva, onde o pai primevo gerou uma herança de totens e tabus através de seus filhos revoltados com a onipotência desse pai. ( )