Understand in about 6 minutes
Freud reads early anthropology through psychoanalysis, arguing that the incest taboo, the rules of taboo, magical thinking, and religion itself all trace back to the divided feelings a child holds toward a father.
Mind Map
Core Message
Freud's whole method rests on one analogy: the customs of the races ethnographers called most primitive resemble the symptoms of patients with compulsion neurosis. He treats their dread of incest, their taboos, and their magic as a preserved early stage of the same psychic life we still carry.
A taboo prohibition has no stated reason and is obeyed without question, yet it guards exactly the act people most want to commit. Freud's reading is that the prohibition stands wherever there is both a strong desire and an equally strong fear of acting on it, a divided feeling he calls ambivalence.
In the animistic stage, people behave as if wishing and naming could move the world. Freud calls this the omnipotence of thought and finds the same over-valuation of mental acts in superstition, in magic, and in the rituals of his obsessional patients.
Borrowing Darwin's picture of a primal horde ruled by one jealous father, Freud proposes that the expelled sons once banded together, killed and ate that father, and were then bound by guilt. Out of their remorse, he argues, came the two oldest taboos and the long history of religion.
Summary
Totem and Taboo collects four essays in which Freud carries psychoanalysis out of the consulting room and into anthropology. His governing assumption is stated at the start: the so-called savage races, especially the aboriginal peoples of Australia, show us a well-preserved early stage of the mental life we have all passed through, so their customs can be compared with the symptoms of neurotic patients. He is candid that this is a borrowing across fields that cannot do full justice to either, and offers it as a new factor added to the study of religion, morality, and society rather than a complete account.
The first essay takes up the dread of incest. Among totem tribes, Freud notes, the whole social organization seems built to prevent sexual relations within the clan, enforced through totemism and the rule of exogamy, and extended even to elaborate avoidance between a man and his mother-in-law. He reads this severe horror not as a sign that such races are free of the wish but as evidence of how strong the wish must be, since psychoanalysis finds the child's first desires turned toward the very relatives later forbidden.
The second essay turns to taboo, a word he traces to Polynesia and links to the sacred and the forbidden at once. Taboo prohibitions carry no justification and are simply taken for granted by those under them, which is what makes them resemble the senseless but binding prohibitions of compulsion neurosis. Freud's key term is ambivalence: behind every taboo lies an act that is both strongly desired and strongly feared, so that whoever breaks a taboo becomes dangerous because he tempts others to do the same. The basis of taboo, he concludes, is a forbidden action toward which there is a powerful unconscious pull.
The third essay examines animism, magic, and what Freud names the omnipotence of thought. Primitive peoples populate the world with spirits and souls and assume that the order of their ideas governs the order of things, so that to wish or to imitate is to cause. He maps three world-pictures onto stages of individual development: the animistic phase matches narcissism, the religious phase matches a child's dependence on parents, and the scientific phase matches maturity. The over-valuation of thought, he adds, survives in our own culture chiefly in art.
The fourth and longest essay reaches for the origin of it all. Combining the totem feast described by anthropologists with Darwin's hypothesis of a primal horde, Freud advances his boldest claim: long ago the brothers driven out by a violent, possessive father joined together, killed and devoured him, and afterward were overcome by remorse for the deed they had both hated and admired. From that guilt, he argues, came the two foundational taboos against killing the totem and against incest, and from the same source flowed the later forms of religion, which he reads as a long attempt to atone for the primal murder. The book ends by siding with action over thought, closing on the line that in the beginning was the deed.
Key Concepts
Freud argues that taboo objects and persons stir up two opposed feelings at once: a strong desire to approach or act, and an equally strong fear or revulsion. The prohibition is conscious while the matching wish stays unconscious.
Ambivalence is the hinge of the whole book. It lets Freud explain why senseless-looking prohibitions are guarded so fiercely, and it reappears as the divided feeling the sons hold toward the murdered father.
In the animistic view of the world, mental acts are credited with power over external reality, so that a wish, a word, or an imitation is felt to bring about the thing it pictures. Freud took the phrase from a former patient.
It connects primitive magic, ordinary superstition, and obsessional ritual under one principle, and supplies Freud's stage of development that precedes religion and science.
Drawing on Darwin, Freud imagines an original society ruled by one jealous father who kept the women and drove off his sons. The sons eventually combined to kill and eat him, then bound themselves by guilt-born prohibitions.
This is Freud's proposed origin for the two oldest taboos, for the totem feast, and ultimately for religion and the moral order, making a private family drama the root of culture.
Mental Models
Freud treats the customs of early peoples and the symptoms of neurotic patients as expressions of the same buried psychic forces, so that one can be read by the light of the other.
It offers a way to interpret a baffling custom by asking what wish and what fear a symptom with the same shape would conceal, while reminding the reader that the analogy has limits.
Where a rule is fierce, unexplained, and obeyed without question, Freud reads a correspondingly strong hidden wish to break it. The strength of the ban measures the strength of the temptation.
It turns a taboo into a clue: instead of taking a prohibition at face value, one asks what forbidden pull it is holding down.
Freud lines up three ways of explaining the world, animistic, religious, and scientific, against three stages of personal growth: narcissism, dependence on parents, and adult acceptance of reality.
It gives a framework for placing magical thinking, faith, and science as successive answers to the same need to make sense of the world.
Selected Quotes
The basis of taboo is a forbidden action for which there exists a strong inclination in the unconscious.
In summing up we may now say that the principle which controls magic, and the technique of the animistic method of thought, is ‘Omnipotence of Thought’.
the expelled brothers joined forces, slew and ate the father, and thus put an end to the father horde.
Source
Source text: Project Gutenberg edition of Totem and Taboo by Sigmund Freud, translated by A. A. Brill.
HTML text: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/41214/pg41214.txt
Project Gutenberg states that this ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever.
The four essays first appeared in the journal Imago in 1912 and 1913; the Brill English translation used here was published by George Routledge & Sons.