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

by Sigmund Freud

Overview

This landmark collection of essays by the father of psychoanalysis explores the conflict between primitive feelings and the demands of civilization. Freud identifies a strong unconscious inclination as the basis of taboo, a forbidden behavior, and traces its earliest appearance to the childhood development of totemism, a widespread belief in a sacred relationship between an object and a kinship group. An acquaintance with this ground-breaking work is essential for teachers and students of psychology, ethnology, and folklore.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780394701240
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	04/12/1960
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	4.40(w) x 7.30(h) x 0.50(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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