Totem and Taboo
Someone let Freud loose in the field of Anthropology! Spurred on by works from his rival Jung, Freud investigates the connections of totems, exogamy, taboos, religious and neurotic thoughts. A collection of four essays Freud initially investigates (or attempts to) the origins of “Incest Dread”, that is to say why incest became a taboo to begin with. From there he considers the correlation between Taboo and emotional conflict. He demonstrates this with some fascinating deconstructions of certain ceremonies to honor a king which required severe austerities that (in the school of psychoanalysis) demonstrates the peoples wish to honor but also torture the king. To prevent harm from coming to the king, but also prevent the king from harming. The subtitle of the book is Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics. This is looked at in depth in the third essay investigating the similar power that animist and neurotics both attribute to thought. In many cases elaborate rituals are created to propitiate themselves of actions that were only committed in the psychic and perhaps subconscious realm. The fourth and final essays is a sort of climax where he attempts to tie everything together and put a Freudian bow on it. In this brilliant essay he argues that our entire society is built off of a real or imaginary event that has given us generational guilt (i.e., original sin). This guilt is the origin of all religion. Drawing from one of Darwin’s speculations about human society possibly being constructed similarly to gorilla’s social structure, that is one alpha male with a harem. The original act then was the brothers (whom the alpha male kicked out) united to murder their father. The father that they loved, feared, and respected. At the end of the day, you gotta go back to Oedipus. ...