Totem and Taboo (Totem und Tabu)

Totem and Taboo, Sigmund Freud's own 1913 work published in German by Hugo Heller Verlag, applies his psychoanalytic theory to the origins of religion and social prohibition, arguing that totemism and the incest taboo descend from a primal act of parricide reenacted symbolically in later ritual. Its strength is that it is Freud's own foundational statement of psychoanalysis applied to religion and culture, essential reading for understanding how Freudian theory has shaped a whole tradition of interpreting myth and ritual, however that theory is now assessed. Its limit is severe and worth stating plainly: Freud built the argument on ethnographic material, chiefly Australian Aboriginal totemism and Frazer's comparative anthropology, that even contemporary scholars considered thin, and virtually no anthropologist today accepts the primal parricide as historical event or the theory as a general account of totemism's origin, so it should be read as a document in the history of psychoanalytic thought rather than as reliable anthropology.