Totem and Tabou

Totem and taboo are a work of Sigmund Freud, published in 1913 under the German original title of Totem und Tabu .

This text is, with Moïse and the monotheism (1939) one of the rare works of Freud to be been interested in the collective.

Being interested in the formation of the taboo and the role of the totem in the companies known as " primitives" , Freud finally will establish bonds between the psychopathology of the neuroses of the man " civilisé" , the primitive cultures and the psychic development of the child: at each psychosexual stage a vision of the world " corresponds; primitif" and etiology of a mental pathology.

But on a more general level, Freud wishes to establish a true theory of the Culture in connection with the psychoanalysis, resting on the monographs and accounts of voyages at its disposal at the time.

This work caused in its time a great polemic, about the universality of the psychoanalysis and of its concepts, in particular of the Oedipus complex .

Plan of the book

fear of the inceste
1. the system totemism
2. matrimonial classes
the taboo and the ambivalence of the feelings
1. the taboo
2. the glance of the psychoanalyst
Animism, magic and any power of the ideas
1. the Animism
2. two magic action groups
3. the glance of the psychoanalyst
the infantile return of the totemism
1. the totem
2. Assumption on the origin of the Totemism

The Myth founder of Totem and taboo

Freud, taking as a starting point a conviction of Darwin, supposes at the origin of humanity a primitive horde , grouping human under the authority of a father the Almighty who has only the access to the women. It presupposes whereas the sons of the father, jealous to be able to have the women, rebelled one day and killed it, to eat it in a meal totemic .
Once the consumed feast, the remorse would have seized the rebellious wire, which set up in the honor of the father, and by fear of its reprisals, a totem with its image.
So that the situation does not reproduce, and not to risk the ire of the incorporated father, the wire laid down rules, corresponding to the two principal taboos: the proscription striking the women belonging to same the totem (inceste) and prohibition to kill the totem (murder and parricide).

Parallel between totemism and infantile sexuality

See also: infantile Sexuality

Freud starts from an interrogation first: why the interdicts of the murder and the inceste are so central in the human cultures, at the point to be beyond any written law?
It is also based on a theory in vogue in its time, which supposes that " ontogeny reproduced and contains the phylogénie" : i.e.: the embryo repeats all the stages of the evolution since fish until the primate. Freud can thus carry out these parallels between childhood and culture, and culture and psychopathology.

Freud compares the world " then; primitif" (such as he sees it starting from the myth of the horde) and the development of the child as well as the psychosexual stages which he released from his analyzes.

the inceste makes during with prohibition on behalf of the father to reach the mother, under penalty of castration (which origin the Oedipus complex ).

the taboo of the murder corresponds to prohibition to kill the father to adapt the mother and fact call to the notion of the Hilflosigkeit (translated like the " désaide").

Hilflosigkeit would be according to Freud the state of désaide, of solitary distress of the child in the event of abandonment of the parents, of his emotional abandonment. The child being a premature being, it is in the incapacity to provide for its own needs, and thus has need for the father (traditionally regarded as the provider of safety) to survive physically and psychiquement.
The murder of the father would deprive it of this assistance and would leave it stripped, a reprisal to which does not wish to expose the little boy, who in fact gives up his mother.

In the same way, totemism and animism would be according to Freud the proof of the belief of the " primitifs" in the absolute power of their thought, of their use of the magic Thought , thus making a bringing together with the Narcissism (which it will theorize only the following year) and the anal Stade (which has a predilection with the magic thought).

Parallel between " company primitive" and psychopathology

Freud thus compares the evolution of the human beliefs and pathologies mental, on the basis of presupposed the psychoanalytical usual one that the psychopathological etiology takes seat in childhood and the first childhood.

Thus, in the exercise of the magic thought and of the rites totemists and animists, Freud locates a similarity with the obsessional rites intended to draw aside the anguish or to prevent the explosion of its unconscious hatred (because of a fixing to the anal Stade with the access of an Oedipus complex problematic).

If " sauvages" totemists described by Freud are culturally with the anal Stade, the Westerners would be with the Phallic stage, developing the problems of the castration.

A theory of the culture

The meal totemic like base of the culture

The Culture was thus born under the auspices from the murder and the inceste.

The two universal taboos of the inceste and the murder would thus come from this original assassination, followed remorse, this act that the child is satisfied with fantasmer before driving back it, and of him also to integrate in the form of moral authority (called later on Surmoi) the two principal interdicts.

In order to explain this psychic transmission of cultural interdicts, Freud uses here the theory of Lamarck of conservation and transmission of the acquired features (refuted since by the scientific community): the primitive feast would thus remain to some extent in a kind of memory phylogenetic, explaining the universality of the Oedipus complex .

Culture according to Freud

For Freud, culture and psychic is in interaction: if there were no culture (relayed by the parental interdicts) we let us live in the field of the Jouissance immédiate.
The culture would be thus what pushes us to defend us against our pulsated, to give up it, in exchange of compensations that Freud exposes in the Avenir of an illusion .

The idea of Freud is that the human society traverses a linear and similar way, comprising a departure and thus an end: it supposes thus that the totemic companies and animists are " enfants" , of the companies children compared to civilizations monotheists, more advanced on the scale of the cultures.
Freud thus supposes that the passage of the totemism and the polytheism to the monotheism of the Judeo-Christian type, with this new all-powerful and unified paternal figure results from this linear development of the culture, and thus constitutes a step moreover towards the cultural adulthood.

The polemic around Totem and taboo

Universality of the psychoanalysis

The work raises the question (always open) of the psychoanalytical universality of the concepts, and the relevance of their application to the cultures different from the nôtre.
Freud presupposes indeed that the fundamental moments constitutive of psyché are universal, like the Oedipus complex .
Bronislaw Malinowski, in sexuality and its repression in the primitive companies (1921) made state of its arguments against this assumption. The Trobriandaise company has a structure of relationship known as matrilinéaire, system in which the child " appartient" with the maternal line. One of the consequences is the particular place taken by the maternal uncle in the social life of the child. Sensitive to the arguments of Malinowski, Freud charged Géza Róheim, ethnologist and psychoanalyst Hungarian, of a mission on the ground in order to study these objections. Work of Róheim shows that if it is manifest that part of heinous motions are related to the maternal uncle, it is not less true than the problems oedipienne integrate the biological father. The child grows with the latter and it is only at the age of 7-8 years that the social influence of the maternal uncle takes really effect. The Oedipus complex preserves his statute of complex nucléaire.

Relevance of the myth freudien of the horde

The myth which is the keystone of Totem and taboo is for a long time refuted by the scientific community. The primitive horde seen by Freud did not exist, which raises the question of the validity of the assertions of Totem and taboo.
In the same way, how to imagine the remorse at the origin of the culture, therefore language and belief if culture it did not have there? The myth freudien would be thus tautological.

If these criticisms towards the model of the horde and thus certain positions defended in Totem and taboo are relatively accepted by the psychoanalytical community, it seems that the parallels stated higher still preserve their theoretical value.

Totem and Tabou (1913) ED.: Payot, 2004, ISBN 2228894079

See too

the Taboo of the inceste
To download Totem and Tabou
Totem and Tabou (full text)

External bonds

Crowned violence! , the murder of the father revisited by Freud, Girard and Lacan , by CH. Bormans, psychanlayste.
Analysis of Totem and taboo, by Patrick Fermi

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