Totem and Taboo

160 Pages·0.63 MB·English

by  Sigmund Freud

Totem and Taboo
‘Freud has told us that for him all natural science, medi-
cine, and psychotherapy were a lifelong journey round
and back to the early passion of his youth for the
history of mankind, for the origins of religion and moral-
ity – an interest which at the height of his career broke
out to such magnificent effect in Totem and Taboo.’
Thomas Mann
‘Relations between social anthropology and psycho-
logy are still ill-defined and unstable. But in any reso-
lution of them the work of psychoanalysts must be
taken very seriously into account. It is very useful, then,
to have this new translation of the pioneer work.’
Nature
‘Freud had a strong element of the artist in his com-
position. Nearly all his work was well translated into
English, with one glaring exception: Totem and Taboo.
Now, at last ... justice has been done.... The book
itself is one of the most fascinating and characteristic,
and also of the most speculative, in the whole Freudian
canon.’
Books of the Month
Sigmund
Freud
Totem and Taboo
Some Points of Agreement between the
Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics
Authorized translation by James Strachey
London and New York
First published 1913 by Hugo Heller
English edition first published in the United Kingdom 1919
by George Routledge & Sons
This translation first published 1950 by Routledge & Kegan Paul
First published in Routledge Classics 2001
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004.
Translation © 1950 Routledge & Kegan Paul
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 0-203-16470-9 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-25893-2 (Adobe eReader Format)
ISBN 0–415–25387–X(Print Edition)
CONTENTS
Translator’s Note vii
Preface ix
Preface to the Hebrew Translation xiii
1 The Horror of Incest 1
2 Taboo and Emotional Ambivalence 21
3 Animism, Magic and the Omnipotence of
Thoughts 87
4 The Return of Totemism in Childhood 116
List of Works referred to in the Text 188
Index 195

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
As Freud explains in his own preface, the four essays comprised
in this volume were originally published in the pages of the
periodical Imago (Vienna) under the title ‘Über einige Überein-
stimmungen im Seelenleben der Wilden und der Neurotiker’
[‘On Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of
Savages and Neurotics’]—the first and second essays in Vol. I
(1912) and the third and fourth in Vol. II (1913). All four essays
were collected and published under the new title of Totem und Tabu
in 1913 (Vienna, Hugo Heller). New editions appeared in 1920,
1922 and 1934 and the work was included in Volume X of
Freud’s Gesammelte Schriften (Vienna, 1924) and as Volume IX of
his Gesammelte Werke (London, 1940). None of these later editions
show any variations of substance from the original one. An Eng-
lish translation by A. A. Brill was published in New York in 1918
(London, 1919). The book has also been translated into Hun-
garian (1918), Spanish (1923), Portuguese (n.d.), French (1924),
Japanese (twice, 1930 and 1934) and Hebrew (1939). The last
of these was introduced by a specially written preface, which,
viii translator’s note
on account of its particular interest, I have included in this
volume.
For the purposes of the present, entirely new, version I have
made an effort to verify all quotations and references so far as
possible; and I have put right a considerable number of inaccur-
acies which had crept into the German editions. Particulars of all
works referred to in the text will be found in a list at the end of
the volume. The responsibility for any matter printed between
square brackets is mine.
My grateful thanks are due to Miss Anna Freud for her critical
revision of the entire translation, and to Mr. Roger Money-Kyrle
for reading through the typescript and making many helpful
suggestions.
J. S.
PREFACE
The four essays that follow were originally published (under a
heading which serves as the present book’s sub-title) in the first
two volumes of Imago, a periodical issued under my direction.
They represent a first attempt on my part at applying the point of
view and the findings of psycho-analysis to some unsolved prob-
lems of social psychology [Völkerpsychologie]. Thus they offer a
methodological contrast on the one hand to Wilhelm Wundt’s
extensive work, which applies the hypotheses and working
methods of non-analytic psychology to the same purposes, and
on the other hand to the writings of the Zurich school of
psycho-analysis, which endeavour, on the contrary, to solve the
problems of individual psychology with the help of material
derived from social psychology. (Cf. Jung, 1912 and 1913.) I
readily confess that it was from these two sources that I received
the first stimulus for my own essays.
I am fully conscious of the deficiencies of these studies. I need
not mention those which are necessarily characteristic of pion-
eering work; but others require a word of explanation. The four
x preface
essays collected in these pages aim at arousing the interest of a
fairly wide circle of educated readers, but they cannot in fact be
understood and appreciated except by those few who are no
longer strangers to the essential nature of psycho-analysis. They
seek to bridge the gap between students of such subjects as
social anthropology, philology and folklore on the one hand,
and psycho-analysts on the other. Yet they cannot offer to either
side what each lacks—to the former an adequate initiation into
the new psychological technique or to the latter a sufficient
grasp of the material that awaits treatment. They must therefore
rest content with attracting the attention of the two parties and
with encouraging a belief that occasional co-operation between
them could not fail to be of benefit to research.
It will be found that the two principal themes from which the
title of this little book is derived—totems and taboos—have not
received the same treatment. The analysis of taboos is put for-
ward as an assured and exhaustive attempt at the solution of the
problem. The investigation of totemism does no more than
declare that ‘here is what psycho-analysis can at the moment
contribute towards elucidating the problem of the totem’. The
difference is related to the fact that taboos still exist among us.
Though expressed in a negative form and directed towards
another subject-matter, they do not differ in their psychological
nature from Kant’s ‘categorical imperative’, which operates in a
compulsive fashion and rejects any conscious motives. Totem-
ism, on the contrary, is something alien to our contemporary
feelings—a religio-social institution which has been long aban-
doned as an actuality and replaced by newer forms. It has left
only the slightest traces behind it in the religions, manners and
customs of the civilized peoples of to-day and has been subject
to far-reaching modifications even among the races over which
it still holds sway. The social and technical advances in human
history have affected taboos far less than the totem.
An attempt is made in this volume to deduce the original