Totem and Taboo

'Totem and Taboo' began life as four separate essays published by Sigmund Freud between 1912 and 1913. Freud was struck by the strong parallels between the behavior of neurotics, children and pre-literate tribal peoples (which he termed 'primitives'), and boldly extended his psycho-analytic theories into the fields of social psychology and anthropology. His belief that humanity's distant past was moulded by the deepest urges of the human psyche led him to propose an astonishing theory which brought together such disparate concepts as Animism, the Primal Horde, Totemism, Cannibalism, and the Oedipus Complex to explain the origin of both civilisation and religious practices.