Concept
Primal horde
Freud's hypothesis, taken in part from Darwin and Atkinson and set out in Totem und Tabu (1913), that humans first lived in hordes ruled by a violent father who kept all the women for himself. The sons banded together, killed and ate him, and then, out of remorse and the ambivalence of their feelings, forbade the killing of the totem animal that stood for him and renounced the women of the clan. Freud saw in this deed the origin of the incest taboo, of morality and of religion, and returned to it in Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse (1921) and Der Mann Moses (1939).
Development
1913
introduced by Sigmund Freud
Taking Darwin's hypothesis of a primal horde ruled by a jealous father, Freud built on it in the fourth essay of Totem und Tabu the myth of the brothers who kill and eat the father, then out of guilt raise the totem and the incest taboo. In 1921 he read the group as a revival of the primal horde.
In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921);Totem and Taboo (1913)
Relations
- 1913 introduced by Sigmund Freud
Taking Darwin's hypothesis of a primal horde ruled by a jealous father, Freud built on it in the fourth essay of Totem und Tabu the myth of the brothers who kill and eat the father, then out of guilt raise the totem and the incest taboo. In 1921 he read the group as a revival of the primal horde.
Works
- 1913
Four essays, first published in Imago in 1912–1913 and collected as a book by Hugo Heller in 1913, that compare the mental life of tribal peoples, as the anthropology of the time described it, with the mental life of neurotics. They treat in turn the horror of incest; taboo and the ambivalence of feeling; animism, magic and the omnipotence of thoughts; and the return of totemism in childhood. In the last essay Freud puts forward the hypothesis of a primal horde in which the brothers killed and devoured a violent father. Their remorse over the deed and their ambivalence toward him, he argues, gave rise to totemism, to the prohibitions on murder and incest, and to social organisation, morality and religion.
- 1921
Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego
Freud’s study of group psychology. Starting from the accounts of crowds given by Le Bon and McDougall, he argues that what binds the members of a group together, and binds them to their leader, is libido diverted from its sexual aims. He takes the church and the army as examples of artificial groups held together by love for a leader. He develops the concept of identification as the earliest emotional tie to another person, and compares being in love and hypnosis to group formation: in each, an object is put in place of the ego ideal. A group is then a number of individuals who have put one and the same object in place of their ego ideal and so have identified with one another. Freud links the leader to the father of the primal horde, and separates the ego ideal from the ego as a differentiating grade within it.
See also
Linked from
People
References
- Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego1921Evidence for a relation
- Totem and Taboo1913Evidence for a relation