Totem and Taboo

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.