Totem and Taboo

by Sigmund Freud

Blurb

Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics is a 1913 book by Sigmund Freud. It is a collection of four essays first published in the journal Imago: "The Horror of Incest", "Taboo and Emotional Ambivalence", "Animism, Magic and the Omnipotence of Thoughts", and "The Return of Totemism in Childhood". In these essays, Freud applies psychoanalysis to the fields of archaeology, anthropology, and the study of religion. Though Totem and Taboo has been seen as one of the classics of anthropology, comparable to Edward Burnett Tylor's Primitive Culture and Sir James George Frazer's The Golden Bough, the work is now almost universally regarded as discredited by anthropologists.

First Published

1913

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