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Totem and Taboo

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398 views2 pages

Totem and Taboo

Uploaded by

Victoria Cosl
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Eberhard Th.

Haas
What has become of Totem and Taboo?

Traditional theories of ritual, which Freud and Reik invoked at the beginning of the twentieth
century and attempted to integrate within psychoanalytic thought, have been back in fashion for
some years now. In addition, various interdisciplinary research projects are currently devoted to
aspects of the ‘dynamics of ritual’. The debate concerns not only rituals in the original sense but
also re-tribalizations, modern totemisms and new ritual formations, for instance on the Internet or
in the media. Civil-religious manifestations in relation to catastrophes, including commemorati-
ons of the Holocaust, also belong in this context.

As regards our own discipline, psychoanalysis seems substantially unable to respond to demand
to the challenges of this field because it has lost touch with Freud’s Totem and Taboo. It will be
recalled that in 1920 the well-known American ethnologist A.L. Kroeber published a devastating
critique of Freud’s work of cultural theory, and that much store was set by the views he expressed
in it because they flowed from the pen of a researcher who was himself close to psychoanalysis.
Since then Freud’s book has met with almost total rejection – and at first more so within than
outside psychoanalytic circles. There is virtually no biography of Freud in which this cornerstone
of his thought does not appear as a stumbling block, and which does not repeat Kroeber’s dictum
that Totem and Taboo has been ethnologically refuted. Psychoanalysts in consequence eventu-
ally came to consider the work solely from the point of view of its author’s hidden conflicts and
unresolved traumas. Totem and Taboo aroused interest as a manifest dream, to be deciphered in
terms of its latent dream thoughts in the context of a continuation of Freud’s self-analysis that
was deemed incomplete.

What was consistently overlooked was the fact that by 1939, the year of Freud’s death and of
the outbreak of the Second World War, Kroeber had become more reflective: he was no longer
happy with his vehement attack on Freud’s book, in which he ‘tore it to shreds’ (Kroeber, 1939, p.
306), and could now turn to account much of Freud’s description of the processes at work. Kro-
eber now saw Freud’s thesis on the theory of culture no longer as a once-for-all prehistoric event
– ‘not a unique event’ (1939, p. 309) – but instead, in conjunction with the Oedipus complex, as a
systematic process of hominization extending over millennia. In this revision he also showed how
much of Freud’s thought and how many of his concepts – regression, infantile fixations, dream
symbolism, the sense of guilt, etc. – had already trickled through into other sciences; the same
was later to be true of Freud’s synthesis of cultural theory. It is time for the manifest text of Totem
and Taboo once again to arouse curiosity on the part of psychoanalysis, particularly as the use and
further development of Freud’s ideas on the primal tragedy of mankind by other disciplines have
opened up new and exciting prospects.
The ‘Ritual and Psychoanalysis’ network wishes to provide information on the reappropriation of
Totem and Taboo as the foundation of a general theory of culture. It also aims to forge links with
scientists seeking psychoanalytic discussion partners in this field. For a world increasingly at risk
of losing control of its own potential for violence, Freud’s views on the theory of culture – which
also enlighten us as to the ultimate foundations of culture and its cohesion – may be of more use
than simply providing psychobiographical presumptions about their author.

References
Haas, E.Th. (2002a) Ist Totem und Tabu ein exotischer Tagtraum oder Grundlage einer allgemeinen Kulturtheorie?
Psyche 56: 139–44.
Haas, E.Th. (2002b) ... und Freud hat doch recht. Die Entstehung der Kultur durch Transformation der Gewalt. (Psy-
chosozial) Gießen.
Kroeber, A.L. (1920) Totem and taboo: an ethnologic psychoanalysis. In A.L. Kroeber, The Nature of Culture. Chica-
go: University of Chicago Press, 1952, pp. 301–5.
Kroeber, A.L. (1939) Totem and Taboo in retrospect. In A.L. Kroeber, The Nature of Culture. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1952, pp. 306–9.

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