IV

BOOK

One Hundred Years of Totem and Taboo

Roland Littlewood

“Through all the years

Immutable stands this event.
….: all men fall into sin
But sinning, he is not forever lost.”
Sophocles, The Theban Plays (pages 124, 153)

䡲 ABSTRACT: One hundred years after the publication of Totem and Taboo, Freud’s book
is summarized, and its reception and current status noted.

䡲 KEYWORDS: cognition, incest, religion, taboo, totem

Totem and Taboo was first published as a single volume in 1913. Its four parts had been pre-
viously published separately in the psychoanalytical journal Imago although they had prob-
ably been originally conceived as a single piece (Wallace 1983). The book appeared at a time
when psychoanalysis had first achieved some wider public acceptance, with the foundation of
an international psychoanalytical association; Adler, the first major dissident, had departed, and
the second, Jung, was in the process of doing the same. Freud’s circle consisted of a commit-
ted group of doctors and others who accepted his understanding of the dynamic unconscious
and the method of free association. The book demonstrated Freud’s continued interest in the
subjects of ethology and history, and it employed detailed citations of social anthropological
fieldwork and data collection such as that by Spencer and Gillen (1899), who were also used by
Durkheim in his The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912).
The introduction presents the general reader with two specialized terms—“totem” and
“taboo”. The “totem”, an Amerindian term for the animal/plant ancestor of a clan, is not eaten by
clan members, except rarely and then ritually; members of a clan cannot intermarry, a process
of exogamy (marriage outside the community) that others had already argued was an extension
of the apparently universal incest prohibition. “Taboo”, a Polynesian word, signified both the
power of the sacred and of its apparent opposite, the polluted. Freud, with his existing interest in
the ambivalence of mental life, emphasizes the similarities between these two contraries, which
he finds also in clinical obsessions. Despite his then warning of the only apparent similarities

Religion and Society: Advances in Research 4 (2013): 196–200 © Berghahn Books

doi:10.3167/arrs.2013.040111
 One Hundred Years of Totem and Taboo 䡲 197

between ethological data and clinical observations, he proceeds to an interpretation of taboo on

the model of obsessional acts: they are both a defense against a prohibited act (typically for obses-
sions the child touching its genitals) and at the same time a disguised satisfying of the act.
Both a neurosis and a taboo are contagious, and another object can stand in for the prohibited
one, and then another in its turn and so on—a chain of displacements generating a cultural fact.
He gives four examples: the appeasement of the slain enemy, and the restrictions then placed on
the killer; ambivalent taboos placed on the king who is both revered and at times reviled; and
taboos placed on the dead who are seen as dangerous—a projection on to them, says Freud, of
our ambivalent attitudes toward them whilst they were alive.
Then comes an interesting point when Freud contrasts individual neuroses—which subserve
individual conflicts—with social reality, which subserves our collective interest. From this point
in the book onwards, the anthropological data cited become less significant as such and are
increasingly subject to psychoanalytical interpretation. He briefly outlines Tylor’s theory of ani-
mism and Frazer’s two types of magic (contagion and similarity) placed under the rubric of the
“omnipotence of thought” (a phrase Freud borrows from a clinical subject) to argue that the
historical transition from animism to religion to science provides a model for the individual
cognitive development of the (modern) individual: ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, Haeckel’s
biogenetic law (Gould 1977).
He proceeds to consider the different theories for the origin of totemism—the nominal, the
sociological, and the psychosocial—and to place particular emphasis on the denial of human
paternity among the Central Australian Aranta (Aranda). He criticizes Westermarck’s thesis
that incest prohibition is “natural” (Greenberg and Littlewood 1995), and introduces Darwin’s
notion of the primal horde among the great apes in which a jealous patriarch is said to pos-
sess and monopolize all the females, and to expel or reduce to submission the younger males.
Moving to modern European children’s fear of animals, Freud suggests that phobias are often a
displacement of the boy’s ambivalent attitude to his own father (here the classic example is his
case of Little Hans). The phobia often presumes, or replaces, an identification with the animal.
Now, if the father equates with the totemic animal (who, remember, is our ancestor), then the
prohibitions (i) against killing the totem and (ii) against sex with the women of the totem, invert
and correspond to the desires to (ib) kill the father and (iib) have sex with the mother. (In other
words, what Freud had previously identified as the Oedipal desires.)
He then turns to Robertson-Smith’s (1894) idea of the sacrifice having originally been a com-
munal meal in which the participants identified themselves with one another and also with the
dead totemic animal whose death is both celebrated and mourned. We have now arrived at the
situation which Freud describes as follows: “if we bring together the psychoanalytical transla-
tion of the totem with the fact of the totem meal and with Darwin’s theories of the earliest state
of human society, the possibility of a deeper understanding emerges—a glimpse of a hypothesis
which may seem fantastic but which offers the advantage of establishing an unsuspected cor-
relation between groups of phenomena that have hitherto been disconnected” (p. 202).
So we come to the synthesis that Freud almost certainly had in mind from the beginning. The
sons of the primal horde, debarred from power and sexuality, revolt and kill their father, and
take the women. But because they loved as well as hated the old patriarch, they are filled with
guilt, and commemorate his death in a symbolic death, in which they identify the totem/sacri-
fice with their father, and identify themselves both with each other, and with the father/totem/
sacrifice. And to prevent a repetition of the situation, and in guilt, they renounce sex with their
sisters of the totem.
With some final remarks about the idea of original sin and the Christian notion of the Atone-
ment, Freud ends with raising again the problematic relationship between the individual con-
198 䡲 Roland Littlewood

sciousness and the collective and historical consciousness of humanity, arguing for the only
provisional nature of his method and conclusions.
The aftermath? Freud’s book had few immediate consequences for social anthropology. He
had unfortunately written it at the end of the period of evolutionary and intellectualist “arm-
chair” anthropology. The genius of Totem and Taboo was to have condensed so much into a
single theory just at the time when such attempts fell into disrepute by contrast with the detailed
field anthropology of Boas and his American colleagues and with the Cambridge University
Torres Straits Expedition (1898), together with the theoretical approaches of the French Année
Sociologique (for whom social facts must always be explained by social facts not by psychol-
ogy). They all pointed us in the direction of the detailed synchronic study of a single society
exemplified by Malinowski’s fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands. But it was Malinowski’s own
remarks about the universality of the Oedipus complex that occasioned renewed debate within
psychoanalysis.
In 1924, Ernest Jones, Freud’s first British adherent and later his biographer, read a paper
to the British Psychoanalytical Society dealing with papers already published by Malinowski,
which became the 1927 book Sex and Repression in Savage Society. In these pieces Malinowski
argued (not unsympathetically, we might note, to Freud) that the Oedipus complex depended
on a patrilineal, indeed patriarchal, society and that in matrilineal societies like the Trobriands,
certainly those without a notion of paternity, the father–son antagonism of the Oedipus complex
was replaced by antagonism between the mother’s brother and the son, and that the incestuous
inclinations of the son towards his mother were replaced by urges towards his sister (which were
strongly tabooed). Malinowski argues for a general “nuclear complex”, which could be patterned
in different ways, Oedipal or Trobriand, by the society.1 Jones objects that the Trobriand denial
of paternity merely illustrates the extremely strong nature of Oedipal desires there, and that
Malinowski had emphasized the mundane power of the mother’s brother (or of the father in
Western societies) at the expense of considering the sexual jealousy of the son, a point taken up
by the later Culture and Personality School of American anthropologists who were influenced
by psychoanalysis. One of these, Kroeber, wrote the first anthropological review of Totem and
Taboo in 1920, after its translation into English, and pointed out that Freud’s linking together of
a variety of remote possibilities made the eventual synthesis less, not more, likely (1/4 x 1/4 =
1/16, not 1/2) (Wallace 1983).
The general anthropological conclusion is that Malinowski won the debate. He bounced back
against Jones in 1929 with the Sexual Life of Savages, which reasserted his earlier position. On
the whole, the details on the universality of the Oedipus complex, and hence on the validity of
the “totem and taboo hypothesis” have not been central to Culture and Personality anthropol-
ogy, which argued instead for the value of psychodynamic hypotheses in general and the notion
of the pan-human “arc of culture” available to any society from which it took its own particular
modal personality. Roheim argued that the Trobriand uncle only entered the son’s life at the
age of six, and so could hardly transform the Oedipus complex. Spiro (1982) reasserted Jones’s
arguments that Malinowski had downplayed sexual jealousy in favor of social power. Whether
the Trobriand downplaying of the Oedipus complex is actually evidence for its overwhelming
importance there is another matter. (This is of course a problem for empirical anthropologists
when considering the possible role of ambivalence when one social fact might be maintained by
two local contraries.) Parsons (1964) looked at the “Madonna complex” in Naples, which to my
mind is merely an extended type of Freud’s Oedipus complex.
I think the most useful current borrowings from Freud are to be found in Nuckolls (1998),
who considers social ambivalences (or better antinomies), and in Obeyesekere (1990), who
besides employing Oedipus for South Asian kingship uses the practicalities of clinical psycho-
 One Hundred Years of Totem and Taboo 䡲 199

analysis (transference, countertransference) as a potential tool in fieldwork. A common conclu-

sion is that in South Asia the resolution of the Oedipus complex is through the son’s “surrender”
to his father rather than his identifying with him and thence “overcoming” him as in Western
cultures (Jadhav, Littlewood, and Ragoram 1999). Both Nuckolls and Obeyesekere refuse to dis-
card Freud’s book altogether, whereas Culture and Personality scholars interested in the psycho-
logical processes underplaying social cognition seem to have shifted away from psychoanalysis
and into ethnopsychology (local categories recalling a psychology) and thence into cognitive
anthropology. We are now concerned with categories rather than competencies, although still
interested in their origins, and thus with what Freud called a metapsychology. But together with
that, evolutionary speculations have reappeared in social anthropology in the work of Sperber,
Bloch, Boyer, Atran, and others, but hardly at the level of the grand metanarratives of recapitula-
tion. (Freud had argued that the latent period in male sexual development corresponds to the
historical Ice Age.) The sensitivity of psychoanalysis to the subjective experience of the analyst
(or here the anthropologist) has, I suggest, much to teach us, but whether there is value for eth-
nography in an essentially nineteenth century form of European psychological healing is quite
another matter.

䡲 ROLAND LITTLEWOOD is Professorial Research Fellow, University College, London; formerly

Professor of Anthropology and Psychiatry UCL; former president of the Royal Anthropo-
logical Institute; Wilde Lecturer in Natural Theology, University of Oxford; and Consultant
Psychiatrist, University College Hospital. He has conducted fieldwork in Trinidad, Haiti,
Lebanon, Italy, and Albania, and authored seven books and around 200 academic papers.
Department of Anthropology, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E
6BT. Phone: 020-7679-3000; Email: rlittlewood@ucl.ac.uk

䡲 NOTES
This was the keynote address to the Conference on Anthropology, Culture and Cognition, held at Lisbon
University, 2013.
1. For a recent discussion of this, now termed the “family complex”, see Johnson and Price-Williams
(1996).

䡲 REFERENCES
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200 䡲 Roland Littlewood

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