Totem and Taboo

Four essays apply the psychoanalytic method to the data of late-Victorian anthropology: the horror of incest among primitive peoples, the ambivalence of taboo, the omnipotence of thought in animism and obsessional neurosis, and the speculative "return of totemism in childhood" with its myth of the primal patricide. Whatever the standing of its anthropology today, *Totem and Taboo* remains a landmark of psychoanalytic thought and the most ambitious early attempt to derive the structure of human culture from the structure of unconscious wishes. A. A. Brill's 1918 translation.