5 - The Psychoanalysis of Culture

Summary

IN THE PREVIOUS CHAPTER, the focus was on the interpretation of individual works of fiction. In the present chapter, I wish to examine the application of psychoanalysis to a number of social phenomena. My point of departure will be Freud's Totem und Tabu (Totem and Taboo, 1913).

Totem and Taboo I

Totem und Tabu ranks as one of Freud's least convincing works. One of its early critics, the American anthropologist A. L. Kroeber, who was by no means unsympathetic towards psychoanalysis, considered it to be so weak that he compared demolishing it to breaking a butterfly on the wheel. Academic opinion of the book has hardly improved since. Yet Totem und Tabu has had a strong influence on literary circles, in particular on German writers of the first half of the twentieth century. Moreover, although the theory it develops may be untenable, the book has proved a source of thought-provoking social critique. Before assessing its merits and demerits, however, let us look at its main ideas.

Totem und Tabu aims to apply the findings of psychoanalysis to certain unsolved problems of anthropology. Central to this aim are two key elements of prehistoric and, in Freud's terminology, “primitive” societies, totems and taboos. Totemism, Freud explains on the basis of the anthropological theories of his day (especially those of J. G. Frazer and W. Robertson Smith) and with reference to the native tribes of Australia, his main object of research, is a kind of prereligious system of belief and the basis of prehistoric and “primitive” social organization.