The totem stands at one of the most contested crossroads in depth psychology, where ethnographic data, speculative prehistory, and clinical theory converge with uneven results. Freud's foundational treatment in Totem and Taboo (1913) establishes the totem animal as the displaced father of the primal horde — a figure simultaneously revered and prohibited, structuring both religion and exogamy through ambivalent identification. Abraham extends this psychoanalytic reading, documenting the survival of totemistic ambivalence in the unconscious of the modern child. Jung reframes the totem entirely: where Freud sees a disguised father-imago, Jung sees the archetype in its most archaic social form, the totem being an embodied collective memory of the half-animal, half-human ancestor — that is, an expression of the archetypes themselves, as even Lévy-Bruhl intuited. Neumann deepens the Jungian revision, arguing that the totem is never merely personal; it is the transpersonal, numinous formative principle of primitive collective life, constituting the spiritual rather than the patriarchal foundation of clan identity. Harrison situates the totem within the ritual logic of sacrament and sacrifice, attending to the mutual dependency of clan and totem animal in Australian ceremony. Campbell extends the totem laterally across comparative mythology, tracing its structural logic into indigenous American monumental art and the circum-Pacific style. Across these positions, the central tension is clear: whether the totem is a screen for unconscious familial conflict or a genuine vehicle of the transpersonal sacred.
In the library
22 passages
The clearest example of this phenomenon—the projection of group wholeness—is totemism. The spiritual nature of the totem has a religious and, in even higher degree, a social and ethical significance. It is the formative principle of all primitive life
Neumann argues that totemism is the paradigmatic instance of group-wholeness projected outward, giving the totem a spiritual and ethical — not merely psychological — authority as the organizing principle of primitive collective existence.
Neumann, Erich, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, 2019thesis
The totem is indeed partly a father, but it never has a personal character, let alone that of the personal father. On the contrary, the whole point of the ritual is that the procreative spirit should be experienced as something remote and different, and yet as 'belonging.'
Neumann directly contests Freud's personalistic reading, insisting that the totem's essential character is transpersonal and numinous, not reducible to the projected father-imago.
Neumann, Erich, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, 2019thesis
What is essential in the totem is the idea of the archetypes. This idea is so suggestive that even Lévy-Bruhl, who can certainly not be suspected of espousing my psychology, says: 'Ce sont des types, vraiment des archetypes.'
Jung identifies the totem's psychological core as archetypal rather than paternal, citing Lévy-Bruhl's independent convergence on the same conclusion as external validation of the collective-unconscious interpretation.
Jung, C.G., Dream Interpretation Ancient and Modern: Notes from the Seminar Given in 1936-1941, 2014thesis
Freud has been able to show that these primitive peoples have an ambivalent attitude towards their totem. They will not hunt, kill, eat, or even touch the totem animal... but under special circumstances they will kill and eat it with elaborate ceremonial. The totem is the object both of their love and their fear.
Abraham consolidates Freud's core psychoanalytic finding — that the totem is the object of constitutive ambivalence — and links this archaic attitude to traceable survivals in the unconscious of contemporary children.
Abraham, Karl, Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis, 1927thesis
they will not hunt the totem animal or kill or eat it and, if it is something other than an animal, they refrain from making use of it in other ways. The rules against killing or eating the totem are not the only taboos; sometimes they are forbidden to touch it, or even to look at it
Freud systematically enumerates the structure of totemic prohibition, establishing the layered taboo system through which the clan's ambivalent relation to its sacred ancestor is institutionally managed.
The members of the totemic clan often believe that they are related to the totem animal by the bond of a common ancestry. This catechism of the totemic religion can only be seen at its proper value if we take into account the fact that Reinach has included in it all the indications and traces
Freud surveys the characteristic features of totemism as a religio-social system, grounding the entire structure in the clan's belief in common descent from the totem animal.
Totemism, on the contrary, is something alien to our contemporary feelings—a religio-social institution which has been long abandoned as an actuality and replaced by newer forms. It has left only the slightest traces behind it in the religions, manners and customs of the civilized peoples of to-day
Freud situates totemism historically as a superseded institution whose psychic residues must be reconstructed from childhood analogy and cultural trace rather than direct observation.
the theme of the totemic sacrifice and the relation of son to father... Robertson Smith has shown us that the ancient totem meal recurs in the original form of sacrifice. The meaning of the act is the same: sanctification through participation in a common meal.
Freud draws on Robertson Smith to establish the structural continuity between the totemic sacrificial meal and later religious sacrifice, reading both as expressions of collective guilt and sanctification.
The totem-animal is in general the guardian and protector of its human counterpart, but the relation is strictly mutual; the animal depends on the man as the man on the animal.
Harrison demonstrates the reciprocal dependency between human clan and totem animal, illustrated through the Intichiuma ceremonies in which men ritually promote the multiplication of their totem species.
Harrison, Jane Ellen, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 1912supporting
Totemism has commonly been treated as a primitive system both of religion and of society. As a system of religion it embraces the mystic union of the savage with his totem; as a system of society it comprises the relations in which men and women of the same totem stand to each other
Freud, citing Frazer, articulates totemism's dual function as simultaneously a religious and social institution, with the two canonical rules — no killing the totem, no marrying within it — defining its structure.
In the earliest times the sacrificial animal had itself been sacred and its life untouchable; it might only be killed if all the members of the clan participated in the deed and shared their guilt in the presence of the god
Freud reconstructs the original totemic sacrifice as a communal act requiring collective participation and shared guilt, prefiguring his theory of the primal crime and the origin of religion.
Many investigators are therefore inclined to regard it as a necessary phase of human development which has been passed through universally. How did prehistoric men come to adopt totems? How, that is, did they come to make the fact of their being descended from one animal or another the basis of their social obligations
Freud frames totemism as a universal developmental phase and poses the originary question — how did animal descent become the basis of social and sexual organization — that his entire investigation attempts to answer.
Man in the totemistic stage rarely sets himself as individual over against his tribe; he rarely sets himself as man over against the world around him. He has not yet fully captured his individual or his human soul, not yet drawn a circle round his separate self.
Harrison characterizes the totemistic stage as one of ego-undifferentiation, in which the boundary between self, species, and community has not yet crystallized into the distinct categories of modern consciousness.
Harrison, Jane Ellen, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 1912supporting
Frazer himself subsequently abandoned this theory that totemism was derived from a belief in souls; and, after coming to know of Spencer and Gillen's observations, adopted the sociological theory... But he came to see himself that the motive from which that second theory derived totemism was too 'rational'
Freud traces the theoretical impasse in Frazer's successive attempts to derive totemism from souls, sociological utility, or a conception story, each discarded as insufficiently primitive — clearing the field for a psychoanalytic solution.
The attitude taken by an author on the problems of exogamy must naturally depend to some extent on the position he has adopted towards the various theories of totemism.
Freud establishes the theoretical entanglement of totemism and exogamy, noting that any position on the origin of the totem necessarily determines one's account of the incest prohibition.
Hence the spirit totem and the ancestor to whom it first appeared often merge in the figure of the spiritual 'Founding Father,' where the word 'founding' is to be taken literally, as denoting a spiritual creator or originator.
Neumann argues that the spirit totem and ancestral figure converge in a transpersonal 'Founding Father,' making the totem the vehicle of inspirational, not biological, origin.
Neumann, Erich, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, 2019supporting
The riddle of how it came about that the real family was replaced by the totem clan must perhaps remain unsolved till the nature of the totem itself can be explained.
Freud acknowledges the constitutive enigma at the center of totemic theory: the social replacement of the biological family by the totemic clan cannot be resolved independently of explaining the totem's own nature.
this shift to animal shape is not a power of transformation due to the mature omnipotence of the god; it is with the Dithyrambos from his birth; it is part of his essence as the Twice-Born.
Harrison traces the totemistic substratum of Greek religion in the animal-shape of Dionysus, arguing that the god's theriomorphic nature is a survival of authentic totemic identity rather than a later theological metaphor.
Harrison, Jane Ellen, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 1912supporting
the game of identification was played in relation to the animals—and in particular those upon which the life of the human society depended. And the game was that of a mutual understanding, supposed to exist between the two worlds
Campbell frames the totemic ceremonial complex as a structured game of interspecies identification, in which the social coordination of human and animal worlds is realized through ritual performance.
Campbell, Joseph, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959supporting
a piling up of similar forms in vertical series (principle of the totem pole), a way of splitting animal forms, either down the back or down the front, and opening them like a book
Campbell identifies the formal principle of the totem pole — vertical serialization and bilateral splitting of animal form — as a diagnostic feature of the Old Pacific Style linking East Asian and Northwest Coast indigenous art.
Campbell, Joseph, Oriental Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume II, 1962aside
we mentally rebel against the totemist's claim of kinship with beast and plant. The average Athenian, when he was told by Empedokles that he had once been a bird or a tree, was probably as much surprised and disgusted as the theologian of the last century
Harrison uses the modern and ancient resistance to totemic kinship as a comparative index of how far the sense of self has hardened away from the original participatory identity with the natural world.
Harrison, Jane Ellen, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 1912aside
Against this most 'rational' of all the theories of totemism it has been objected that feeding conditions of this kind are never found among primitive races and have probably never existed. Savages are omnivorous, and the more so the lower their condition.
Freud dismisses the nutritional theory of totemism's origin on empirical grounds, clearing the way for psychological rather than subsistence-based explanations.