Totemism occupies a contested and generative position across the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as a clinical hypothesis, an anthropological datum, and a philosophical problem concerning the origins of religion, law, and social organisation. Freud’s ‘Totem and Taboo’ (1913) establishes the dominant axis: totemism is a religio-social institution encoding the two primal taboos — against killing the totem animal and against incest — which Freud reads as the cultural precipitate of the Oedipus complex and the primal parricide. Karl Abraham extends this thesis by demonstrating the persistence of the totemistic attitude in the unconscious of the modern child. Erich Neumann, by contrast, repositions the totem away from the personal father and toward the transpersonal numinosum — the projection of group wholeness onto an archetypal carrier — thereby placing totemism within a developmental schema of collective consciousness. Otto Rank reads totemism through Durkheim as a universal principle of world-partition rather than a merely social institution. Jane Ellen Harrison, approaching from classical scholarship, illuminates totemism’s ritual substrate in communal sacrifice and the magical reciprocity between clan and totem animal, grounding Greek religious forms in these archaic structures. Joseph Campbell situates totemic identification within a comparative mythology of sympathetic participation between human communities and the animal world. The central tensions in the corpus are: the personal-father versus transpersonal-archetype reading of the totem; the universality or historical contingency of totemism as a developmental stage; and the adequacy of the Oedipal reduction.
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.
Freud defines totemism as an archaic religio-social institution whose direct presence has dissolved but whose psychological residues survive in childhood and in the unconscious, making psychoanalytic reconstruction of its meaning both possible and necessary.
, Totem and Taboo, 1913thesis
the two taboo prohibitions which constitute its core—not to kill the totem animal and not to have sexual relations with a woman of the same totem—coincide in their content with the two crimes of Oedipus.
Freud identifies the two foundational taboos of totemism — against killing and against incest — as direct structural cognates of the Oedipus complex, linking the origin of totemism to the repressed nuclear wishes of childhood.
, Totem and Taboo, 1913thesis
The two taboos of totemism with which human morality has its beginning, are not on a par psychologically. The first of them, the law protecting the totem animal, is founded wholly on emotional motives.
Freud distinguishes the two taboos of totemism psychologically: the prohibition against killing the totem is purely affective in origin, while the incest prohibition additionally carries a practical social foundation.
, Totem and Taboo, 1913thesis
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.
Neumann reframes totemism not as a father-substitute but as the projection of group wholeness onto an archetypal carrier, making it the formative principle of all primitive social, ethical, and religious life.
, 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.
Neumann directly corrects Freud’s reduction of the totem to the personal father, insisting the totem functions as a transpersonal numinosum whose alien quality is essential to its ritual efficacy.
, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, 2019thesis
Psycho-analytical investigation has brought to light the remarkable fact that under the conditions of civilization of to-day the totemistic attitude still reappears in the mental life of the child, and leaves behind unmistakable traces in the unconscious of the individual.
Abraham confirms and extends Freud’s thesis by demonstrating the clinical persistence of the totemistic attitude — including ambivalence toward the totem-as-father — in the unconscious mental life of contemporary children and adults.
, Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis, 1927thesis
children displace some of their feelings from their father on to an animal. Analysis is able to trace the associative paths along which this displacement passes.
Freud anchors his theory of totemism’s origin in clinical child analysis, showing that animal phobias in children (such as Little Hans) recapitulate the displacement of Oedipal ambivalence onto a totemic animal substitute.
, Totem and Taboo, 1913thesis
the totem animal in real life a substitute for the father; and this tallies with the contradictory fact that, though the killing of the animal is as a rule forbidden, yet its killing becomes a festive occasion.
Freud synthesises the psychoanalytic translation of the totem as father-substitute with the paradox of the sacrificial totem meal, reading the ambivalence of love and murder as the psychological core of totemic religion.
, Totem and Taboo, 1913thesis
since the appearance of Durkheim’s great work we have no excuse for regarding the totemism of the primitives as a mere principle of the social structure, but must see in it a universal principle of world-partition.
Rank, drawing on Durkheim, argues that totemism is not reducible to a social institution but constitutes a universal cognitive and metaphysical principle by which primitives organise the totality of experience into differentiated categories.
, Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development, 1932thesis
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, establishes the dual character of totemism as simultaneously a religious system (mystical union with the totem) and a social-juridical system (rules of exogamy and clan membership).
, Totem and Taboo, 1913thesis
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 identifies the reciprocal covenant between clan and totem animal as the structural core of totemic religion, exemplified by the Intichiuma ceremonies in which ritual action is directed toward multiplying the totem species.
, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 1912supporting
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; in a number of cases the totem may not be spoken of by its proper name.
Freud catalogues the elaborate network of taboos surrounding the totem, showing that the prohibition system extends beyond alimentary restrictions to encompass sight, touch, and naming — evidence of the totem’s numinous charge.
, Totem and Taboo, 1913supporting
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 systematically inventories the twelve features of totemic religion drawn from Reinach’s comparative survey, establishing the phenomenological baseline against which psychoanalytic explanation is to be measured.
, Totem and Taboo, 1913supporting
Many investigators are therefore inclined to regard it as a necessary phase of human development which has been passed through universally.
Freud notes the comparative-ethnographic consensus that totemism represents a universal developmental stage in human prehistory, while acknowledging that the theoretical disputes about its origin remain unresolved.
, Totem and Taboo, 1913supporting
In primitive totemistic conditions the Emu man, by virtue of his common life, his common mana, controlled, or rather sympathetically invigorated, Emus; but his power was limited to Emus.
Harrison traces the historical dissolution of the totemistic system, showing how the departmentalised, mana-based power of the totem-clan specialist gradually expanded into generalised sovereignty over fertility and weather.
, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 1912supporting
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, via Robertson Smith, reconstructs the primal totem meal as a communal sacrificial act whose shared guilt and sacred consumption constituted the original form of religious solidarity and the template for later sacrifice.
, Totem and Taboo, 1913supporting
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 traces the continuity between the archaic totem meal and later sacrificial religion, arguing that the structure of communal guilt, sanctification, and identification with the deity derives directly from the totemic prototype.
, Totem and Taboo, 1913supporting
it is important to note that 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 demonstrates that the Greek god’s theriomorphic aspect is not a late mythological accretion but an archaic totemic inheritance, connecting the animal-form of Dionysus directly to the pre-personal stage of totemic religious identity.
, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 1912supporting
Thus totemism did not arise from the religious needs of men but from their practical, every-day needs. The core of totemism, nomenclature, is a result of the primitive technique of writing.
Freud surveys the nominalist theory of totemism’s origin — that totemic names arose from pictographic identification rather than religious sentiment — in order to contrast it with his own psychoanalytic derivation.
, Totem and Taboo, 1913supporting
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.
Freud traces Frazer’s successive revisions of totemism’s theoretical grounding — from soul-belief, through sociological functionalism, to a conception theory — illustrating the empirical instability of naturalistic accounts.
, Totem and Taboo, 1913supporting
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 identifies the theoretical relationship between totemism and exogamy as the central fault-line dividing scholarly positions, with some accounts treating them as intrinsically connected and others as historically contingent co-occurrences.
, Totem and Taboo, 1913supporting
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.
Harrison, drawing on Lévy-Bruhl, characterises the totemistic stage of consciousness as one of undifferentiated participation in which ego-boundaries between self, tribe, and natural world remain permeable.
, 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.
Campbell situates totemic identification within a comparative typology of sacred ‘games,’ arguing that hunter societies ritualised identification with animals as the symbolic means of maintaining the covenant of mutual life between human and animal worlds.
, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959supporting
the essential is that there should be a communal feast of Raw Flesh, a dais ōmophagos.
Harrison traces the raw-flesh communal feast of Dionysian ritual back to the totemic sacramental meal, arguing that the ōmophagia is intelligible only against its substrate in archaic totemism.
, 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.
Freud dismisses the alimentary-rationalist theory of totemism — that totemic prohibitions arose from preferred food sources — on empirical grounds, clearing space for his own psychogenetic account.
, Totem and Taboo, 1913aside