From the one “empirical” fact to the other “empirical” fact, it takes only rudimentary effort to come to the realization, which is the revelation of psychoanalysis.

So Freud believes that he knows for a fact that there was a primal horde and that totemism is the origin of religion.

The second piece of evidence is William Robertson Smith’s Lectures on the Religion of the Semites from which Freud knows that totemism is the first and original religious form, and that eating the totemic meal is the first religious act. The existence of the horde enjoys for Freud the status of firmly established knowledge. The first piece of knowledge is from Darwin, from whom Freud knows about the existence of a primal horde at the starting point of human origins. Relying in Totem and Taboo on the best and most up to date “science” of his day, Freud had very good reason to come to these speculative conclusions about totemism and the origin of religion.įollow the chain of reference, paying particular attention to two bits of what would have been understood at the time to constitute the empirical science propelling the psychoanalytic leap. Rather, it is based upon knowing, or what the author believed he could know, which is good enough, and the most that any of us have to go on. Freud’s theory is not based upon the imagination as such. Assuming that leaves one free to assess Freud’s in-credible story one way or the other on the merits of its status as a powerful work of fiction, a work of the imagination, a reflection of its author social position and mental constitution in fin de siècle Vienna.īut consider this alternative interpretation.

There is no supporting anthropological or archaeological evidence to buttress the theory, or so it is argued. The usual line of argument against Freud’s theory is that it is what Evans-Pritchard in his book on “primitive religion” called a just-so-story. According to that well trodden story, they killed him because he was an all-powerful power hoarding all the women in the group, that after the parricide they felt guilt for killing the father whom they both hated and loved and hated, and they then recreated him as a god, placing the totem and the eating of totemic animal at the center of the psychic life of the group. Something I realized last semester working through Totem and Taboo with graduate students runs counter to the usual argument that Freud had no evidence with which to posit totemism as the first form of religion, and to speculate that the origin of totemism lies in the murder of an archaic father by his sons.

Freud totem