Totem and Taboo

In four essays published in 1913, Freud turned psychoanalysis toward anthropology. Starting from the taboos and totem animals described by travellers and anthropologists, he compares them with the obsessions of his patients and ends with a bold theory: that religion and morality began with a prehistoric crime, the killing of a tyrannical father by his sons.

Few anthropologists accept the theory today, and Freud built it on the sources of his time. But the book is a key to how he thought about guilt, law and religion, and it led to his later writings on civilisation. Read it after A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis.

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) grew up in Vienna in a Jewish family and trained as a neurologist. After studying hypnosis with the famous Charcot in Paris, he began listening to his patients talk freely about their dreams and memories, and developed from this practice a new theory of the mind and a new kind of treatment: psychoanalysis.

From his consulting room at Berggasse 19 he published The Interpretation of Dreams and a stream of books that changed psychology, literature and everyday language. In 1938, after the Nazis took over Austria, he fled to London, where he died the following year. A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis is the best place to begin.