If you were to explain the central goal of "Totem and Taboo" to a curious friend who knows nothing about it, how would you articulate Freud's unique approach to "racial psychology" and the "resemblances" he seeks to explore?

From the book

temism.” This difference in the treatment of the two subjects is due to the fact that taboo still exists in our midst. To be sure, it is negatively conceived and directed to different contents, but according to its psychological nature, it is still nothing else than Kant’s ‘Categorical Imperative’, which tends to act compulsively and rejects all conscious motivations. On the other hand, totemism is a religio-social institution which is alien to our present feelings; it has long been abandoned and replaced by new forms. In the religions, morals, and customs of the civilized races of…

children. The close connection between totem and taboo indicates the further paths to the hypothesis maintained here. And although this hypothesis leads to somewhat improbable conclusions, there is no reason for rejecting the possibility that it comes more or less near to the reality which is so hard to reconstruct. CONTENTS CHAP. PAGE I THE SAVAGE’S DREAD OF INCEST 1 II TABOO AND THE AMBIVALENCE OF EMOTIONS 30 III ANIMISM, MAGIC AND THE OMNIPOTENCE OF THOUGHT 125 IV THE INFANTILE RECURRENCE OF TOTEMISM 166 TRANSLATOR’S…

ed sciences, and psychoanalysts; they cannot, however, supply both groups the entire requisites for such co-operation. They will not furnish the former with sufficient insight into the new psychological technique, nor will the psychoanalysts acquire through them an adequate command over the material to be elaborated. Both groups will have to content themselves with whatever attention they can stimulate here and there and with the hope that frequent meetings between them will not remain unproductive for science. The two principal themes, totem and taboo, which give the name to…

teaches, however, one thing, namely, that the original pleasure to do the forbidden still continues among taboo races. They therefore assume an _ambivalent attitude_ toward their taboo prohibitions; in their unconscious they would like nothing better than to transgress them but they are also afraid to do it; they are afraid just because they would like to transgress, and the fear is stronger than the pleasure. But in every individual of the race the desire for it is unconscious, just as in the neurotic. The oldest and most important taboo prohibitions are the two basic laws of…

xamples to test our assumptions as long as the meaning and the origin of the totemic system is so wholly unknown to us. But the very wording of these taboos and the fact that they occur together will remind any one who knows the results of the psychoanalytic investigation of individuals, of something quite definite which psychoanalysts call the central point of the infantile wish life and the nucleus of the later neurosis[44]. All other varieties of taboo phenomena which have led to the attempted classifications noted above become unified if we sum them up in the following sentence.…