sigmund freud totem and taboo
Sigmund Freud: Totem and Taboo. (10/23/2001) In the subtitle of his attempt to capture the moment when civilization began, which is one way Freuds Totem and Taboo has been characterized, he makes it abundantly clear and obvious why people "trained" in psychoanalysis should never attempt to expand their territory to include the discipline of anthropology, which has enough problems of its own so as not to need any help from someone who is only dabbling, when he names it a work meant to establish Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics. Freud bases his position on the idea that primitive, that is, tribal, people created their inferior form of religion by means of projecting the content of their mostly inadequate minds outward into the real external world. ... Well before anyone gets to this statement, Freud establishes exactly what he means by the "evil impulses" that savages project as religion into the world. ... Freud says that "They do not build houses or permanent shelters; they do not cultivate the soil; they keep no domesticated animals except the dog; they are not even acquainted with the art of making pottery. ... " (4) Freud, of course, fails to mention a few facts, as much because of a lack of European knowledge of aboriginal life as it might be to twist the reality of it to his own purposes, when he does not mention the tribal singers, those men and women in each community who are responsible for maintaining the four distinct aspects of their tribal culture. ... Europeans like Freud did not even have a coherent history that long when he wrote his denigration of their civilization. It is not what Freud left out of his account, however, that is most troubling. In the sentence immediately following the paragraph quoted above, Freud turns to his favorite subject, sexuality, since he wants to establish the existence of the incest taboo in even this incredibly savage people. ... " (4) He follows this absurd falsehood by assuring us that the Aborigines did observe the incest taboo; but, the point here is that he labels them "cannibals" when in the previous paragraph he states that they only ate the animals and roots they had hunted and gathered. ... Freud is simply a liar, but in a noble cause, since it is impossible to find any "evil impulses" in his description of aboriginal life, unless living by the rule of tribal elders is somehow immoral, and so is forced, in order to satisfy the needs of Eurocentric desire, in order to preserve the myth of European superiority, to invent them as he goes along. ... Freud is not finished with his denigration of tribal people after turning hunters and gatherers into cannibals, however, since he goes on to apologize for attributing higher powers of reason to "modern savages" than the probably deserve when he compares their state of intellectual achievement to that of European children; that is, "I am under no illusion that in putting forward these attempted explanations [for primitive beliefs and practices] I am laying myself open to the charge of endowing modern savages with a subtlety in their mental activities which exceeds all probability.