Mack's Reviews > Totem and Taboo

This is my second Freud book, the first being Civilization and Its Discontents, so I'm not an expert on this guy by any stretch of the imagination. As of now, I've concluded he's far more compelling to read as a philosopher than as a scientific practitioner of any variety. There are a lot of moments where it feels like he's trying to force a square peg through a round hole—a metaphor I'm sure he'd be very fond of. He makes a lot of great observations and then tries to subsume them all into his overall Oedipal ideology, only to cheapen the ideas themselves.

There's little doubt in my mind that plenty of the historical, psychoanalytical and social work he builds his thesis on here have at least been updated if not downright rejected since this book came out. Basically, don't go into this expecting much you can hang your hat on in terms of certainty, but be excited to leave with plenty of compelling thoughts to chew on. The second essay, in particular, is really intriguing: the central idea that the anxiety brought on by moral ambivalence led primitive people (as well as modern neurotics—read: most of us, if we're being honest) to enforce moral absolutes is perhaps the most succinct way I've ever heard the concept of totally subjective morality discussed. That's an idea you see fleshed out in the Bible as much as you see it in Curb Your Enthusiasm. Similarly, his analysis of the human urge to assign their own thought omnipotence—namely, by anthropomorphizing everything they encounter—is a psychological idea I find pretty incontestable. As far as the usual Freudian incest stuff, he only occasionally voyages into the realm of self-parody. He defends some of his points on the subject well but I just don't think it's a strong enough case to base his entire psychological paradigm around. When he uses incest as a means to flesh out ideas about how taboos are created in the first place, I can track and appreciate what he has to say. When he says incest is the basis of any/all taboos and just about everything else, it's way harder for me to stay on board the train.

While Totem and Taboo is dated and a little silly at points, it's still a book I'd consider thought-provoking, if not explicitly enlightening, in a lot of respects.