Totem and Taboo

Totem and Taboo is among Freud's most-maligned works. 

It struck me like lightning when I picked up a copy in a Sydney bookstore during a break from fieldwork in a New Guinea Highlands village.  Like nothing else I had read as a graduate student in anthropology in New York, it seemed to describe what I was actually experiencing and learning. 

Freud discovered Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics not because he was racist, sexist, and imperialist, as all late 19thC European bourgeois white men are supposed to have been, but rather because, like the… show more.

Sigmund Freud was a profound influence on the surrealist movement and his book, Totem and Taboo, which blends together psychoanalysis and anthropology, is particularly important for understanding how the surrealists saw art as an expression of magic. The essay in this book titled "Animism, Magic and the Omnipotence of Thoughts" describes a technique of animism used in ancient and primitive societies. This system of magical thinking was described by Freud as the "omnipotence of thought" and this is what the surrealists attempted to achieve through their art. For surrealist artists, myth and magic were seen as archetypal expressions of… show more.