The Vicissitudes of Totemism

One Hundred Years After Totem and Taboo
Erscheinungsjahr 2015
ISBN: 978-1-78220-262-2
Verlag: Taylor & Francis

Buch, Englisch, 286 Seiten, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 481 g

After being the subject of many studies up until 1914, totemism seemed to disappear from the literature. The publication of Freud’s work Totem and Taboo was initially greeted with silence, and subsequently with critical and hostile reactions. C. Lévi-Strauss was one of the few to devote a book to totemism but considered it as an illusion, although a number of prominent members of the English school of Social Anthropology contested this view, describing the direction adumbrated by Freud’s enquiry as “highly pertinent”. Totemism appears in Freud’s work as a way of dealing with one of the canonical forms of human destructiveness, namely parricide. Why did eminent men find it impossible to utilise Freud’s book and those studies that followed it in the interwar period? The mass murders in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, however different they may have been, both generated a profound sense of horror that made their consequences largely unrepresentable for Europeans for more than thirty years. Did this delay, and the attitudes of the following generations towards authority, result from an unconscious logic of “resistance” aimed at re-establishing refusals that did not take place at the time? The Western world seems to have forgotten the strength of the mixed family ties of tribes, casts, and religions that are in fact at work in the psychic life of a great number of men and women in the world.

Zielgruppe

Professional Practice & Development

Autoren/Hrsg.

Lucas, Gerard

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Ethnologie Religionsethnologie
• Sozialwissenschaften Psychologie Psychologie / Allgemeines & Theorie Psychologische Theorie, Psychoanalyse Psychoanalyse (S. Freud)
• Sozialwissenschaften Psychologie Allgemeine Psychologie Sozialpsychologie Kulturpsychologie, Ethnopsychologie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Preface -- Introduction -- An outline of the situation of totemism in anthropology in the years following the First World War -- From the 1920s to the Second World War -- Returning to the circumstances of the publication and translation of Totem and Taboo -- Totemism and anthropology after the Second World War -- Psychoanalytic interpretation: with and without the patient -- The misfortunes of ambition -- The evolution of practices -- Beyond nature and culture -- The new possibility of discussions on the principle axes of Freud’s thought in Totem and Taboo -- Totem and Taboo, politics, and law -- Totemic systems and totalitarianisms: the point of view of Totem and Taboo -- The price of murderous consent? -- Summary of the main lines of Freud’s essay

Über Autor(innen)

Gerard Lucas is a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and honorary training member of the Societe Psychanalytique de Paris. He has run various institutions in Paris, including the Alfred Binet Centre from 1978 to 2006, and is the author of numerous books and articles. In 2014 the International Psychoanalytical Association named him vice-president for Europe of its Organisational Committee for Child and Adolescent Psychoanalysis.