ABSTRACT
Sigmund Freud’s contemplations on the origins of society and morals in Totem and Taboo, and especially in its fourth essay on the affinities between totemism and the death wish, are an attempt to understand the emergence of social institutions such as law with the help of psychoanalytic theory. With few exceptions, the text has often been neglected in mainstream legal scholarship because of its allegedly ‘mythological’ and, consequently, non-scientific character. With the help of his interventions into ethnology and social psychology, Freud constructs an account of how the worship of the totem animal and the primary rules regulating exogamy – for Freud, exogamy is the social expression of the prohibition of incest – can be better understood with an analogy as to how prohibitions and their ceremonial transgressions operate in the human psyche. Relying heavily on the ethnological literature of his time, Freud notes that the
most primitive form of a social rule in any society is the prohibition of incest. In primitive societies, intercourse amongst people who are regarded as kin is regulated by what is known as a ‘taboo.’ Freud duly points out that the term ‘taboo’ has numerous connotations:
‘Taboo,’ however, refers to everything, to persons and to places, to things as well as to transitory conditions that are the vehicle or source of this mysterious attribute. Taboo is also the prohibition that arises from the same attribute, and, finally, it has a connotation that includes simultaneously ‘sacred,’ ‘above the ordinary,’ as well as ‘dangerous,’ ‘unclean’ and ‘uncanny.’
