ABSTRACT
When Totem and Taboo appeared in 1912±1913, Freud's loyal followers greeted it with unreserved enthusiasm. Even before he had seen it in print, Ernest Jones ventured the opinion that it and ``not the Traumdeutung [The Interpretation of Dreams] would be Freud's `masterpiece.' ''1 Having had a chance to look at it, SaÂndor Ferenczi came to the conclusion that it ``will one day be the nodal point of the study . . . of civilization.''2 The development of anthropology suggests that Ferenczi's prediction was wildly inaccurate. According to George Stocking, Totem and Taboo, with its ``bit of highly conjectural history, . . . perhaps more than anything else in Freud, contributed to the alienation of anthropologists from psychoanalytic theory.''3
In one respect, however, analysts and anthropologists were in agreement: they regarded Totem and Taboo as a work of applied psychoanalysis, that is, bringing psychoanalysis to bear on ethnographic problems and in the process promising both solutions to those problems and something akin to experimental proof of Freudian postulates.
