ABSTRACT
Totem and Taboo provides an originary myth that, while failing to explain how cultural symbol systems arise, illustrates their formative and, indeed, humanly constitutive qualities. Within the terms of Freud’s inquiry, acculturation occurs by means of processes of displacement, projection, and symbolization. Thus the cultural world-building found in animism, magic, and religion provides vehicles for far-ranging differentiations and transformations of the personality. These include an ethical orienting of subjectivity governed by structures mediating differentiated relations along lines of value.
