ABSTRACT
In Totem and Taboo Sigmund Freud joined the investigations to the larger conversation about the origins of human institutions that had been conducted in Europe since the sixteenth century, and linked his descriptions of the constitution of the contemporary psyche to speculations about the primordial beginnings of the psyche and of human society. In so doing, he followed the conventions of this conversation, describing the origins of both psyche and society in terms of the customs of so-called primitive peoples, as they had been reconstructed by European colonialists and anthropologists from the sixteenth through the nineteenth century. This chapter traces the specific sources of the anthropological ideas that Freud used, then maps their occurrence and influence in Totem and Taboo and beyond. It demonstrates how the unconscious came to be seen as primitive, and how the concept of regression came to forge a link between psychopathology and psychoanalysis' raced others.
