Producing Oedipus:Totem and TabooRead Through Actor Network Theory

Abstract

This article reads Freud's Totem and Taboo (1912–13) according to its role within the consolidation of the Oedipus complex. Freud's text is discussed with a focus on the process of knowledge production in psychoanalysis, and in relation to Bruno Latour's ideas of translation, association and black box. In this respect, this article regards a central feature of Totem and Taboo as being the articulation of a full-scale argument for the production of the Oedipus complex as ‘fact’. It is in this sense that different actors such as clinical cases, totemism, phylogenesis, the development of psychoanalytic theory and so on are considered here.