Ritual Remembrance: Freud's Primal Theory of Collective Memory

Abstract

In the final essay of Totem and Taboo, Freud infamously claims that civilization began when a band of brothers brutally murdered their father. This postulation leads Freud to conclude that “the beginnings of religion, morals, society and art converge in the Oedipus complex,” 1 and, accordingly, most readers, regardless of their argument, presuppose that the text depicts a “fundamental oedipal revolt.” 2 This is how Peter Gay characterizes the action of Totem and Taboo in his short introduction to the Norton Standard Edition, and this is how the text is generally remembered. While we may forget the moves of Freud’s argument and the details of his historical narrative—not to mention the first three essays of the book—we do remember that, according to Freud, in the beginning was the Oedipus complex. It is not surprising, then, that many readers have felt Freud went too far with Totem and Taboo. Its publication incited anthropologists to attack the universality of the Oedipus complex; 3 others have turned the tables on Freud and charged him with projecting his own oedipal guilt onto an imagined horde of parricidal sons; 4 and most in the field of psychoanalysis have come to disregard Totem and Taboo, in part because it threatens the validity of the Oedipus complex. As E. B. Spillius explains: “today the idea of the Oedipus complex no longer needs to be defended against rival schools of psychoanalysis, and the use of the Oedipus complex to explain the origin of civilization would do it more harm than good” (187). Clearly, Freud seems to have crossed the line, or lines, in Totem and Taboo: whether from Western to universal culture, fantasy to historical reality, or psychoanalytic to anthropological theory, his transposition of the Oedipus complex into realms where it does not belong appears to be the gesture most abhorred by critics. Yet those sympathetic to Totem and Taboo do not deny that the work is fundamentally oedipal. Ernest Jones, for instance, responded to Bronislaw Malinowski’s anthropological critique by insisting that Freud had in fact established the Oedipus complex as a universal “fons et origo.” 5 Indeed, Jones even chalked up the composition of Totem and Taboo to Freud’s own