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Freud regarded Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics as one of his most important works, but his readers saw things otherwise.1 Viewed by Freud as an essential contribution to “ethno-psychology (Völkerpsychologie)” (1912-13a, p. xiii, trans. rev.), Totem and Taboo was denounced already in 1920 by the ethnologist and psychoanalyst Alfred Kroeber, who, despite his sympathy for psychoanalysis, later claimed that Totem and Taboo was so anthropologically flawed that dismantling it was as simple as “breaking a butterfly on the wheel” (1939, p. 446). Later critics echoed Kroeber, arguing that Freud was wrong on all major fronts: his Lamarckian belief in inherited acquired qualities, his adoption of Haeckel's biogenetic law (ontogeny repeats phylogeny), and, most important, his claim that totemism produced incest-prohibition in the aftermath of an ancient parricide (Malinowski, 1923; Thurnwald, 1928; Lévi-Strauss, 1949/1969, pp. 88ff, 491). Rendered irrelevant for ethnology and already of little use to clinical psychoanalysis, Totem and Taboo became primarily interesting for fiction writers, notably Thomas Mann, who admired Freud's vivid depiction of modern man's past as “naked cannibals” and “primitive men” who fearlessly allowed thought to “pass directly into action” (Freud, 1912-13a, pp. 2, 161).2 But even this romantic-atavistic fascination with Totem and Taboo faded after Nazism's glorification of a barbaric German prehistory. Freud's book fell to the fringes of his oeuvre, picked at only for bits of theories (narcissism, ambivalence, the cultural effects of guilt) that could be incorporated into other arguments.