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Clinicians have benefitted from the use of psychoanalytic theory in understanding the internal psychodynamics of their clients and, in shedding a psychoanalytic light on dark places in the psyche, illuminating clinician and client on the meanings of their disturbing experiences and behaviors in their internal and external object relations.
Psychoanalytic theory can also be applied to phenomena outside the consulting room. An early example is Freud's speculations in Totem and Taboo (1913) concerning the origins and phylogenesis in humans, of magical thinking, the incest taboo, emotional ambivalence, and the Oedipus complex. He applied psychoanalytic theory in a hypothetical structuring of anthropological, archeological, and religious observations. In the process, he suggested that social behaviors such as the Oedipus complex are transmitted phylogenetically down the generations. He proposed that behaviors among our primitive progenitors, repeated over many generations, can be encrypted into genetically transmitted traits. This hypothesis has been criticized and discounted as a psycho-Lamarckian theory of genetic transmission of acquired characteristics, which has been widely debunked in favor of Mendelian genetics and Darwin's theory of the origin of species. Nevertheless, Freud's speculations about the phylogenetic origins of drives, behaviors, primitive modes of thinking, and social instincts like the Oedipus complex remains an alluring explanation of the origins of instinctual behaviors albeit having no basis scientific fact.
Benveniste revisits Freud's speculative hypothesis but from a different perspective: socio-cultural evolution. He points out that there are other forms of communication passed down the generations besides phylogenetic transmission. Cultural tropes such as language, myths, rituals, religious beliefs, traditions, and history impact individual development. Benveniste cites Géza Róheim's important anthropological research on the impact of culture o