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Does Shakespeare adorn our office shelves or does Marcus Aurelius or, perhaps, Lao Tze? Do we seek wisdom and provenance for our own thinking from Athens, Jerusalem, Rome or from the Late Enlightenment in Europe? There is a subtle recognition implicit to our reaching back to ancient writers, an awareness, perhaps, that we are all still made of the same stuff … independent of race, location, or time-period. Human evolution moves at a snail's pace and the changes it has wrought in our way of processing experience has likely not altered much since our ancestors began living in fixed and fortified cities 3000 – 4000 years ago—however evolved Modern Humankind imagines itself to be!
Perhaps, it is so that the members of Freud's primal hordes, those that he focused upon in Totem and Taboo (1912–1913)—composed of a dominant male and his subordinate women and sons and daughters—would feel out of place at 21st Century dinner parties. Still, whether one chooses the writings of Ancient China or Jerusalem or Athens, one finds similarity in existential, political and practical questions that expose the homology between ancient and modern people and peoples. How to live and parent well and how to die well? What constitutes the healthy polity? And how, indeed, should an individual navigate his or her daily life? These have remained broadly similar, if not the same.
Freud, when reaching for proof-texts for psychoanalysis—and for whatever personal reasons of his own—was moved toward the secular past and avoided seeking contributions directly from religious writings, though, he did use them as evidence of primitive thinking. His Totem and Taboo (1912–1913), Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) and The Future of an Illusion (1927) do not draw their models from religious texts, models for how to be. Instead, they focus on how not to live under the constraints of gods that do not demonstrably exist, except in the minds of those prone to such illusional thinking.
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