Libido, Culture, and Consciousness: Revisiting Freud's Totem and Taboo. By Daniel S. Benveniste. New York:  IP Books, 2022,  473 pp., $57.50 paperback. On Freud's “Moses and Monotheism.” Edited by Lawrence J. Brown. New York:  Routledge, 2023,  196 pp., $39.95 paperback.

From the beginnings of his psychoanalytic investigations, Freud was deeply interested in applications of his findings to human history, our evolutionary history—how we became human, and historical processes seen in groups. Some of Freud's ideas on these matters led to him conflating and at times equating biological evolutionary development (phylogeny) and the development of the individual (ontogeny), and conflating the history of our biological evolution and group historical processes. The reasons for the lack of differentiation of these different phenomena, and why and how it will be necessary to properly work out their relationships to make further progress in this field of study, will be the theme of this essay. We begin with two recent books that revisit and revise two of Freud's major works on these topics. I would recommend both of them to anyone interested in the application of psychoanalytic findings to our biological evolution and group historical processes. In this review, I will touch on some of the main ideas in the two books and attempt to tease out

key conceptual issues, ending with a few suggestions of approaches to push the field forward.

Daniel Benveniste's book Libido, Culture, and Consciousness is, as its subtitle tells us, a revisiting but also a reworking of the ideas in “Totem and Taboo,” Freud's (1913/1955b) major work on the evolution of the human mind. Benveniste presents a detailed summary of “Totem and Taboo,” including Freud's discussion of ambivalence and the omnipotence of thoughts, as well as the main thrust of Freud's argument speculating about events in human prehistory that laid the foundation for human psychological development and the society based on it. Freud took an idea of Darwin's that humans originally lived in what he called a horde, a group ruled over by a prim