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Freud published 'Totem and Taboo' in 1913; he considered it a great achievement, as it illustrated the universality of the Oedipus complex and, he thought, illuminated issues in the discipline of anthropology. Alfred Kroeber, then doyen of contemporary anthropologists, and not unsympathetic to psychoanalysis as well as being one of Erik Erikson's mentors, dissected the work in an exercise that engineers would term 'testing it to destruction' (Kroeber, Am. Anthrop., 1920). Later, remorseful about how devasting his critique had been—so that no anthropologist took the work seriously—he wrote a second review (Am. J. Sociol., 1939) in which he childed himself for his harshness with what was after all a genius' (Freud) piece of whimsy. He likened his own critique to breaking a butterfly on the wheel, and indicated that 'Totem and Taboo' merited appreciation as a work of art—a Fantasiestück, a gossamer thing to be admired but not to be taken so seriously as a part of a scientific controversy. Freud's work drew on anthropologists dead and gone—Frazer & Robertson-Smith—and his conclusions were thus based on data not collected for his specific purposes and therefore had limited validity.
In the 1920s, the Polish-British anthropologist Malinowski was in the Trobriand Islands with knowledge of Freud's thesis and first-hand contact with a culture organized along sharply contrasting, matrilineal principles. On the basis of his observations, deficient though they were from the viewpoint of psychoanalytic methodology, he argued that the Oedipus complex, as described by Freud, was a special case, and that various 'nuclear complexes' could exist, depending on the way that intimate and authoritative relationships are structured in a family. This occasioned the famous debate between Malinowski and Ernest Jones. Anne Parsons' paper in the present volume—'Is the Oedipus Complex Universal? The Jones–Malinowski Debate Revisited and a South Italian "Nuclear Complex"'—updates this sci