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Dear Editor,
Freud's seminal contributions regarding the phylogenetic origin and evolution of human civilization, religion, and the Oedipus complex were first outlined in Totem and Taboo (Freud, 1913). Freud postulated that hominid history was forever changed when a clan of embittered savage adolescent brothers rose up and killed their brutal, tyrannical, yet loved father, but then for the first time in hominid history, the savages became stricken with a sufficient quantity of guilt such that it required expiation. Thus, to allay their sense of guilt, the savages elevated a chosen animal to the status of a sacred totem protoGod - a feared and revered symbol of their slain father - and instituted totem law, which included prohibitions on murder and incest within the clan. Freud hypothesized that the clan's savage women were mainly spectators in this patricidal drama, after which they nevertheless enjoyed and promoted the increased freedom and social order commanded by (projected onto) their new totem protoGod.
Freud hypothesized that the enlightened clan's new social-religious structure based on this excess of male patricidal guilt proved to be adaptively superior to the prevailing social structures of the more degenerate clans, such that over many eons, the primal guilty patricidal act and its attendant elevation of the totem protoGod was perpetuated throughout the land and inherited phylogenetically (either by Lamarckian or, as he later conceded, by Darwinian mechanisms; Freud, 1987), ultimately becoming the genetically expressed blueprint for the modern child's Oedipal object relations program - complete with built-in patricidal rage, guilt, and an internalized father God imago. It therefore follows that Freud would have predicted that the modern Homo sapien genome codes for an internalized, Oedipalized God imago, the essential characteristics of which were inherited from the primitive men's fear of, and the primitive women's support for, the exalted totem protoGod.