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Freud and Anthropology is a scholarly and detailed study of the relationship between Freud's anthropology and some of his later psychoanalytic theorizing. Wallace wishes to stress that this relationship is not peripheral to the corpus of psychoanalytic theory, but bears on some of its most fundamental principles, and is 'an integral part of his clinical-psychological work'. In contrast to the predominant attitude among many psychoanalytic educators in which the bulk of Freud's cultural works are ignored or treated as exotica, this is a unique and interesting view. The volume contains six chapters, with an introduction, conclusion, and two brief appendices. In my reading the material fell most neatly into two categories: an analysis of the scholarly debates and historical referents surrounding Totem and Taboo, which constitutes the major focus of the entire book, and a discussion of more contemporary issues concerning the relationship between psychoanalysis and anthropology. Chapter 5, 'Recapitulation and synthesizing', and the brief Conclusion and Appendices will be treated under the later category; everything else as part of the former.
Chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, and 6, make a cohesive package in which the author puts forth the core of his thesis that Totem and Taboo contains the kernels of Freud's fundamental approach not only to cultural materials but to his developing depth psychology as well. Wallace from the start draws a strong connexion between Freud's interests in archaeology and in cultural evolutionism in anthropology, and the emergence of his later ideas:
Freud thereby raised this (Oedipus) complex from the status of a neurotic phenomenon on one modern man (himself) to that of a universal contemporary, as well as historical phenomenon. In other words, the individual present (neurosis) is linked not only to the individual past (childhood) but implicitly to the cultural past (Oedipus). Thus the key concept of psychoanalysis emerged not only from Freud's c