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In 1912 Freud published a series of articles in the journal Imago. In bookform these articles were translated into many languages. Totem and Taboo1 is one of the representative works of a great genius. Freud learned the meaning of human behavior from his patients and in this work for the first time in a systematic way he applied this knowledge to the puzzling behavior of strange races and cultures. He discovered new and universal meaning in primitive incest taboos. A man gets into a state of panic at the sight of his mother-in-law, a brother must not speak to his sister, a father may not be in the house alone with his daughter. Among the Akamba a girl must avoid her father from her puberty to her marriage; before and after these periods there is no taboo against association between them. It was evident to Freud that these customs were protective measures erected against incestuous desires; no one would devise elaborate prohibitions against occurrences that could never eventuate.
The symptomatology of taboo customs in general is similar to the content of the obsessional neuroses. Its contagiousness betrays the common danger of temptation; its equal applicability to 'defilement' proves the underlying ambivalence. Both in obsessional neurosis and in taboo the nucleus of all prohibitions is the exclusion of permission to touch, the origin of the delire de toucher.
It is surprising to find that primitive man does not show simply hatred for his enemies but also the tendency to identify himself with them and to atone for the murder. Conversely the divine king is not solely the adored idol of his subjects; ritual gives them plenty of opportunity to abreact their hostility. The dead are not only mourned and revered, they are also