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Freud often claims that mental features, such as guilt for the primal murder, are preserved in the unconscious of all or most humans. Further, he needs this claim for his psychoanalytic explanations of cultural institutions. This claim has often been labeled “Lamarckian.” The present paper, while not offering a complete defense of Freud's explanations of cultural institutions, attempts to rebut this charge of Lamarckism. This is done by examining three ways in which unconscious mental contents might be transmitted and preserved over generations: genetic inheritance, cultural transmission, and a combination of the two. The first is rejected, not because it is Lamarckian but because it entails the highly contentious view that every time a person is in physical state y, that person is in mental state x, where x is something fairly specific. The second and third are admitted as possibilities, however—cultural transmission with the aid of a model for unconscious transmission of ideas suggested by Freud in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, and the combined approach based on a model proposed by the evolutionary biologist f. M. Baldwin. Suggestions are also made as to how the mental states would happen to remain unchanged over many generations.