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Totem and Taboo was one of Freud's most significant pieces of cultural work and represents some of his boldest assertions about family, society, and religion through the application of psychoanalysis to social anthropology, archaeology, and prehistory.
Over a century later, while it remains compelling and impressive in its daring, some of its assumptions about culture are era-bound and have aged poorly. Technological advances in archaeology and anthropology necessitate a revisiting of some of its theories, and the under-girding principles of psycho-Lamarckian and Haeckelian evolution are questionable. The subtitle of Freud's work, translated often as either Resemblances Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics or Some Points of Agreement Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics is where Benveniste's book picks up Freud's classic text. Like Freud, Benveniste examines the relationship between child development, early human history, and cultural-mythic-ritual coevolution.
Benveniste's Libido, Culture, and Consciousness: Revisiting Freud's Totem and Taboo seeks to continue and expand Freud's “phylogenetic project of psychoanalysis” (p. 35). The main argument is that “the symbolization of our primate social instincts is what gives rise to our psychodynamics” (p. xxix). Across Benveniste's text, this ambitious goal is accomplished by linking four stages in human cultural evolution to a corresponding stage of Freudian psychosexual development, psychopathology, mythic, and ritual analog. Once these parallels are drawn a psycho-mythic schema of development recasts the prior chapters into four psycho-mythic stages and expands to complete the lifecycle. Benveniste argues our clinical listening can be enhanced if we are aware of the common metaphors of each psycho-mythic stage.