Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

Julius Caesar 63
III
Peter Gay notes Freud’s “audacious” ambition in writing Totem and
Taboo, in which he attempts “to dig down to the most remote foundations
of culture” (324). Although it exhibits difficulties characteristic
of Freud’s forays into fields outside psychoanalytic theory—its
anthropology heavily derivative, its history speculative—Totem and
Taboo contains some of Freud’s most brilliant, and certainly his
most controversial, formulations regarding collective behavior. Freud
himself told Strachey “that he regarded it as his best-written work,”
although he reportedly experienced “doubts and hesitations about
publishing it” (13:xi). Totem and Taboo’s problematic status as invented
myth was identified early, when in 1920 R.R. Marett labelled it a
“just-so story” (Gay 327).
As Freud summarizes his myth in Civilization and Its Discontents,
“the human sense of guilt,” and hence the conscience, derive from an
original murder, “the killing of the primal father” (132). The deed is
not posited as metaphoric, like the relationship that the mythic and
dramatic story of Oedipus supposedly bears to modern parent–child
relationships, but rather as an actual originary act, setting in motion
the guilt of subsequent generations. Freud qualifies the historical
reality of the deed at several points. In a footnote to Totem and Taboo,
he apologizes for “the indefiniteness, the disregard of time interval,
and the crowding of the material” (184n) in the account of how “one
day the expelled brothers joined forces . . .” (183). And in Moses and
Monotheism he maintains that these events “occurred to all primitive
men—that is, to all our ancestors. The story is told in an enormously
condensed form, as though it had happened on a single occasion,
while in fact it covered thousands of years and was repeated countless
times during that long period” (81). While these qualifications might
make it more accurate to speak of multiple originary acts, the essential
point is an eventual transformation from historical deed to symbolic
fact. Whether occurring once for the species as a whole, or repeatedly
within numerous tribes, a first, supposedly real, parricide produces
remorse in the murdering sons, who subsequently establish the superego,
investing it with the power of the father, and thus creating the
law, the “restrictions . . . intended to prevent a repetition of the deed.”
A domino effect of rebellion and guilt is set in motion, with the
members of each generation passing through their roles as aggressive