Totem and Taboo is probably Freud's best known work, in which he applies psychoanalysis to the fields of anthropology and religious studies. When it was first published in 1913, it caused a sensation with its radical interpretation of religion as a neurotic symptom. It is a collection of four essays in which Freud examines some aspects of the life of natural peoples and relates them to the mental life of neurotics. Perhaps the most famous is the last essay, in which Freud derives belief in gods and totems from a prehistoric event in which a group of outcast sons killed their father, an alpha male, and then ate him to absorb his power. When the sons wanted to atone for their act, they turned their dead father into a totem and issued a ban on eating him. So the original - and in a more veiled form any - religion is really an attempt to atone for the original crime. Few people believe such an interpretation today, but it has become a famous and integral part of the study of man and religion.
Czech edition