![]() As Benveniste summarizes Freud in Totem, “The two principal taboos of totemism are the taboo against harming the totem and the taboo against sexual relations within the clan” (p. However, the repressed guilt over the patricide influenced the creation of totemism and exogamy, practices that defined the fraternal society that succeeded the primal horde. These disinherited sons banded together, killed and ate their father, and agreed to cooperate to forge a society that was gentler and more equitable. The 1914 work spoke of a “primal horde” that was lorded over by an alpha male, a “primal father” who kept all the women to himself and subjugated or drove away the weaker males in the group. Though Freud wrote about his “phylogenetic fantasy” (this term deriving from the title editors gave to an English translation of one of Freud’s unpublished papers) throughout his later life, it is in 1914’s Totem and Taboo that we find the fullest expression of his idea that humans inherit memory traces of their forebears’ traumatic experiences. ![]() Daniel Benveniste’s Libido, Culture and Consciousness is an attempt to flesh out Freud’s underdeveloped notion that psychosexual stages originated with our ancestors’ traumatic prehistoric experiences. ![]()
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