Ritual Remembrance: Freud's Primal Theory of Collective Memory

In the final essay of Totem and Taboo, Freud infamously claims that civilization began when a band of brothers brutally murdered their father. This postulation leads Freud to conclude that "the beginnings of religion, morals, society and art converge in the Oedipus complex,"¹ and, accordingly, most readers, regardless of their argument, presuppose that the text depicts a "fundamental oedipal revolt."² This is how Peter Gay characterizes the action of Totem and Taboo in his short introduction to the Norton Standard Edition, and this is how the text is generally remembered. While we may forget the moves of Freud's argument and the details of his historical narrative—not to mention the first three essays of the book—we do remember that, according to Freud, in the beginning was the Oedipus complex.

It is not surprising, then, that many readers have felt Freud went too far with Totem and Taboo. Its publication incited anthropologists to attack the universality of the Oedipus complex;³ others have turned the tables on Freud and charged him with projecting his own oedipal guilt onto an imagined horde of parricidal sons;⁴ and most in the field of psychoanalysis have come to disregard Totem and Taboo, in part because it threatens the validity of the Oedipus complex. As E. B. Spillius explains: "today the idea of the Oedipus complex no longer needs to be defended against rival schools of psychoanalysis, and the use of the Oedipus complex to explain the origin of civilization would do it more harm than good" (187). Clearly, Freud seems to have crossed the line, or lines, in Totem and Taboo: whether from Western to universal culture, fantasy to historical reality, or psychoanalytic to anthropological theory, his transposition of the Oedipus complex into realms where it does not belong appears to be the gesture most abhorred by critics.

Yet those sympathetic to Totem and Taboo do not deny that the work is fundamentally oedipal. Ernest Jones, for instance, responded to Bronislaw Malinowski's anthropological critique by insisting that Freud had in fact established the Oedipus complex as a universal "fons et origo."⁵ Indeed, Jones even chalked up the composition of Totem and Taboo to Freud's own oedipal fantasies.⁶ And while more recent readings have emphasized different facets of the text, the centrality of the Oedipus complex is still accepted as a given. Rachel Blass, for example, accounts for the apparent incongruities between analytic truth and the form of truth presented in Totem and Taboo by explaining why the Oedipus complex had to be historicized.⁷ Julia Kristeva focuses on the seemingly secondary taboo of incest but nevertheless acknowledges that the relationship between Freud's murderous event and the Oedipus complex has been "logically established."⁸ It would seem as though, as Kristeva writes, "[d]ivergences from and even contradictions with this Freudian thesis are finally no more than variants and confirmations" (57).⁹ For critics, regardless of position or disciplinary background, all seem to agree with Peter Gay that "the fact of life on which Freud most insisted in Totem and Taboo, and which organizes the book, is the Oedipus complex."¹⁰

But just what sort of Oedipus complex does Freud depict in Totem and Taboo? His entire account of the murder and the history it unfolds concerns the actions of a collectivity, not an individual. Freud's primal collectivity is said to be fortified through "homosexual feelings and acts" (144); its members are referred to as "brothers" rather than sons, which emphasizes the fraternal rather than the paternal dynamic; and any relation between the brothers and a mother figure is entirely absent—in fact, there is no mother to be found. In short, the familial structure Freud describes in no way resembles an oedipal triangle, and it even seems like a stretch to domesticate Freud's primal crew under the familiar banner of "family." Nevertheless, in his conclusion, Freud claims that all roads lead to the Oedipus complex. While some critics have lambasted Freud for attempting to explain the origin of civilization psychoanalytically, and others have argued that Freud's thesis...