Abstract

Psychodynamic Practice, 2018 Vol. 24, No. 4, 393–409 BOOK REVIEWSS by Gerard Lucas, London, Karnac, 2015, 286 pp., £29–99 (paperback), ISBN 978-1782202622 How human species evolved from the state of nature to the state of culture? Freud concludes the fourth and ultimate essay of Totem and Taboo (1913) with a story that aims to solve this scientific enigma. ‘At the beginning was the deed’ imagined Freud: the murder and the ingestion of the primal horde’s father by the united brothers was at the basis of primitive social organisations. The traces of this founding act are visible in totemic civilisation but also in neurotic symptoms. With this vision Freud put forward a resolution to the chal- lenges raised by Totem and Taboo: to provide an anthropological foundation to the Oedipus complex and to show how clinical work can be used to explore the past of human society. A bit more than a hundred years after Totem and Taboo opened the possi- bility of a dialogue between the study of the psyche and the research on social organisations, Gerard Lucas examines in his book The Vicissitudes of Totemism how Freud’s thesis have been received by anthropologists and ethnologists. Lucas’s book is