Totem and Tabu

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was an outstanding Austrian psychologist, psychiatrist and neurologist, the founder of psychoanalysis - a method based on the recognition of the existence of such mental processes as the conscious, unconscious and superconscious, that is, on the existence of not only processes that are controlled by a person and are conscious, but also those that are carried out unconsciously and are not controlled by him. The unconscious manifests itself in intuition, premonitions, creative inspiration, sudden guesses, dreams, hypnotic states, etc., in actions that are carried out automatically, reflexively. This discovery led to a revolution in psychiatry and the treatment of neuroses.

In the work "Totem and Taboo" (1913), Freud presents a theory of the origin of religion and culture, based on the main postulates of his theory. He argues that the development of morality, religion, and culture is conditioned by the conflict between the sexual drive of an incestuous orientation (the Oedipus complex, inherent in both infantile individuals, such as children or neurotics, and representatives of infantile primitive society - primitive people) and the strict prohibition of such desires (taboo), as well as the feeling of guilt, which provokes the replacement of unfulfilled desires with surrogates, which ultimately leads to the emergence of creativity as such.