Libido, Culture, and Consciousness: Revisiting Freud’s Totem and Taboo

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Libido, Culture, and Consciousness: Revisiting Freud’s Totem and Taboo takes us back to the phylogenetic project of psychoanalysis, leaves behind Freud’s psycho-Lamarckian assumption, and sets out in search of analogous relations between psychosexual development, psychopathology, prehistoric cultural evolution, myth, and ritual toward a unified theory of human development. Benveniste considers human social instincts in relation to primatology and Hominin evolution and finds their manifestations elaborated in the artifacts of prehistoric culture after the human symbolic function achieved its modern level of sophistication fifty thousand years ago. These analogous relations are schematized in four stages of psychomythic development. The stages are informed by psychosexual development and illuminate how human psychology has projected mythic thought into the world and out onto the walls of the universe throughout our cultural evolution.