FREUD'S PSYCHOANALYSIS AND TOTEMISM

The present study lays siege to one of Freud's most relevant theories, the function of totemism in the history and minds of human beings. The siege is based on criticism of the sources used by the Viennese doctor in developing his thesis. These sources are previous to a crucial date, 1912, the year in which new studies appeared revealing a concrete fact: the magic character of the totem, a character quite distant from the evolutionist doctrines accepted by Freud and that led him to consider the totem as an expression of certain norms that had to observed by the members of a given society. From there the analysis that follows formulates very concrete questions as to the pertinence of certain theses that are extremely relevant for an important zone of psychoanalysis.