What Lacan Said About Totem and Taboo

By Markos Zafiropoulos
English

This article sets out to revisit Totem and Taboo as the keystone to all psychoanalytic anthropology, from case studies to group analysis. Furthermore, offering a preliminary repositioning of this founding issue must necessarily lead us to place this within the perspective of what Lacan said about Totem and Taboo in his return to Freud. This article thus identifies the different moments in Lacan’s reading of the Freudian myth. These different moments find their essential pivotal point in Lacan’s transference to Lévi-Strauss at the time that he was re-grounding psychoanalysis, setting aside his familial-centered vision in favor of a structuralist reading, in which the laws of language and speech outclass those of the family.

Keywords

  • psychoanalytical anthropology
  • structuralism
  • Lévi-Strauss
  • matriarchy
  • patriarchy
Go to the article on Cairn-int.info