The author, a psychoanalyst, looks at a North American Indian people, the Crow, who lived through the limit experience of an environmental and cultural disaster by “dreaming” a totem in tune with their new historical situation. For them, this totem was not an illusion (Freud, 1927), but the symbol of the collective development of a new self-preserving function of the ego. The author draws on Crow culture to find a third perspective – a totemistic culture – from which to view the naturalistic ontology of our Western culture, with the help of Freud, Bion and Descola.