The work is made difficult because of its complex construction, the manner in which Freud uses analogy, the extreme interpretative power of his analysis, the conceptual richness of the book -projection, ontogenesis of moral conscience, the reality-ego and pleasure-ego -and finally because of the 'spiny hedge of literature and reference' included (letter to Ferenczi, May 13, 1913).

He establishes the existence of the concepts he examines, the dynamic that governs them, as well as their bearing on his own work, on the following hypotheses: the existence of a primitive horde whose father is omnipotent the murder of the father by the group of brothers, leading to the growth of the totemic clan, and the conditions for this possibility of thought. But there is more to the analogy, which Freud develops at the end of the third essay and in the fourth. The third essay, cutting across similarities and differences, offers, among other things, the first detailed investigation of narcissism (animism). Postulates the primal existence of emotional currents, distinguishes between savages and the rest of us based on the intensity of emotion, and provides the first in-depth investigation of this conception of emotion. The second essay interprets taboo as a manifestation of the ambivalence of emotions.

The analogy unfolds in three parts, starting in the first essay where the resemblance between the two is related to the horror of incest that Freud identified in savages by analyzing totemic systems as laws of exogamy. The work presents a classic and sweeping analogy between two terms: on the one hand, savages, on the other, neurotics and children -us, in other words. Two topics appear in the letters: 'tragic guilt' and the 'libidinal origin of religion.' His competition with Carl Jung, who was writing the Metamorphoses of the Soul and its Symbols (1912), is mentioned, and their break in fact occurred while the book was being written. The foundation of the work's ideas first appears in 1911, in his correspondence with S ándor Ferenczi, through which it is possible to trace the development of Freud's thought. Totem and Taboo is Sigmund Freud's first work on group psychology.

Totemism freud