Our boy Freud pushing psychoanalysis beyond the individual and into the collective life of cultures.

Across four linked essays, Freud examines incest prohibitions, taboo, ambivalence, animism, magic and totemism, asking how systems of belief and prohibition might emerge from the same buried psychic forces he saw operating in dreams, neurosis and family life.

The book’s anthropological framework is heavily marked by its period, and many of its assumptions are now untenable. However, as a piece of speculative theory, the interest is in the lean into how private desire becomes social structure: how fear hardens into ritual, how prohibition produces fascination, and how supposedly archaic forms of thought persist beneath modern reason.

A foundational and deeply unruly work of psychoanalytic cultural theory, and one of the clearest examples of Freud trying to build a bridge between the intimate and the civilisational.

W. W. Norton & Company, New York. The Norton Library, N143. Paperback. 1950 by Routledge & Kegan Paul. Later Norton printing. Moderate age-toning throughout, with rubbing, creasing and general shelf wear to wrappers; small old price mark/sticker residue to front. Binding appears sound and internally clean. Good condition.