The myth of the origin of culture. Dialogues on the primordial horde by Sigmund Freud

Abstract

In Totem and Taboo, written in 1913, Sigmund Freud proposed the hypothesis of the primordial horde as that indeterminate time-space in which extremely dramatic events occurred, which triggered the origin of culture. It all begins with the existence of a small group made up of the father, who, in an authoritarian manner, owns all the women and deprives his sons of access to them. Tired of the situation, they decide to conspire against the father to murder him and, later, eat him. The consciousness of guilt triggered by the original parricide will allow the emergence of a new social organization (the clan of brothers), a religious system (totemism) and the establishment of a normative system, led by the prohibition of incest. This article proposes to analyze the Freudian hypothesis from three pairs of concepts: myth and history, nature and culture, and phylogenesis and ontogenesis.