its concept of collective murder is close to the themes of his own work. The historian Peter Gay suggested in Freud: A Life for Our Time (1988) that in Totem and Taboo Freud made conjectures more ingenious than those of the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Gay observed that Totem and Taboo was in part an attempt by Freud to outdo his rival Jung, and that the work is full of evidence that "Freud's current combats reverberated with his past history, conscious and unconscious". The critic Harold Bloom asserted in The American Religion (1992) that Totem and Taboo has no greater acceptance among anthropologists than does the Book of Mormon, and that there are parallels between the two works, such as a concern with polygamy. Richard Schechner criticized Freud for having assumed in Totem and Taboo that some humans are more "primitive" than others. The psychologist David P. Barash concluded that in Totem and Taboo Freud "combines idiosyncratic, almost crackpot fantasy with startling profundity and originality". Anthony Elliott argued that Freud's account of social and cultural organization suffers from limitations, and that, because of anthropological knowledge that became available subsequent to Totem and Taboo, the theories Freud proposed there now have few advocates. Elliott wrote that "Freud's attempt to anchor the Oedipus complex in a foundational event displaces his crucial insights into the radically creative power of the human imagination", ascribing to real events "what are in fact products of fantasy". Elliott added that Freud should be credited with showing that "reality is not pre-given or natural", but rather structured by the social and technical frameworks fashioned by human beings, and that "individual subjectivity and society presuppose one another". Dominique Bourdin wrote that in Totem and Taboo Freud "develops an idea that clearly embarrasses the current psychoanalysts, but that is essential to the logic of Freudian thought: that of Phylogenetics". The philosopher Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen and the psychologist Sonu Shamdasani argued that in Totem and Taboo Freud applied to history "the same method of interpretation that he used in the privacy of his office to 'reconstruct' his patients' forgotten and repressed memories". See also Guy Rosolato Little Arpad Psychoanalytic sociology References External links Totem und Taboo German edition, Open Library 1913 non-fiction books Anthropology books Books by Sigmund Freud Religious studies books Taboo