continued to regard it as a classic, the work that created psychoanalytic anthropology. Wilhelm Reich, following Johann Jakob Bachofen and other authors, maintained that early human societies were matriarchies and that this ruled out Freud's account of the origins of civilization in Totem and Taboo. Reich argued that Freud's theory that the Oedipus complex was a prime factor in the development of civilization ignored the cultural relativity of the Oedipus complex, which, drawing on the work of Malinowski, he saw as only a result of the patriarchal order. Freud himself considered "The Return of Totemism in Childhood" his best-written work, and Totem and Taboo as a whole remained one of his favorite works. Other responses The classicist Jane Ellen Harrison called Totem and Taboo one of the most important works in her intellectual life. Harrison's work Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion (1912) has been compared to Totem and Taboo, since Harrison and Freud both attempted to find a universal mechanism that would account for the origins of religion. The novelist Thomas Mann wrote that Totem and Taboo had made a stronger impression on him than any of Freud's other works, and that of all Freud's works it had the greatest artistic merit. The feminist Simone de Beauvoir criticized Totem and Taboo in The Second Sex (1949), writing that Freud is forced to "invent strange fictions" to explain the passage from "the individual to the society"; she saw the inability to explain this transition as a failing of psychoanalysis. Georges Bataille argued that Freud was misled by the "superficial knowledge of ethnographical data" typical of his time into concluding that the taboo on touching corpses generally countered a desire to touch them. The classicist Norman O. Brown criticized the work in Life Against Death (1959), writing that Freud correlates psycho-sexual stages of development with stages of history, thereby seeing history as a "process of growing up". Brown saw this view as a "residue of eighteenth-century optimism and rationalism", and found it inadequate as both history and psychoanalysis. The mythologist Joseph Campbell considered Freud's Totem and Taboo and Jung's Psychology of the Unconscious (1912) the two key works that initiated the systematic interpretation of ethnological materials through insights gained through the study of neurotic individuals. The critic René Girard wrote in Violence and the Sacred (1972) that, despite the rejection of Totem and Taboo by "contemporary criticism",