This volume is available in German only:
Freud's Totem and Taboo, edited and commented by Herman Westerink according to contemporary context and current meaning.
"Totem and Taboo," one of Freud's major works on culture and religion, is now, almost 100 years after its first publication, newly edited and extensively commented. Not only is the contemporary context of the work, its reception and Viennese reactions to it are outlined. It also provides a detailed commentary on the enduring relevance of this important and controversial work: It views the problem of guilt in various religions as historical constructions and migrations, and does not seek to derive the complexity of religions from innate and natural psychological processes. Religious development is not interpreted as a progressive-evolutionary and goal-oriented process; religion appears as a stage of human dramas and psychological conflicts, i.e., it is ultimately understood as an expression and ordering of instinctual life in relation to objects.
Dr. Herman Westerink (born 1968) is a psychologist of religion and currently a private lecturer at the Institute for Practical Theology and Psychology of Religion at the Faculty of Protestant Theology of the University of Vienna.
Vienna University Press at V&R unipress, Vienna 2020.
213 pp.
