How do we get our practical, sexual, and emotional needs satisfied without trampling on other people’s needs? Freud casts this in an emotional ambivalence. This friction between individual values and collective values becomes a major thread in Freud’s works until his death. The tribes and eventually civilizations were able to thrive when this balance was met and failed when weaknesses were exposed in wars and revolutions. The cooperation of the different members of society required rules, regulations, punishments and rituals. With scarce resources and a short life span, it was necessary to get your food and sex all in a short period of time to ensure survival of the current generation and to create another generation. The need to be in a group ensured survival. In the ancient world being alone was the same as certain death. The book itself provides one of the best understandings of envy and human conflict in all literature. With research from the then current anthropologists and Darwinism, Freud was able to connect his Oedipus theory to a psychoanalytic original sin, and began fleshing out early understandings of Narcissism which he later delved into.
One of his most famous and influential books was Totem and Taboo which focused on comparing the mental life of primitive societies, their superstitions, their scapegoating, to that of modern individuals under his label of neurosis. After Freud’s initial success, he was ready to start taking his early theories and advance them into other areas outside of Psychoanalysis, and to look deeply at the human condition.
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