This book is a collection of four essays (The Horror of Incest, Taboo and Emotional Ambivalence, Animism, Magic and the Omnipotence of Thoughts and The Return of Totemism in Childhood) employing the application of psychoanalysis to the fields of archaeology, anthropology, and the study of religion. In this controversial study Freud applies the theories and evidence of his psychoanalytic investigations to the study of aboriginal peoples and, by extension, to the earliest cultural stages of the human race before the rise of large-scale civilizations.