It is a collection of four essays inspired by the work of Wilhelm Wundt and Carl Jung and first published in the journal Imago (1912–13): "The Horror of Incest", "Taboo and Emotional Ambivalence", "Animism, Magic and the Omnipotence of Thoughts", and "The Return of Totemism in Childhood".

Though Totem and Taboo has been seen as one of the classics of anthropology,[citation needed] comparable to Edward Burnett Tylor's Primitive Culture (1871) and Sir James George Frazer's The Golden Bough (1890), the work is now hotly debated by anthropologists.

Freud, who had a longstanding interest in social anthropology and was devoted to the study of archaeology and prehistory, wrote that the work of Wilhelm Wundt and Carl Jung provided him with his "first stimulus" to write the essays included in Totem and Taboo.

The last part of the essay concludes the relationship between magic (paranormal), superstition and taboo, arguing that the practices of animism are merely a cover up of instinctual repression (Freud).

In "The Return of Totemism in Childhood" Freud combines one of Charles Darwin's more speculative theories about the arrangements of early human societies (a single alpha-male surrounded by a harem of females, similar to the arrangement of gorilla groupings) with the theory of the sacrifice ritual taken from William Robertson Smith to conclude that the origins of totemism lie in a singular event, when a band of prehistoric brothers expelled from the alpha-male group returned to kill their father, whom they both feared and respected.

Though believing that Freud showed "sharp wit", he accused him of engaging in "the free play of fantasy" where "logical argumentation" was needed and of misunderstanding the work of Darwin.

He wrote that Freud explained morality as the "product of a social contract" and compared the Oedipus complex to the "original sin of the human race".

[10] Marvin Harris described Totem and Taboo as representative of what Boas's followers regarded as "the worst form of evolutionary speculation", criticizing "the grandiosity of its compass, the flimsiness of its evidence ... the generality of its conclusions" and its "anachronistic framework".

[12] Géza Róheim, an anthropologist as well as a psychoanalyst, considered Totem and Taboo one of the great landmarks in the history of anthropology, comparable only to Edward Burnett Tylor's Primitive Culture (1871) and Sir James George Frazer's The Golden Bough (1890).

Róheim eventually abandoned the assumptions of Totem and Taboo, but 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.

[18] 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.

[21] 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.

[23] The psychologist David P. Barash concluded that in Totem and Taboo Freud "combines idiosyncratic, almost crackpot fantasy with startling profundity and originality".

[25] 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".

[26] 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".