While many of Freud's original formulations have required either revision or rejection and replacement with newer models, his cultural books, such as Civilization and Its Discontents and Totem and Taboo, though extremely influential in the early part of the 20th century, have more recently been either neglected or else dismissed as long-outdated fantasies.

Robert A. Paul shows that Freud's ideas in these books, and his thinking on how human society is possible, given the unpromising materials out of which it is constructed (i.e. human beings), can appear in a different and more favorable light when viewed through the lens of contemporary anthropology, cultural studies, and evolutionary theory.

Table of Contents:

Introduction: The Stream and the Road
Part I. DROSS INTO GOLD: Recuperating Freud's Social Theory
1. Freud's Theory of Society
2. Biology and Culture in Civilization and Its Discontents
3. Yes, the Primal Crime Did Take Place
PART II. LIKE RABBITS OR LIKE ROBOTS? Sexual versus Non-Sexual Reproduction in the Western Tradition
4. The Genealogy of Civilization
5. Sons or Sonnets?
6. The Pygmalion Complex
PART III. OUR TWO TRACK-MINDS: A Dual Inheritance Perspective on Some Classic Psychoanalytic Issues
7. Incest Avoidance: Oedipal and Preoedipal, Natural and Cultural
8. Sexuality: Biological Fact or Cultural Construction?
9. Consciousness, Language, and Dual Inheritance
References
Index