Upon reading again the third chapter of Totem and Taboo it becomes
clear that it was the English eighteenth-century philosophers and their
followers who inspired in Freud his conception of a universal history of
man’s evolution. This paper analyses, in particular, the links between
this Weltanschauung and notions such as narcissism, omnipotence of thoughts
and the Freudian ‘history of the libido’s
development’ ( Entwicklungsgeschichte der Libido ), the
latter usually being considered as the results of clinical observations.
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