Numerous have been the attempts to unveil what Andrew Lang called the Secret of the Totem, a question upon which Sir J. G. Frazer once said he had changed his views repeatedly and was prepared to change them with every new piece of evidence.

Dr Róheim, a young Hungarian anthropologist, whose work had already attracted the attention of English authorities, surveys totemism in the light of psychoanalytic knowledge in his book Social Anthropology originally published in 1925. Freud and Rivers are pioneers in this field but Róheim’s work is the first attempt to submit a specific anthropological question to detailed psychoanalytical investigation. In result, it will be seen that the application of the investigations of unconscious mental processes in the individual to a study of the Australian native give a profound meaning and universal psychologic significance to customs whose understanding has hitherto baffled scholarship. The book is not a translation; it was written by Dr Róheim in English.

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Géza Róheim was a Hungarian psychoanalyst and anthropologist. Considered by some as the most important anthropologist-psychoanalyst, he is often credited with founding the field of psychoanalytic anthropology; was the first psychoanalytically trained anthropologist to do field research; and later developed a general cultural theory.