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[[Freudian ]] [[thought ]] on origins translates an effort to [[think ]] the extraindividual, in [[order ]] to anchor the [[subject ]] within the ancestral lineage and the [[history ]] of the [[species ]] as well as within [[biology]]. Several modalities can be discerned: the [[myth ]] of origins; the genetic myth—the foundational [[role ]] of the [[drives ]] as a substrate of the [[psyche]]; and [[primal ]] [[fantasies ]] and/or fantasies of origins.Neither [[maternal ]] nor [[natural]], the myth of origins in the [[work ]] of Sigmund [[Freud ]] from the outset placed the history of humanity at the horizon of the [[paternal function]]: The original myth is held to be that of the [[murder ]] of the [[father]]. This Freudian [[theory ]] posited the murder of the primitive father as the starting point for humanity and [[society]]. The hypothesis must be [[understood ]] not as historical [[truth ]] but as a [[working ]] myth that expresses the posited requirement that each [[human ]] [[being]], in the [[words ]] of Freud, be "an offshoot of [[Oedipus]]." Put forward by Freud in <i>[[Totem ]] and [[Taboo]]</i> (1912-1913) and taken up again in <i>A Phylogenetic [[Fantasy]]: [[Overview ]] of the [[Transference ]] [[Neuroses]]</i> (1985a [1915]), this myth retraces the history of the primitive [[horde ]] ruled by a tyrannical father who requires [[total ]] submission of his sons and exclusive ownership of all the females. However, the brothers [[form ]] a coalition to kill the father, and devour him in a cannibalistic celebration. They then erect a totem representing the father and impose a [[prohibition ]] against [[incest]]. This [[symbolic ]] pact and the rules that result from it constitute the beginnings of society.Freud elaborated this myth of origins in light of his readings in ethnology and [[anthropology]], analyzing the [[meanings ]] of totems and taboos in so-called primitive societies. This enabled him to observe that totemic [[activity ]] coincided with exogamy, that is, the neutralization of the [[practice ]] of incest. Freud asserted in <i>[[Totem and Taboo]]</i>: "The violent primal father had doubtless been the feared and envied [[model ]] of each one of the company of brothers: and in the act of devouring him they accomplished their [[identification ]] with him, and each one of [[them ]] acquired a portion of his strength. The totem meal, which is perhaps mankind's earliest festival, would thus be a [[repetition ]] and a commemoration of this memorable and criminal deed, which was the beginning of so many things—of [[social ]] organization, of [[moral ]] restrictions and of [[religion]]" (p. 142). Elsewhere, he pointed out that in the [[Christian ]] myth, the original sin was the result of an offense against God the Father. By sacrificing his own [[life ]] to free men from this sin, [[Christ ]] tends to reconcile humankind with God the Father. Through his sacrifice, the son himself becomes God in [[place ]] of the father. The religion of the son replaced the religion of the father. To mark this [[substitution]], the old totemic meal was revived: The communion was instituted, in which the gathered brethren eat and drink the flesh and blood of the son, rather than the father, to sanctify themselves and [[identify ]] with him. At the same [[time]], noted Freud in "Totem and Taboo," a "[[sense ]] of [[guilt ]] for an [[action ]] has persisted for many thousands of years and has remained operative in generations which can have had no [[knowledge ]] of that action" (p. 158).In this [[regard]], Jacques [[Lacan ]] believed that Freud had implicitly assumed that "a forgotten drama traverses the ages in the [[unconscious]]," as he wrote in<i>[[Écrits]]</i> (1966/2002); he deduced from this that the [[true ]] father, "[[the symbolic ]] Father, insofar as he signifies this Law, is truly the [[dead ]] Father" (p. 189). More specifically, according to Lacan, "it is thanks to the [[Name]]-of-the-Father that [[aggression ]] against the Father is at the [[principle ]] of the Law and that the Law is in service to the [[desire ]] it institutes by the prohibition against incest."What we find to be of primordial importance in the [[reading ]] of this myth is that the murder of the father is repeated by the sons during the [[religious ]] [[ritual ]] in the form of sacrifice; this constitutes the symbolic pact among the brothers, who thus celebrate the restoration of [[authority]], in which they participate from that point on. It is this precise [[moment ]] that we consider to be the cornerstone of hominization and of [[culture ]] (Kristeva, 1996). In Freud's view, on the [[individual ]] level we are all, unbeknownst to ourselves, repositories of this myth of origins, which each of us reactualizes through the realization of his or her Oedipus [[complex]]; he considered the latter, as he wrote in "Totem and Taboo," to constitute "the beginnings of religion, morals, society and art" (p. 156) and also "the nucleus of all neuroses" (p. 157). He was later led to reintegrate into his inquiries into origins the maternal function, seemingly evacuated from this myth, by discovering an early link between [[mother ]] and daughter that he compared to Minoan-Mycenaean culture, long hidden by Athenian culture.By extension, [[thinking ]] [[about ]] origins appears in the form of an anchoring of the psyche in the <i>archè</i> of biology, expounded initially in Freud's correspondence with Wilhelm [[Fliess ]] between 1887 and 1902 (<i>Extracts from the Fliess Papers</i> [1950]) and later in "A Metapsychological [[Supplement ]] to the Theory of [[Dreams]]" (1915), "[[Negation]]" (1925), and "An [[Outline ]] of [[Psycho]]-[[Analysis]]" (1940). For the father of [[psychoanalysis]], there could be no [[doubt ]] that [[psychic ]] life originated in the organism and that it could thus be conceived of as an evolved form of [[biological ]] life. This bracketing together of the two is conceptualized in [[terms ]] of [[anaclisis]], with [[self]]-preservation serving as a support to the [[libido]]. Also resulting from this is the essential place of the drives as a borderline [[concept ]] between the somatic and the psychic. In this spirit, in his "metapsychological" essays Freud advanced the hypothesis of an innate "unconscious kernel," around which agglomerates all that the individual represses in the course of [[development]]. This explains how the unconscious can be organized in the same way in all individuals and how it can be made intelligible in and through psychoanalysis. To attach the psychic [[apparatus ]] to this biological reservoir, Freud proposed the models of his two topologies (<i>[[Ucs.]]/Pcs./Cs.</i>; id/ego/superego). He was at pains in "Negation" to establish the steps and modalities of this transformation of the [[drive ]] into [[meaning ]] and, to this end, he emphasized the role of [[language]], which provides an alternative trajectory for pulsional negativity by demarcating the pathway of thought and the symbolic. In analysis, the coming to [[awareness ]] of the primal [[repressed ]] is often manifested by means of the [[symbol ]] of negation, in which thought is freed from the limitations of [[repression]].The primal fantasies that are fantasies of origins (observation of the [[parents]]' [[sexual ]] relations, [[seduction]], [[castration]]) make up the [[third ]] panel in the triptych of Freudian thinking on origins. On the one hand, these fantasies have an [[object ]] that allows [[infantile ]] sexual curiosity inevitably to confront the question of "where babies come from." On the [[other]], hereditary mnemic traces are organized into scenes developed by [[narrative ]] scenarios, with these foundations encompassing [[conceptual ]] forms or "schemes whose fundamental property is their polarizing, organizing, and classifying role," as André Green put it in "Penser l'originaire" (1991; Thinking the primal). Fantasies of origins are anterior to any individual [[experience]]; [[present ]] in the form of phylogenetic mnemic traces, they thus belong not to the historical part of the psyche, but to a transmissible heritage. These schemes, which require a phylogenetic explanation, are justified according to Freud by [[reality ]] as a [[missing ]] link in individual psychic experience and are related through it to humanity's archaic [[past]], during which, for example, castration was presumably actually practiced by the father on his sons, as he conjectured in <i>A Phylogenetic Fantasy</i>.It could be submitted, in conclusion, that the Freudian "ur" transcends the limits of the individual to move toward the history of the species (in a Darwinian perspective) and toward being (in a [[phenomenological ]] perspective), with the subject appearing, in Lacan's formulation, as a <i>"parlêtre"</i> (being-through-[[speaking]]).

# [[Freud, Sigmund]]. (1912-1913a). Totem and taboo. SE, 13: 1-161.