This chapter develops the topic of blood as a figure of species identity in readings of late Victorian anthropological writing on totemism and on blood brotherhood. The totem, according to its first theorist, is always a species, and totemism is a theory of species identity. Besides anthropology, the chapter discusses Kipling’s Jungle Book and Stoker’s Dracula. It closes with a return to Freud, to the species concept in psychoanalysis, and to species identity as constituted by diet.

Freud wrote some admittedly far-fetched speculative works addressing what he considered to be fundaments of the human psyche. Chapter 7 considers two of his most speculative pieces, “The return of totemism in childhood,” the fourth essay of his Totem and Taboo (1913), and Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920).

Both writings, despite their fantastical nature, contain a coherence and completeness The Interpretation of Dreams lacks. Throughout the Totem and Taboo excerpt, Freud examines his suppositions and, in the end, offers an enlightening, if hypothetical, account of totemism, the evolution of religion, and a prehistoric piece of modern mentality. The steps, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, through which he reaches his improbable anchoring of mental life in dueling life and death instincts are clear, if avowedly extreme at the time.