Abstract

LOPES, Anchyses Jobim. Ice age art - cave art: and humanity’s first totem (or, isn’t it that Totem and taboo could be right?). Estud. psicanal. [online]. 2016, n.45, pp. 15-36. ISSN 0100-3437.

The lion man, a totemic sculpture, dating about 40.000 years ago, up to now humanity’s oldest artistic artefact. The Upper Paleolithic Revolution, according to archaeology specialists, age when were born: spoken language, music, art, religion and a larger and more complex society. According to these specialists, uninfluenced by psychoanalysis, the appearance of metaphor was this revolution’s bearer. Using psychoanalytic concepts one can see the beginning of dynamic unconscious, repression and anxiety. Cave art as way of appeasing death’s awareness through religion. Conducting thus to the more recente studies about totemism and shamanism. Cave art specialists interpret half animal metamorphic beings as mediators between this and the otherworld. Through a pscyhoanalytic reading, also working to convert animism and it’s enclosing psychosis, into more stable totemism and neuroses.

Keywords : Totemismo; Animism; Birth of metaphor; Prehistoric art; Verbal language; Music.

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