"Totem and Taboo" in a latency boy.

Against the background of Freud's "Totem and Taboo" the case of a seven-year-old boy is discusses, focusing on his identification with a cat. Guided by Freud's dialectic thinking and his discussion of the phenomena of patriarchy and matriarchy, one is led to contemplate the totemism of a matriarchally oriented boy. The attempt to understand this child's pathology is based upon the concept of the specificity of a developmental phase. In the light of anthropological data, clinical phenomena are evaluated ontogenetically, in analogy with the recapitulation hypothesis.