Freud very quickly complemented his psychobiology with a sociobiological theory of culture and society. As early as 1897, he rooted the psychological phenomenon of repression (shame, disgust) in what he called a “primary,” “organic” repression that corresponded in the history of the species to the adoption of the erect stature and the abandonment of the oral-anal-urethral zones as sources of sexual excitement. To this biological origin of the civilizing process, Freud added in Totem and Taboo the murder and cannibalistic incorporation of the “primal father,” an event supposed to account at the collective, phylogenetic level for the prohibition of incest, and at the individual, ontogenetic level for the “decline” of the Oedipus complex during the latency phase of the libido and the corresponding emergence of an internal “superego.” The whole development of culture is thus viewed by Freud as a constant recapitulation and commemoration of this guilt-producing event whose unconscious memory is imprinted in the “archaic heritage” of the human race and transmitted compulsively through the generations, in conformity with Lamarck’s theory of inheritance of acquired characteristics.

“The Death of the Supertramp” examines the extent to which psychoanalytic concepts inform contemporary expressions of the American wilderness myth. It does so by focusing on the much-publicized death of Christopher McCandless, the subject of Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild (1996), as well as his cult following. McCandless takes to an extreme an idea popular within the deep ecology movement: that by quitting human civilization one might recover a repressed, authentic sense of wholeness. McCandless equates this lost unity with the expansive scope of the ecosystem as a whole rather than a bounded sense of self. Krakauer’s account demonstrates the centrality of Freud’s developmental schema to the young man’s logic: McCandless believes that his civilized ego represses a natural, more expansive psychic condition. It also suggests that this influence introduces a certain political quiescence to both wilderness discourse and mainstream environmentalism in general. In dismissing the importance of his self-identity – the ego that gives him reason to stay alive – McCandless does the most authentically ecological thing possible: he dies, consequently allowing his bodily matter to circulate.