ABSTRACT
In The Ghost Dance (1970), his magisterial treatise on the origins of religion, the anthropologist Weston LaBarre writes (pp. 591–592):
The relation of fathers and sons is mysterious and terrifying. It has never been rational, nor will it ever be. It is not the only relationship that men must suffer. But father and son form the most critical and dangerous animal relationship on earth, and to suppose otherwise is to invite catastrophe. For it is by no means delivered to us that this specics-paradigm will survive annihilation in blind selfslaughter through some displaced pathology of this relationship. No man ever grows beyond the reach of its influence.… How to accept and how to embody male authority, how to express and when to modulate aggressiveness against other men—how, in short, to be father and son, government and citizen—these still remain the towering problems of the oedipal animal.
