ABSTRACT
Towards the end of an essay I published a few years ago on ‘Freud and anthropology’ (Hiatt, 1987), I made some tentative remarks about the Oedipus complex in the light of modern studies in behavioural primatology and brain evolution. More recently, I attempted to develop this perspective in an article called ‘Towards a natural history of fatherhood’ (Hiatt, 1990). The present paper continues the project by examining the relationship between fathers and sons in the context of initiation among the Australian Aborigines. The empirical materials are drawn largely from On Aboriginal Religion by W.E.H.Stanner, published first as a series of articles in Oceania between 1959 and 1963 and later as a monograph.1 However, I touch on a more general issue, viz. what is the significance for psychoanalytic theory of the fact that fathers in many cultures not only love their sons but behave lovingly towards them?
