ABSTRACT
There is a relationship between the feelings that a leader awakens in his country’s citizens and those which a father, in the same country and period, awakens in his children. Frequently the process is circular: a sovereign of great prestige encourages families to take the father as a model; in turn, a period of strong expansion of patriarchal power within the family can increase the elevation of the position of the king. The contrary process has also been encountered. The modernized state tends to supplant the father, especially in education. But it is difficult to define the direction in which authority flows, from the public to the private, or vice versa. Their interrelationship belongs to the psychology of symbols, which can’t be approached in quantitative terms or reduced to cause and effect. In Western countries, the father has undergone a long, slow decline: an uncertain decline at the beginning of the modern era, but then more visible in the last two centuries. The figures of state or religious authority that rank as collective metaphors of the father follow a parallel decline.
