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ABSTRACT
The relationship between a son and his father is usually characterized as primarily one of rivalry. In this emendation of classic oedipal theory, what has traditionally been referred to as the ‘negative oedipal relation’ is given prominence as a boy’s first emotionally significant relationship in which he initiates affection with another human being, his father. Such love is in the service of identification but is also as important as the template for a male’s later relationships with women (sexual), other men, and his children. A peculiarity of Freud’s relationship with his own father is suggested as the source of oversight of this element of the oedipal drama. A boy’s emotional reactive response to his mother is primarily one of gratitude in response to her love. Proactive loving is first experienced with his father.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. While the phrase usually refers to the natural mother, it must be remembered that ‘the mothering figure’ is a set of functions. This raises a question to which we will return later, about how a boy raised by his father (or another male) will negotiate the oedipal relationship with that male when he identifies with him. The father is not a set of functions indifferent to his sex. For a view that challenges this, see Corbett (Citation2009). Since this is a paper about the boy’s development, I will use the male pronouns exclusively.
2. This is a Latinized version of the Greek title Oidipous Turannos. The Greek word turannos reminds us of the godlike status of Oedipus when he is king and his being above the law of the land. His personal life is similarly above natural law as the unwitting murderer of his father and a participant in mother-son incest.
3. Freud certainly knew Euripides’ Phoenician Women, which contains some of the relevant details. See Edmunds (Citation1985).
4. In Sophocles’ version of the Oedipus story, Laius and his wife, Jocasta, are warned against having a son by an oracular pronouncement. Edmunds (Citation1985) concludes from the full story of Laius that he was the first pedophile (pederast). He also relates the figure of Laius to Judas, the biblical figure who betrayed Jesus to the Roman authorities and effectively opened the way to his crucifixion. The line of inquiry Edmunds pursues is interesting in itself, but one can read the relationship between Laius and Chrysippus in a different light, which I propose to do in my revision of Freud’s theory of the early father-son relationship. See also John J. Winkler (Citation1991) on the historical context of the myth. It is significant that Laius was a homeless boy, whose own father, Labdacus (himself left fatherless as a boy) had been murdered. Lycus, his adoptive father, was also killed. Laius was thus twice orphaned. See Calimach (Citation2002, pp. 31–35). Devereux’s (Citation1953) brilliant paper states outright that the ‘early history of Laius seems to provide us with data which are fundamental for the understanding of the entire Oedipus myth’ (p. 139) and in that way a full psychoanalytic understanding of the son-father relationship.
5. The well-known work by Ross (Citation1982) and those who have responded to him on the ‘Laius complex’ assumes that rivalry is the leading psychodynamic feature of the son-father relationship. My proposed revision does not counter the orthodox Freudian account but is intended to supplement it. Freud considered any feelings a boy might have for his father in terms of passive sexual strivings, which he termed the ‘negative’ dimension of the boy’s oedipal development. But there is more to the relationship.
6. Freud’s disappointment in his own father, Jakob, led him to see his father as a passive (feminized) male, a coward who while walking with his young son, Sigmund, would not stand up to a man who knocked off his hat causing it to plop into the mud. Freud used an historical figure (Hannibal) to as serve as a model for identification, much as boys do now with television superheroes. In his own self-analysis, Freud can be seen fathering himself, and this may have been his greatest personal accomplishment. Boys in contemporary American society who are being raised without a father (currently nearly one out of three) are using fictional cartoon characters, television personalities, and professional athletes for the same purpose. In general, the view that men want to see their sons become great and powerful men is an androcentric myth. Most fathers recall quite well their own experience of the ‘big impossible’ of becoming a man (Gilmore, Citation1990).
7. Freud’s anthropology (Citation1913) stresses the rivalry among sons and between father and son. Another aspect of the male oedipal situation deserving attention is the father’s own feelings of rivalry for his son that seems to occur in childhood during the phallic-oedipal phase and again following the son’s puberty. The earliest occurrence of this feeling probably follows receiving relatively less attention from his wife as she attends to the demands of the infant. It occurs in another form when his son reaches adolescence and becomes a fit competitor for selection by women as a sexual partner. Many fathers react to this by trying to be like their adolescent sons. They return to the gym and may go looking outside of the parental partnership for a younger female sexual companion.
8. Perhaps we have erred by first looking at the relationship of father to son rather than that of son to father, that is, by beginning the analysis with the father. It is implicit in the former (father-son) relationship that the father takes part in what will become a reciprocal relationship. In the latter (son-father) relationship, however, the son is understood to initiate the relationship. For the boy, this makes all the difference in the world.
9. One classic account is found in Laplanche and Pontalis (Citation1973) where it is defined as the ‘psychological process whereby the subject assimilates an aspect, property or attribute of the other and is transformed, wholly or partially, after the model the other provides’ (pp. 204–207). Lacan’s (Citation1977, pp. 1–7) mirroring process in infancy as ‘primary identification’ is in service of recognition of the self and perhaps identification as a human being. Those who believe that identification is entirely a matter of imitation (as in social learning theory) will neither need nor care to follow me further.
10. I am not speaking here of love as unconditional devotion to another human being, which is known only to females and is based on the natural mother’s relation with her infant. Only women are capable of love so defined. Men can simulate such feeling in romantic love in which the female is idealized and loved on the model of love of God (de Rougemont, Citation1983). Such love is different than amativeness (male-female sexual ‘love’) and adhesiveness (male-male friendship). Both are distinct from erotic longing. I consider the feeling between a father and son to be a manifestation of this longing. On male adhesiveness see Lynch (Citation1985) and Katz (Citation1995). Freud’s later concept of Eros as a primal force has another sense.
11. Mahler et al. (Citation1990) has characterized the first months of life as autistic and symbiotic. These vivid terms capture the character of the relationship between an infant and his mothering figure that is entirely selfish. Anaclitic, it does not require that the infant see the mothering figure as a separate entity, let alone as a person (to say nothing of being a sexed being). He feels the need for what she has to give him.
12. I borrow the term ‘separation-individuation’ from Mahler et al. (Citation1990).
13. Greenson (Citation1968) has suggested that the boy dis-identifies with his mothering figure as he enters the phase of identification with his father. The term is misleading, however, since no real identification with the mothering figure has taken place. Mirroring and or ‘primary identification’ and oedipal identification are not equivalent psychological processes. Partial identification seems to be an equivocal use of the term.
14. Again, the question arises: What if he has been reared through infancy by a male? Although this is still rare, it now occurs more commonly.
15. I suspect that Freud’s own development took this direction and left its impression on his theory of oedipal dynamics. It should be noted that the standard explanation of so-called male homosexuality is not among the possible results listed. This follows from my view that it is not a form of sexuality at all but rather erotic experience that is essentially ludic. Female homosexuality has an entirely different dynamic. Undoubtedly, another overall effect of protracted symbiotic involvement with the mothering figure is incomplete formation of the self. Such boys have probably felt unlovable since infancy in the orbit of maternal involvement.
16. In being the object of identification, a father will very likely recollect emotionally (if not explicitly and verbally) his own identification with his father.
17. Gilmore (Citation1990) notes that the indigenous Tahitians and Semai of central Malaysia are such exceptions.
18. Stoller (Citation1965) argues persuasively for this view of an inner sense of maleness on the basis of clinical experience. He does the same for female development (Stoller, Citation1968).
19. This is necessarily an unsatisfying venture and acquires a compulsive quality. So-called homosexual men find themselves in a psychologically impossible situation. The point is that, although we have come to call such behavior homosexual (in contrast with heterosexual behavior), it is not sexual behavior at all. Homosexuality, as we know, was invented to give a name and sense to what appears to be reproductive behavior between individuals of the same sex. They were characterized as deviants who did not seek out the other sex to reproduce. On historical material that supports this, see Katz (Citation1995).
20. This is not primarily a matter of not being attracted to women. Most ‘gay’ men enjoy the company of women and many even feel more comfortable among them. Some, of course, dislike women and may even find them repugnant because they remind such men of the mothering figure, her needs, and especially her unwillingness to let them reach full individuation and independence. Lack of sexual interest is secondary, however, to a perception that women (as represented by the mothering figure) stand in the way of a male’s existential unfolding as an individual. In extreme situations, some men may seek revenge on substitutes for the mothering figure and commit rape or other sexually tinged crimes. Sexual intercourse then becomes a means of asserting power over and controlling the primal female substitute. Jukes (Citation1997) has suggested that all males experience primitive rage in reaction to the process of psychological ‘hatching’ (Mahler et al., Citation1990) from their mothering figures that takes place during the first months of life. Ordinarily, however, powerful social constraints (morality) suppress expression of this ‘psychotic core’ of hate for the early mothering figure.
21. The fact that men are expected not to find other men’s bodies aesthetically appealing does not affect the argument. As gender dimorphism becomes less decisive in our culture especially for woman and ways of seeing human beings other than in terms of gender become more prominent, it can be expected that men will again express aesthetic interest in other men’s bodies as they have periodically in the West (ancient Greece, the Renaissance). In our culture, women are only now admitting to seeing the male body as something beautiful as well as healthy and strong. Women have always been free to see other women’s bodies from an aesthetic perspective.
22. On the debate whether matriarchy preceded patriarchy, see Young (Citation1991).
23. While an infant boy mirrors his mothering figure without necessarily knowing that she is a separate entity, he models himself on an image of his father that has among its features the status of being a separate individual and a (genital) male one at that. The separateness of the father (as well as the boy’s own individuation) as distinct from the dual unity or oneness with the mothering figure is a condition for undertaking the identification process at all.
24. The mothering figure and the boy were a self/other that then divided into the boy’s own self and the first other in his life. On the other hand, his father is the first other self a boy experiences. A son never experiences his mothering figure as an independent self, which accounts for why the relationship with her remains so ambivalently powerful throughout a man’s life. Other males and features of other males with whom he will later identify (older peers, teachers, coaches, religious and political leaders, writers) are also independent selves from which the individual takes on characteristic values, ways of thinking and behaving. The father, however, I take to be the fundamental model of an other self, not just an alternative to his own self which emerged in the boy from the undifferentiated mother-self. Other selves, both women and men, will never have quite the same importance in the formation of his personality as his father did, since he was the object of the boy’s first self-sourced erotic longing (affection). Undoubtedly, there are elements of the mother’s love for the boy in his way of relating to his father, but since his first erotic efforts are as primitive as they are ardent, they have a quality about them that is unique. Besides, the relationship is ultimately in service of identification.
25. It is important that a boy’s first object of directed affection should be a male, since another male is more likely than a female to appreciate the ways boys tend to express affection; namely, by doing rather than saying. Hence the necessity of a father’s availability to do things with his son (perhaps with little verbal exchange) and not merely talking with him from a distance which some parental separation and divorce situations require. Boys typically show their affection (later for non-parental others, including their female sexual partners and wives) rather than speak it, which is a more natural way for girls to express their affection given their greater verbal facility. The greater verbal expressiveness of girls has often been observed. This way of behaving may be innate in girls but it is more likely the case that a purely biological disposition to speak feelings and thoughts rather than enact them is an effect of the extent to which girls are spoken to more as infants and boys are listened to less by parents regarding matters of the heart.
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Miles Groth
Miles Groth, PhD, is Professor and Acting Chair of the Department of Psychology at Wagner College. He has been in private practice as a psychotherapist since 1980. He is the author, most recently, of After Psychotherapy and The Voice that Thinks, essays on Martin Heidegger, as well as numerous articles in the areas of psychoanalysis, continental philosophy, and male studies. He is the editor of New Male Studies: An International Journal.