Freudian psychoanalysis places the Greek Oedipal myth, dramatised by Sophocles, as a timeless and universal frame to define father—son relations. Erotic longing for the mother, a key narrative element in the myth, creates feelings of violence and aggression towards the father and in Freudian psychoanalysis was at the root of male experience and the formation of male identity. The Oedipal Complex privileges the attrition of rivalry as a key mode in father—son relations, simultaneously making male experience the exemplar for identity formation and canonising one interpretation as common to all cultures.
Cultural anthropologists, folklorists and psychoanalysts have challenged the Freudian claim to the universality of the Oedipal Complex and argued that support and love are equally central to the father—son relation. The prodigal son myth (in the parables of the Gospel of Luke, for example) emphasises the merciful father pardoning the rebel son. The benign father appears in Korean folktale encouraging and offering protection for his son’s journey into manhood. Mead’s anthropological study of non-Western societies (1935) contested the view that competition is the key element in every boy’s experience of growing up.
Disputes notwithstanding, the pre-eminence of the Oedipal Complex remains significant through it appears in different forms. A.K. Ramanujam’s post-modern understanding (1999) interprets the castration complex of the Oedipus myth in South Asia as a reversal. In Indian mythic renditions, the father, Shiva, kills his son, Ganesh, whom he sees entering his wife’s chamber but then restores him to life by placing an elephant head on his body. Others, particularly Courtright (1999) and Obeyesekere (1999), interpret the symbolism of the flaccid elephant trunk as a castration of the son’s sexuality by the jealous father.
Jokes and humour also dwell on the oedipal theme. In the southernmost Andalusian province of Spain explored by Brandes (1980), jokes focus on filial awe and anxiety about the father’s phallic superiority linked to hierarchic notions of male power. Mocking the son’s inability to measure up to the father’s genitals, jokes transgress the extreme codes of modesty between fathers and sons and counter the injunctions that restrain fathers from exposing their genitals to their sons. On the other hand, rebellion is expressed in ridiculing the potency and sexual prowess of the father, comparing his anatomy unfavourably with animal genitalia or his inability to satisfy the mother.
The emphasis on the biological link in myth and humour provides a powerful paradigm for non-kinship contexts. In north India, for example, employers commonly extend the term for son to workers. Owners of family businesses in pre-industrial England treated certain categories of employees as sons and included them in their households, especially if the young men were children of friends or distant kin. While inheritance was restricted by blood or kin ties, business and craft skills were passed on to unrelated young men. Authority and concern are simultaneous in fictive kinship relations and unrelated older and younger men follow the idioms of father—son relations in their dealings with each other.
The father as a critical role model is important in studies of juvenile delinquency that assume the necessity of the authoritative presence and active involvement of fathers in the lives and socialisation of sons. Criminology creates the Absent Father—Delinquent Son as a new dyad in the landscape of modern postindustrial society. These assumptions place women-headed households as a major factor in the increasing delinquency of young boys growing up without clear male role models or paternal authority to curb them.
Violence and fatherhood had a particular resonance in Nazi Germany and the subsequent historiography of the father—son relation. The links between the Nazi state, the discourse of the Fatherland and the political cadres of young men produced a political configuration of the father—son relation that was no longer confine d to the dome stic d oma entered the public arena of violent political action. Dying for the fatherland or cleansing the nation-as-family of pollution by nonAryan blood became expressive of the loyal son fulfilling his duty towards his Fatherland.
Subsequent critiques of Germany’s Nazi past had to deal with the vexed question of fathers who may have been part of the Nazi political regimes. Student revolts and civil disobedience movements in 1968 were a rejection by young men of their fathers’ complicity in Nazi fascist violence. Adorno (1969) drew parallels between the ‘fatherless society’ of Nazi Germany, where the state assumed the father’s role, and the totalitarian socialist state of East Germany. The state entered the family and displaced the breadwinner role of fathers and the childrearing functions of the family, and created what Adorno referred to as a family without fathers that was responsible for right-wing voting patterns backed by the violence of young men.
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