Fathers and Sons: Violence and Sacrifice

Abstract

The family offers one of the closest and yet most problematic of relationships in the father-son dyad, whether divine or human. Sigmund Freud thought that this relationship, with all its passions and strife, lay at the very core of Western culture and civilization and grew from the infantile, sexually driven competition of the son with the father for possession of the mother. He named the mindset of the son in such a situation the “Oedipus complex.” The Oedipal phase of psychosexual development occurs normally, he thought, between the ages of three and five. He understood this phase as a universal human phenomenon that, if not “mastered,” resulted in arrested psychic development, or “neurosis,” in which one fails to evolve naturally through the stages of mental maturation and remains lodged in a mindset appropriate to a very young child.¹ Freud’s idiosyncratically focused explanation does not help much as one seeks to understand the father-son relationship in religious/mythological narratives with their persistent echoing of sacred ritual, for it is indeed more rich and varied than Freud noticed. Freud recognized the Oedipus complex easily enough but failed to recognize what I call the “Laius attitude,” manifested in the father’s murderous intentions toward the son.²

It is your own son there

don’t murder your son

the wild and well born

son let him be….

Kinsella, The Táin 42

We have a law, and by that law he ought to die, because he has made himself the Son of God.

John 19:7