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IN CONSIDERING THE BOY'S OEDIPAL TRANSITION, we wish to take you back to a time long before Oedipus escaped the patricidal jealousy of his homosexual father Laius, and survived to kill his father, albeit unknowingly, and marry his mother. For this we need simply to visit our Stone-Age contemporaries in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. Understanding their very different way of managing the boy's oedipal transition can serve to clarify and to some extent amplify our psychoanalytic concepts of this phase of a boy's development.
In a previous paper (Lidz and Lidz, 1977) we examined the initiation rituals of several Papua New Guinea cultures for the insights they provided concerning the boy's problems of gaining a firm masculine identity because of his initial symbiosis with his mother, his initial identification with her, and male envy of woman's maternal nurturant attributes and her closeness to nature. Stoller and Herdt (1982) utilized data about related ritual initiations into the male cults to differentiate the development of transsexuals from that of the New Guinea tribesmen who became fierce warriors after passing through a very prolonged period of homosexuality; both the transsexuals and the warriors start their lives in a lengthy intimate relationship with their mothers, with little intervention from their fathers. They especially emphasize the differences in the mother's