You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Is there such a being as The Father - not fathers, whose socio-economic, psychological, and mythic status are set in their particular times and locations, but The Father who, for all his variety, is stamped from a universal template? Zoja asserts that there is such a being, and that historical epochs, psychological orientations and cultural forms instantiate his various dimensions.
The father is an archetypal figure, a figure created and maintained in culture and the [archaic] psyche, not in biology. Unlike the roots of motherhood, fatherhood had to be invented, then learned; it is not a natural given nor does it have an instinctual base. Indeed, the father marks a turning in nature from man's biological prehistory into the psychic dimension of civilization and culture. ‘Proto-man’, unlike animals, ‘began to preserve … a mental image of the beast he was tracking’ to return to the females and babies with the prey and to invent the family and ‘the feeling of belonging to a place’ (pp. 37-8). ‘Paternal behaviour … one day appeared, then developed, and then became a constant’ (p. 39). The father marks a ‘course … outside the sway of evolution [and] his existence requires the existence of intentions’ (p. 43). The father is an object of a psychic need and a need of civilization.
What needs does this father meet? He embodies aggression and the capacity to win on the one hand, and goodness and justice on the other. Outside, in the public space where he operates, he must be strong against enemies; inside, in the family, he must be good, loving and just. He is, however, mired in continuous conflict over these often opposed forces, and likely to regress from restrained aggression in the service of values into arrogance, tyranny and violence.
Zoja focuses on epochs that seem to instantiate aspects of the conflict: pre-history, Greece, Rome, Christianity, the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the world wars and the post-war period. In each case, he typifies the struggle