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Western culture is a strange paradox. In spite of its pledged allegiance to the spiritual world, it has created the most remarkable material culture history has ever seen. Man lives less confused about
the nature of the physical world than about his own nature. As facts about man have been steadily accumulating, we might form opinions about our basic nature and our place in the larger natural order if we did not prefer to remain ignorant. In theory and practice all social sciences are moving toward coöperation and integration. Man's significantly human traits are possessed indifferently by all races. Man can no longer be considered a reprobate ape or an apprentice angel.
Weston La Barre advocates a consistently naturalistic view of man. He skilfully correlates physical with cultural anthropology by use of analytic psychology. In a rapid survey of evolution he points out that man's fateful two-footedness and his possession of hands make his unique. The peculiar nature of human motherhood and the prolonged biological immaturity of human infants bring about the stability of fatherhood in man. An investigation of speech as the fundamental symbolic system of culture leads to a description of psychosexuality. The chapter on man's earliest beliefs shows how and why and to what an extravagant degree the 'symbol-using animal' can make disastrously wrong analyses of reality and of himself. The original taboo on which all known cultures is based is symbolically illustrated by a rewording of the riddle of the Sphinx, which should have asked: 'Who may love, but not love the one whom he loves most?' (namely, his mother). Humanity depends on an exaggeration of mammalian traits: the female roles of protective mother and of breeding mate are separated in man. When the next breeding season comes around among animals, the young ones have departed, and if later the adult son mates with his animal mother he may do so on the same competitive basis as any other male.
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