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Professor Slater has written a pathography of a culture. He sees Greek family life of the classical period as determined by the ambivalent but predominantly antagonistic relationship between
a mother and her son: the woman, slighted in a male-dominated society, turns to the son she can dominate in the household for satisfaction and revenge. This mother/son relationship is a narcissistic one that threatens the child's individuation as well as his potency. Greek literature, history, and especially myths are presented to show the central importance, the nature, and the consequences of this family constellation. The author brings in the observations of many psychiatrists, including Freud, to support his rather idiosyncratic views on the psychopathology involved. He concludes, for example, that 'maternal dominance in the home … [generates] with equal facility, homosexuality, schizophrenia and achievement drive'.
All myths, all literatures, all cultures can be scrutinized meaningfully in relation to narcissistic and preoedipal intrafamily ties, and it is obvious that these relationships were particularly important in classical Greek society. Unfortunately, the author's thesis is tendentious—charged with a moral fervor one feels he is not fully aware of. What is set forth is a concentrated and narrow point of view that leaves out too much; especially neglected are the healthy and creative aspects of Greek life. The author states that he is not interested in individuals but in 'collectivities': the Greek family, the Greek mother, the Greek male. The sense of individuals in a culture is lost and, therefore, so is verisimilitude. Thus Slater considers that 'the Heracles that emerges from the total agglomeration of Greek myth is a far more complex and interesting figure than Achilles'. Achilles is called 'a gorilla'—a typical reductive denigration. In contrast to Homer's Achilles, who has individual human (although larger than life) character, Heracles of the my