Edmunds suggests using the Oedipus myth to enhance our understanding of fatherhood. Events in Oedipus' life are traced through standard mythology, as well as in Aeschylus' Seven against Thebes, Euripides' Phoenician Women, and Sophocles'

Oedipus at Colonnus. The emphasis is upon aspects of paternal aggression toward sons, the sustained authority of Oedipus as father, and Oedipus' positive relationship with his daughters. The author observes that Freud's focus on the myth is from the perspective of sons. This view continues in Freud's notion of the primal horde, in which rivalrous sons overthrow the father and then employ a totem animal to represent the idealized father, toward whom ambivalent feelings are clear to the psychoanalytic observer. Edmunds points out that characterological weaknesses of the son in the Oedipus myth are simultaneously present in the father.