Proceeding from Alexander Mitscherlich's sociopsychological diagnosis of the fatherless society (1963), Heim goes back to Freud's Totem and Taboo (1912-1913) and its treatment of the myth of the origins of culture. He reflects on the recurrent failure of culture, its constant relapse into murder and barbarism, and sees this in connection with the dialectic nature of enlightenment, and the patently intrinsic ambiguity of all human progress. On the one hand, patricide and the advent of a fatherless society promise emancipation from mythic forces; on the other hand, latent feelings of guilt ensure that those same forces remain operative and periodically explode into murderous activity. The fatherless society could only lose the terrors of ambivalence if it were possible to bring to an end the symbolism of the murdered father in the secularized equivalents of the totem, and to resolve the culturally seminal oedipus complex of the primeval age in the conciliatory figures of postoedipal superego and ego ideal.