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This is a book on fatherhood and on the father-son relationship through the ages. It is a history of this relationship and of the genealogy of men, and discusses the father as an institution that promotes a mature male identity: the father as an internal object for the son, the father as a function, the father as the parent of civilization.
Zoja is a Jungian analyst and the book has a distinct Jungian flavour to it, although there is no particular Jungian terminology in it. It is well written and makes at times fascinating reading, especially in its analysis of classical texts such as Homer, Virgil and, more recently, John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.
It is not a psychoanalytic book; in fact at times it is surprisingly non-psychoanalytic, and the discussion of Freud and Klein is very sketchy and rather simplistic. Yet the book is interesting despite its several problems: its lack of any analysis of the internal world; its idealization of the father-son relationship within patriarchy; its lack of any discussion of the relationship between mother and father; its lack of any discussion of a parental couple or any in-depth discussion of the Oedipus complex (this latter is especially surprising in a book about the father, even if the author is Jungian). There is generally a nostalgia for old patriarchal relationships. However, the main argument of the book holds, i.e. that male identity vacillates between, on the one hand, a narcissistic, irresponsible, impulsive, adolescent type of personality in which hubris predominates and the responsible, provident father on the other. When the authority of the father declines, the society of brothers dominated by the immature male personality prevails and ruthless competition and the survival of the fittest threaten to plunge humankind into the law of the jungle.
The book is divided into four parts. The first part entitled ‘Prehistory’ ventures into evolutionary psychology and into the animal roots of human experience.
Civilization