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Why do we encounter in so many human cultures the belief that boys do not naturally mature into men but must be ritually formed, developed, and finally re-created, reborn, as men? Male initiation is a phenomenon to be found in many culture areas, but recent ethnographies of New Guinea Highlands cultures have provided an exceptionally rich and detailed picture of the symbolic beliefs and practices surrounding the shaping of male identity from childhood, through puberty, to adulthood (e.g., Berndt 1962; Gillison, 1993; Godelier, 1986; Herdt, 1981, 1982a, 1982b, 1984; Langness, 1967, 1974; Read 1952; Salisbury 1965; and others). It is thanks to this exceptionally fine-grained ethnographic analysis that the interpretations to be offered in this article are possible. As many scholars have warned us (Keesing, 1982), male initiation is a complex, multifaceted phenomenon which cannot be reduced to any single explanatory schema. The aim of this essay is not to “explain” male initiation, but to show how the symbolism of New Guinea Highlands male ritual reflects unconscious fantasy themes related to the primary relationship with the mother imago as elaborated in the work of Melanie Klein.
“Explanation” would require explaining why male initiation does not occur in other cultures. My concern here is with evidence for widely occuring patterns of fantasy in human culture-reflections of deep unconscious processes in the human mind which influence human cultures and are expressed in them, but in no directly predictable ways. In the New Guinea Highlands cultures we are about to examine, I believe we encounter remarkably direct expressions of fantasy themes identified by Klein as