I. THE FILICIDAL PAST

The origins of filicidal behavior are lost in the darkness of prehistory. By the time history begins, we see everywhere filicidal, patriarchal societies in which the masculine and feminine roles we know so well today are already being handed on from generation to generation. As is the case with many fundamental social phenomena, the reasons remain elusive. The fact that we are a bisexual species obviously played a role. We must have early learned the survival value and efficiency of a division of labor based on biological sex difference. Other factors--geographic, climatic, cultural--can only be guessed at.

It is possible we are dealing here with not only individual amnesia but racial amnesia well. If a global matriarchy existed in prehistory, this patriarchal world maybe the result of a violent and bloody overthrow of that matriarchy, perhaps carried out by males who were once as oppressed as females are today. Hidden in our past may be a real and vast filicide--what more brutally effective way to take vengeance on and control from the Mothers than to slaughter the children en masse? Perhaps the many myths of literal filicide from around the planet are the only way we could afford to remember such a terrible event.

Whatever lies behind it, the historical record reveals two tendencies:

A more and more refined attempt to justify our filicidal behavior;

A gradual intensification of that behavior.

Although our own lives bear witness to those tendencies, their general development may be seen most clearly in the major myths of the historical past. "Myth" here implies not fiction, or unreality, but precisely the opposite. The figures we encounter in myth are realer than real, larger than life, if you will. They, and the stories in which they occur, reveal in a concentrated form truths about ourselves which we easily and continuously overlook in our everyday life. Immersion in myth tempts one often to the conclusion that much of what we call life is a sort of patchwork bulwark erected over thousands of years to protect us from certain facts about ourselves and our origins we are not yet ready to face openly.

Nor does "myth" imply disbelief in the historical reality of the figures involved, particularly those of religious myth. Myth might be best understood as the consensual reality we have settled on concerning the meaning of those figures.

Two of the primary sources of myth in the Western world are Greek civilization and the Judeo-Christian tradition. An examination of a few of the best-known myths from those sources will provide abundant material for understanding the emotional depth and the cultural antiquity of filicidal behavior. Perhaps even more disquieting is the ease with which one is then able to trace our filicidal myth-making up to the present day.

3. GREEK MYTH

OEDIPUS AND JOCASTA

The myth of Oedipus tells us that the first experience which he has, soon after birth, is the proto-scene in its most basic and dangerous form. His parents attempt to kill him. His father, Laius, had been warned by the Delphic oracle that he would die at the hands of his son. When Jocasta bears him a male heir, Laius has the child exposed.

A filicidal reading of the story illuminates a number of points concerning the nature of our actual, as opposed to our pretended, behavior toward children. Of course, nowadays the story comes to us filtered through Freud. In looking again at Freud's reading of the myth, what strikes one now is the fact that he failed to find any great significance in this violent and dangerous experience to which Oedipus' parents subjected him at the beginning of his life. The fact that we have so readily gone along with the Freudian interpretation of the myth, with its profound indictment of the infant instead of the parents, says as much about our own hidden biases as about those of Freud.

Implicit in Freud's failure to see any significance in the attempted filicide at the beginning of Oedipus' life is the commonly held assumption that an infant, especially a newborn, is hardly a person at all. We view infants more as creatures with human potential who perceive what is done to them and what happens around them in only very limited ways.

With Oedipus, what is done to him is not simple filicide. Before exposing him, Laius has the infant's feet bound. Even after Oedipus is saved, he is permanently crippled as a result of the binding.("Oedipus" = "club-foot"). In Oedipus' lameness we have an extraordinary, explicit externalization of the internal distortions caused by filicide. In this poignant sense, we are all--male and female--Oedipus.

The terrible events at the beginning of Oedipus' life form a clear micromodel of the hidden relationship between all parents and all children. As the mother to some extent actively participates but mostly gives only her passive assent, the father--in this patriarchy--forces the child into the proper behavior. Though he may not kill the child outright, he is quite likely to threaten to do so (I’ll whip you within an inch of your life). The parents demonstrate their power by symbolic mutilation of the child (if male and American, the child has approximately a one per cent chance of avoiding circumcision). The child is then put in such a position of extreme dependence that if it survives at all, it does so on the parents' terms: as an outcast from the larger universe and as a cripple, having no conscious remembrance of the awful deed which was done to it and which makes the child into the peculiarly warped adult which it becomes.

Lame, and with a forgotten heritage of brutal violence, Oedipus survives and grows up in a foreign land. As an adult he is one day wandering about the landscape solving problems by violence (as men are wont to do). He encounters a problem in the form of a group of people blocking his path. Solution: he fights and kills one of them. His path is no longer blocked. Not realizing that his victim was in fact his father, he wanders on, arriving in Thebes where, again without knowing what he is actually doing, he eventually marries his widowed mother.

The crossroads in Greece, on the road from Delphi to Thebes, where, legend has it, Oedipus unknowingly killed his father.

From these two deeds (killing the father, marrying the mother), Freud spun the web of Oedipal guilt in which to trap us all--male, female, father, mother, son, daughter. (Freud developed the Electra Complex, it seems, almost as an afterthought to account for the daughter's murderous jealousy of the mother.) Freud's argument is that it doesn't matter whether Oedipus knew what he was doing or not. The point was that in the family as Freud knew it and as we know it the son is doomed to feel murderous jealousy toward his father and the daughter is doomed to feel murderous jealousy toward her mother.

If we consider Freud's motives in terms of the theory of filicide, we must conclude that he was to a large extent only creating yet another version of the same self-serving adult propaganda that one finds in so many of our earliest myths. The common threat described in those myths is that of the son toward the father. Freud perceived the central meaning of the Oedipus story in the following manner. The son understands that the mother has betrayed his affection for her in the arms of the father. The son's life is therefore shaped, perhaps warped, by the repressed desire to fuck his mother and to kill his father.

Obviously both these taboos are being given expression in the Oedipus story. But if the theory of filicide is correct, what we have in this myth and in countless other early myths in which the father destroys his infant son is a very crude attempt at a plea of self-defense: / killed my son, because if I hadn't killed him, he would have killed me. The theory of filicide stands this defense on its head by showing that if one wishes to speak of a guilty party, it is always the father who kills the son. To interpret the patricidal myths as central to our culture--as Freud did--one has either to ignore or grossly misinterpret such blatantly filicidal stories as that of Oedipus.

The quantity of filicidal myth is, when one finally lays down the blinders which Freud placed on us all, astonishing. It is as if we could not restrain ourselves from telling the true filicidal story over and over, while realizing that we at the same time had to offer some justification for our behavior. What better way is there than to find dangerous evidence of one's own repressed, adult violence in the most helpless and defenseless of humans, in the infant, who after all cannot even speak in its own defense? The parent, unable to trust himself and knowing on some level that he does harbor violent, even murderous, tendencies, can only assume that the same is true of his children. The parent then acts toward the children is if that is the case. It then becomes the case. Filicidal behavior is a vicious circle, a feedback loop of the most exquisite perfection enclosing all humanity.

What are we to make of Oedipal guilt? Is there sufficient motivation in Freud's analysis, self-serving though it is, to account for the fact that when the truth at last becomes known, 0edipus' self-hatred is so great that he blinds himself? And what of Laius' and Jocasta's willingness to destroy their infant son--how does that fit in Freud's interpretation? It seems that something is missing from the Freudian reading both of the myth and of the hidden politics of the family. We could accept Freud's version of the Oedipus Complex as adequate and sufficient only if that complex does exist to some degree in us all, and if that complex conceals behavior even more bizarre and threatening to our personalities than the killing of one's father and the marrying of one's mother.

What the Oedipus Complex conceals is filicide. Like Oedipus, we do not remember that our mothers and fathers killed us. Also like Oedipus, we will do almost anything to avoid facing that reality, even to the point of blinding ourselves to it. For is that not what Oedipus is doing at the end of Sophocies' play? He knows then that his parents tried to kill him; yet his great lines concern only what he did to them. And he is aware that he acted in total unconsciousness, while they, when they attempted to kill him, were fully aware of what they were doing.

Every day of our fear-filled, compulsively controlled, cautious, dissimulating lives bears witness to some terrible deed hidden in our individual pasts. No matter how successful we become, how rich, how famous, how brave, how loving, how holy, how creative, there is always that gnawing terror that we cannot stop and face. So extreme is our evasive behavior that we must believe that to face it would destroy us. What actually happens is that, in order to avoid facing that terror, we construct lives and civilizations which turn out to be alarmingly self-destructive anyhow.

To recognize what was done to us means to recognize that even as adults we are fragile, delicate creatures. But a central part of cultural filicide is the presumed killing off of the weak and fragile sides of ourselves. Even women, trapped in the deceptive softness of the traditional emotional role, are at bottom filicidally as tough as men. Otherwise how could they have stomached all the blood we men have shed in the name of humanity? Male and female, we cannot forgive ourselves for what we were subjected to as children. We cannot forgive our fathers in this patriarchy for being the chief, overt, controlling agents of filicide. We cannot forgive our mothers their complicity.

The Oedipal cry is: Mother, how could you let him do that to you? Meaning: How could you let him fuck you,-- how could you love him more than me? Freud, with his patriarchal reading of the story and of the politics of the family, can see only the son's jealousy of the father with its resultant, repressed hatred. The relationship between the two males is seen in entirely negative terms. It is not the son's lack of love which generates Oedipal guilt. It is rather the presence of hatred and competition. To find sense in Freud's interpretation we have to believe that it is the younger and weaker of the two, the infant son, who brings this hatred and sense of violent competition into the relationship.

In Freud's world the two males can relate to each other only through competition for the female. That may be a perversely flattering situation for the female. What it implies for males is that we have no choice but to spend our lives fighting, or sublimating our desire to fight. With the Electra Complex Freud applied much the same analysis to women, who are doomed to compete with each other for the male.

The filicidal cry is: Father and Mother, how can you both do this to me? The betrayal is by both parents, acting in concert. Again we see how things are topsy-turvy in the myth. Oedipus' parents knew what they were doing, but in the case of cultural filicide, the parents not only are ignorant of what they are doing, they believe they are giving the child nothing but love. Here Freud encountered a problem. He could find love in the Oedipal situation only between the child and the parent of the opposite sex. Between the child and the parent of the same sex he found at best a strange, inhuman nothingness and at worst a dangerous, violent hatred.

The theory of filicide enables us to perceive the existence of some approximation of love on the part of the child and both parents. Freud's one-sided reading of the Oedipus story assumes that men cannot love each other and that women cannot love each other, that apparently being "human nature." Such an assumption, based as it is on adult interaction with a newborn, implies a degree of genital, sexual, and emotional identity on the part of the infant which the Oedipus Complex, if it is to stand, necessarily denies.

Freud introduced the term, "Primal scene," as part of his analysis of the Oedipus story. The primal scene consists of the child's viewing of his parents having intercourse. From that sight the child supposedly concludes that his mother has betrayed him. The brutality of intercourse, as the child perceives it, is supposed to confirm the child's worst fears about his father. Here too we have another instance of self-serving patriarchal propaganda. Freud's primal scene implies a virility on the part of modern fathers and a sexually judgmental ability on the part of infants which is no more convincing than certain other of Freud's conclusions (such as those concerning female orgasm and penis envy).

What is the source of the self-destructive energy which causes Oedipus to blind himself? The theory of filicide indicates that it is that compulsive, unconscious, unexamined desire to be that perfect parent which no one has ever been. Oedipus has lived his life in an exemplary fashion, following the stated rules of his society to the best of his ability, only to find that his best-intentioned, most constructive efforts have in reality been exceedingly destructive. The Oedipal male is characterized by a life of tragic failure. In classical tragedy we attribute that failure to chance, or perhaps to the whimsy of the gods, or to the obscure machinations of fate or destiny. To blame the failure on hubris, or pride, is only to apply another coat of analytical whitewash.

Though few of us live out the tragedy of our lives to such a bloody and spectacular denouement as that achieved by Oedipus, tragic failure is nonetheless a familiar pattern on all levels of society. At the top we see it in the lives of tyrants of every political stripe who are convinced that they are the beneficent servants of their harried citizens. We see it in the tyranny of fathers and mothers who with the best of intentions suffocate their children in this process called cultural filicide and then point with pride to the well-behaved,. squeaky clean products of their efforts. In our adult lives we see it in the readiness with which we conform to the deadening constraints of society, a conformity which when done well we refer to as "maturity.

Freud found the female counterpart of Oedipus in Electra, who must stand passively by as her mother kills her father and then remarries. Whatever pain and ignominy Electra suffers, she was not driven to the self-destructiveness we see in Oedipus. That Freud should settle on her for his female Oedipus figure is only another indication of Freud's patriarchal bias. It is as if to say: women cannot and do not suffer as much or as grandly as we men suffer. If we set out to find a filicidal female equivalent of Oedipus, we find it close at hand, in the person of Jocasta, his mother. When the truth about Oedipus comes out, she exacts a greater price from herself than Oedipus does from himself. Her solution is even more violent than that of her son. So great is her guilt and so extreme her involvement that she resorts to suicide.

ORESTES AND CLYTEMNESTRA

The Oedipal male and the Jocastan female provide us with one of the two basic sets of responses to filicidal reality: the lives of tragic failure. The other response is found in lives characterized by tragic success, in the lives of persons who pursue traditional social goals in full consciousness of what they are pursuing and who, when they achieve those goals, find only emptiness. The House of Thebes provided the model for tragic failure. The model for tragic success comes from another of the great families of Greek myth.

The House of Atreus was founded on literal filicide. Tantalus, the ancestor of Agamemnon, Orestes, and Electra, was a mortal son of Zeus, and a favorite of the gods. His special standing was lost when he committed a terrible deed: he killed his only son, Pelops, and served him at a banquet when the gods were in attendance. The gods were outraged and, after restoring Pelops to life, placed a curse on Tantalus and his descendants. Two generations later the House of Atreus produced Agamemrion.

Agamemnon and Clytemnestra have three children: lphigenia, Electra, and Orestes. Their tragedy is set in motion at the beginning of the Trojan War. Before allowing the Greek fleet to sail for Troy, the gods demand that Agamemnon, as commander, sacrifice lphigenia. He does so, and the fleet sails. Clytemnestra is enraged. During Agamemnon's long absence she takes a lover, Aegisthus. When Agamemnon returns from the war, Clytemnestra and Aegisthus kill him. Orestes flees, knowing that if he stays Aegisthus will murder him too. Electra is left behind to watch her mother, the murderer of her father, rule with her equally murderous consort. Electra’s only hope is that Orestes will return and avenge their father's death. Which he does. Orestes kills his mother and his stepfather, because he knows it is the only thing to do. Everybody, including oracles, has been telling him as much.

The Oresteian male is the one who commits himself openly and consciously to the filicidal role of violent control. His life is characterized by tragic success. He is the man who plays by the rules and "wins". Sometimes he appears to us wearing a general's stars, sometimes wearing the Congressional Medal of Honor, sometimes wearing seven Olympic gold medals. Sometimes he amasses a financial fortune, sometimes an electoral fortune. Lesser examples abound in our lives and communities, from the local bank president on down. The Oresteian male's success becomes tragic to the extent that he becomes aware of the emotional, moral, and psychological price he pays for winning.

The woman who enjoys tragic success is Clytemnestra. Unlike Jocasta, who submits to her own guilt and to the judgment of the gods and takes her own life, Clytemnestra commits herself to vengeful action following Agamemnon’s sacrifice of lphigenia. She is aware of the price she pays in killing Agamemnon: she loses her other two children. When Orestes returns, she knows why he has come back. At that point, she no longer resists, and submits herself to his vengeance.

Tragic failure, as Oedipus/Jocasta, or tragic success, as Orestes/Clytemnestra. Those are the two basic filicidal roles open to us. Our lives, no matter how carefully and skillfully we attempt to plan and control them, are finally undercut by irony. Whom the gods would destroy, they first make filicidal.

IPHIGENIA

If we tried to find a single figure in Greek myth who most nearly perfectly embodies the tragedy of filicide, that person would surely be lphigenia. Of all the major figures in Greek myth, she is the only one who undergoes literal, successful filicide. Euripedes changed the earlier version of the myth, so that in his telling she was saved at the last minute by divine intervention on the part of Artemis. Even spared death, her fate was not happy. Artemis transports her to Tauris, an island kingdom hostile to Greeks, where lphigenia has to preside over the ritual sacrifice of any Greeks who fall into the hands of the Taureans. Her role in life becomes that of the accessorial mother who must aid in the sacrifice of an endless series of innocent victims. She is released from this fate only when her brother, Orestes, while trying to appease the gods for his murder of his mother, discovers lphigenia in Tauris and takes her away with him.

lphigenia occupies a central place both in the tragedy of the House of Atreus and in the Homeric epics. If Agamemnon had been a nonfilicidal father, he would have refused to sacrifice his daughter at the whim of the gods, which means the Greek fleet would not have sailed for Troy, which would have deprived the Greeks of their central saga of masculine violence, and we in turn would have been deprived of our two most ancient, grandest glorifications of war and its romantic after-effects. But Agamemnon is an exemplary filicidal father, to whose violence toward his child we, in a sense, owe the glories of Homer.

Greek myth is filled with filicide, some literal and some not. A few examples:

--At the beginning of the world, Ouranos, the creator of all things, was so repulsed by many of his children that he imprisoned them in the earth.

--Chronos ("Saturn" to the Romans) learned that one of his sons was destined to overthrow him and proceeded to eat all his children as they were born. That son turns out to be Zeus, who is saved through his mother's intervention. Zeus then receives a similar warning about one of his sons and in turn reacts violently toward his offspring.

--Hercules, the man-god who does not know his own strength, kills his wife and three young sons in a fit of irrational temper. The famous Labors were a penance for those murders.

--King Acrisius learns that his daughter, Danae, will have a son who will overthrow him. Acrisius initiates a years-long persecution of Danae and her son, Perseus, whom she bears--with Zeus as the father--while she is imprisoned.

--Theseus banishes his son, Hippolytus, for allegedly being responsible for the death of Phaedra, Hippolytus' stepmother. The banishment results in Hippolytus' death.

--Procne kills her son and feeds him to her father.

--Atalanta, she who ran in the race of the golden apples, was exposed as a child because her father had wanted a son. She was rescued and raised by animals.

The farther back in time we go, the more frequent and savage the filicide tends to be. To put it the other way around: we begin history as fully developed filicides; and the more skilled we become at creating our own reality, called civilization, the farther from our consciousness our filicidal behavior recedes. Yet on deeper levels we always remain aware of what was done to us as children and what we continue to do to our own children. Mythically, the course of Western civilization may be seen in part as a gradual process in which we compulsively sought to develop a justification for our filicidal behavior adequate to the pain and guilt produced by that behavior.