So that is man died in battle his seed might be planted in many wombs– particularly in times when diseases struck men and women often in young adulthood.

When physical conditions are adverse, such social traditions have often emerged. In times of overpopulation, so-called homosexual and lesbian tendencies come to the surface– but also there is the tendency to express love in other than physical ways, and the emergence of large social issues and challenges into which men and women can throw their energies. There are “lost” portions of the Bible having to do with sexuality, and with Christ’s beliefs concerning it, that were considered blasphemous and did not come down to us through history.

It is natural to express love through sexual acts–natural and good. It is not natural to express love only through sexual acts, however. Many of Freud’s sexual ideas did not reflect man’s natural condition. The complexes and neuroses outlined and defined are products of our traditions and beliefs. We will naturally find some evidence for them in observed behavior. Many of the traditions do come from the Greeks, from the great Greek playwrights, who quite beautifully and tragically presented the quality of the psyche as it showed itself in the light of Grecian traditions.

The boy does not seek, naturally to “dethrone” the father. He seeks to emulate him; he seeks to be himself as fully as it seems to him that his father was himself. He hopes to go beyond himself and his own capabilities for himself and for his father.

As a child he once thought that his father was immortal, in human terms– that he could do no wrong. The son tries to vindicate the father by doing no wrong himself, and perhaps by succeeding where it seems the father might have failed. It is much more natural for the male to try to vindicate the father than it is to destroy him, or envy him in negative terms.

The child is simply the male child. He is not jealous of the father with the mother, in the way that is often supposed. The male child does not possess an identity so focused upon its maleness. I am not saying that children do not have a sexual nature from birth. They simply do not focus upon their maleness or femaleness in the way that is supposed.

To the male child, the penis is something that belongs to him personally in the same way that an arm or leg does, or that his mouth or anus does. He does not consider it a weapon. He is not jealous of his father’s love for the mother, for he understands quite well that her love for him is just as strong. He does not wish to possess his mother sexually in the way that adults currently suppose. He does not understand those terms. He may at times be jealous of her attention, but this is not a sexual jealousy in conventionally understood terms. Our beliefs blind us to the sexual nature of children. They do enjoy their bodies. They are sexually aroused. The psychological connotations, however, are not those assigned to them by adults.

The beliefs involving the son’s inherent rivalry with the father, and his need to overthrow him, follow instead patterns of culture and tradition, economic and social, rather than biological or psychological. Those ideas serve as handy explanations for behavior that is not inherent or biologically pertinent