The grand event that prepared the arrival of the human being, and of which homo sapiens appears to have been the protagonist, was not “the killing of the father” but the birth of the father.
E.Morin, Le paradigme perdu
The pre-men lived in Africa, a few million years ago, in areas of abundant vegetation. To shape a clearer image, we could also call them the ape-men, since many of their characteristics were probably fairly similar to those of the modern man-apes.1
Their mating must still have been regulated by the females’ periods of heat, just as we find today among the animals. Males and females formed no stable ties. They mainly fed on leaves and fruit, which they were able to collect without any need for lengthy forays, or for working together as an organized group. Their social life probably took the form of the small to medium size bands which are typical of most of the higher apes.
They walked on all four limbs. But they could also stand erect. They had begun to venture beyond the edges of the forest and out into the open savanna, where an upright posture was advantageous. It allowed them to see to a greater distance, and also improved their locomotion, little by little as natural selection led to the evolution of longer lower limbs.
Walking erect held the further advantage of freeing the hands for the gathering of food, and for the ever more frequent use of tools. When employing tools became habitual, and when the ape-men learned the advantage of collecting and preserving useful objects, their hands discovered a new function: carrying things. And their children were the most important things for our distant forebears to be able to carry.
The evolution of an ever more erect posture demanded progressive changes in the species’ pelvic bones, which called in turn for ever shorter pregnancies. The offspring, on the other hand, needed ever longer periods of gestation, mainly because of the increasing size of their brains and heads: larger brains were needed for the coordination of ever more complex activities. The result was a kind of premature birth. The infant that waited for long enough to be completely
developed before leaving the womb risked causing the death of both itself and its mother. So, infants born prematurely had greater probabilities of survival.
The length of the baby’s period of growth, and of dependency on adults, therefore had to increase, so as to allow the conclusion of the phases of development which the period of gestation had left incomplete. (Whereas the cubs of the other mammals are immediately capable, or almost immediately, of standing up and walking, the human baby may need more than a year.) This period, indeed, continued to lengthen, more and more, since later phases of development likewise came to require more time. Humans, today, are the only species in which the process of development seems never to reach its end. Unlike every other animal, the human being continues to be marked by typically infantile characteristics (a large head, hairlessness, and so forth) even after reaching sexual maturity. This phenomenon is known as neoteny and was initially studied from a zoological point of view,2 and later in terms of the characterization of behavior. 3 Here we are mainly interested in its psychological features: it already harbingers
the insatiability and the curiosity, the neurosis and the triumph of the human being. Much more than might be said of any bodily characteristic, these are the qualities that set us apart from the animals.
But let’s return to the pre-human infant, who for the very first time was in no way autonomous. Its mother’s hands had to be free and efficient so as to be able to carry and care for it. She couldn’t rely on the behavior of female apes, who, walking as a rule on all fours, carry their infants on their backs. Nor could she teach it to clutch her pelt, since our ancestors were losing their body hair. When the proto-human being stood up and walked on two legs, the freedom of its hands became less a possibility than a sheer necessity; mothers without that freedom couldn’t have assured their children’s survival. We shouldn’t be surprised that our hands, unlike those of the apes, also have an important erotic function: the human hand was born for precisely the purpose of delicately touching another body. Rhetorical conventions have given us an image of the first human hands as male, intently shaping the first tools; but the hands of such males were a later development than those of the mothers who carried them.
We may also, here, be close to the origins of another human characteristic: the clear separation of the tasks of the sexes. If the mothers’ hands were busy with the children, male hands would have to provide for food and defense. It was perhaps for precisely this reason, and perhaps at precisely this time, that the males could begin to call themselves fathers.
Life in the open spaces presented a greater number of dangers, but also of possibilities, thus stimulating the growth of intelligence to an ever greater degree. Having descended from the trees and advanced into the plains, they encountered large and dangerous animals: a new challenge that encouraged cooperative defense, as well as the ability to use objects as arms. These constantly developing talents—in social cooperation and technical know-how also encouraged the hunting of other beasts, of which the flesh became the basis of a new, high-protein diet. Our ancestors ceased to be vegetarians. Those, in turn, who most mastered
these new techniques were the ones most likely to assure the lives of their females and offspring, as well as their own, and thus to pass along their characteristics.
Remains of the skeletons of these pre-humans, from more than two million years ago, have to some extent been preserved. The size of their brain was more ape-like than human, yet still they made use of tools, and there are numerous indications of the achievement of a modicum of social structure. Having taken their destiny into their hands, they had also freed their mouths, which had lost the large, aggressive teeth of the apes.
The new developments in their bodies, their social lives, and the activities through which they procured their nourishment were accompanied by profound alterations in the relationship between males and females, which in turn enlarged the scope and increased the speed of the process of evolution from which it stemmed. As stated before, there’s no way of knowing the dates at which such changes took place. Yet nothing should stop us from trying to shape an image of these creatures, who, after all, at just this time, were beginning to specialize in mental images. Let’s think back to the very first set of petrified footprints to have reached us: the footprints of two proto-humans who clearly walked erect, accompanied by a third and smaller individual. The footprints continue together, clearly outlined, for a lengthy stretch. They were found in Laetoli, in what now is Tanzania, and date at least from three and a half million years ago. We have no way of knowing if they represent a chance encounter, or if they stem from a true and proper family—father, mother and child—that was on the move together. The most highly evolved of today’s apes seem to stand at the threshold of a division of male from female labor. Hunting, defending the territory, and wars with neighboring groups mainly fall to the males.4 Since their society is probably
similar to that of the pre-human ape-men, and since the division of male and female labor is now a common feature of all human societies, it’s a fair assumption that the two sexes continued their specialization while further evolving: the males in hunting, the females in gathering vegetables from sources closer to home, as demanded by the presence of offspring that could not be left behind. (In the most primitive nomad groups that still survive today, this principle still holds.)
All of this led to a form of society with rules and regulations, and which also included the first modes of exchange. Foods too tended to become typically male or female, but the diet of all remained balanced, in spite of these specializations, thanks to the bartering of the different foods that males and females procured. The search for a balanced diet seems independent of social considerations, it belongs already to the instincts. For example, the apes observed by Goodhall were in the habit, while eating meat, of putting leaves into their mouths at the same time. But the division of labor between the sexes transformed this equilibrium on the part of individuals into an element of the equilibrium of the society they were starting to form, it became part of the relationships between individuals and encouraged their communication with one another. So, feeding habits too were a part of the web that wove the family, since the young received vegetable food from their mothers, and meat from their fathers.
Greater mobility, the ever increasing ability to work together as a group, and the availability of the first weapons allowed the males to fell ever larger prey, and to undertake hunting excursions to ever greater distances. Though they inevitably ate more meat than the females5—it is interesting to note that men today still
eat more meat, and that women are more frequently prone to a vegetarian diet— they would have found it hard to consume it all, meat spoils quickly in the heat of Africa. So, the males—exploiting their recently acquired ability to carry things —began to bring a part of it back to the females and their offspring. It makes little difference that this habit was at first acquired by only a few of them: their proclivity in any case improved their children’s diet, and amply increased their children’s chances of survival. So the practice was promoted by the natural selection. The fathers who observed it had a greater number of descendants. Those who stuck to the behavior of the male apes, who share none of their food with their young, lowered the chances of their offspring’s survival. So their number diminished.
No matter exactly how it came about, a new attitude had appeared. Unlike male pongids, who consume their prey on the spot, the pre-human male was learning to take it home. His contribution to the course of life ceased to be limited to his sperm. He no longer approached the females for nothing more than the very brief act of mating. He became a constant presence, even if intermittently so, as demanded by his hunting expeditions.
The males’ inclination to ever more demanding forms of hunting was also to lead them to a new and higher level of psychic complexity. The animal hunts for as long as its prey excites its senses; and as soon as its prey is beyond the range of ears, eyes and nose, the animal grows disinterested. Proto-man, on the other hand, began to follow psychic rather than simply physical spoors: he began to preserve, throughout the long approach, a mental image of the beast he was tracking, even when his senses no longer perceived its presence. This extended span of memory was coupled, moreover, with the increasingly likely possibility that one or some few of a group of ever more numerous and organized hunters might remain in contact with the prey. So, the hunt could last for much longer periods of time, up until the moment of final success, thus rewarding those who were capable of constancy, memory and effective communication with their hunting companions. The group pressed out to ever greater distances.
At this point, however, tracking wasn’t the only activity that demanded psychic effort: there was also the question of returning to their starting point; and at the end of such extended expeditions, it surely had ceased to be visible. The development of memory—the ability to lend attention to something no longer in view, remaining faithful to a stored mental image which is unrelated to the current message the eye is sending to the mind—was also of assistance for the second half of the task, the task of returning to the point of departure. Success or failure in learning to do so would determine whether man would take possession of the earth, as ordered by the biblical story of creation, or grow extinct, as happened with the dinosaurs. It was the greatest challenge of all times, and
crowned by great success. Psychological reconstruction and the study of biological evolution both tell us that the males’ return became habitual, and that it wasn’t simply a matter of groups that made a return. Couples and nuclear families began to form.
In the situation of a growing distinction between male and female roles, those who failed to return abandoned their descendants, depriving them of meat and of male defense. The food consumed by all, no less than the safety of the young, who lay exposed to the dangers of the open savanna for ever longer periods of time, required that the males, as a counterbalance to their growing habit of roving to ever greater distances, form ever stronger ties with the places from which they had departed. These largely nomadic creatures had to invent the feeling of belonging to a place. And since a certain degree of nomadism is in any case required by both gathering and hunting, that place of safety and stability had to be something other than a geographic place. It had to be a psychic place. They thus discovered the family as the place to which to return, and they likewise invented the experience of nostalgia: that sense of pain and emptiness when one’s children and companion are somewhere else; the desire once again to be with them. Perhaps—we have to say it softly, since we are using a weighty word—they invented love. Surely, of course, this need was less than pure, since it wasn’t distinct—as even now it is never distinct—from questions of control and power. But it remains a need, and encompasses ties, which before had been unknown: a creation on the part of the beginnings of a life of the psyche.
Returning to the family was in some sense invented before the family itself; going back home before the invention of a home to go back to. A single gesture on the part of the proto–men—no matter how vast the ages in which it came about, and no matter how unconsciously—simultaneously laid the basis of both psychic and social life. The appearance of the father coincided with the invention of postponement and the ability to formulate projects. It was a construction that took place in time, no less than an act that constructed time.
We do not know how many generations are needed for a new behavior pattern —a variance that doesn’t derive from physical evolution—to become a permanent characteristic of a species. Part of the success of analytical psychology derives from its notion of the archetypes, as universal psychic tendencies, but few have offered suggestions on their genesis.6 With respect to paternal behavior we
can only say that it one day appeared, then developed, and then became a constant. It is found in all known human societies, with a single, minuscule exception.7
The dawn of psychic space—that very same dawn which had brought the need to explore the savanna in pursuit of ever larger animals, and as well of the excitements of a lust for knowledge and conquest which amounted by now to something more than any simple hunger that had to be stilled—had invented the entirety of the structure of the voyage: departure and return; the thirst not only for discovery, but also for security.
If the new impulse had consisted entirely of curiosity, of the need to explore and to vanquish, it would never have led to the human being. Such a temperament would have forged ahead into one of evolution’s blind alleys, the new breed of adventurers would have run aground on extremely high levels of mortality, and their offspring would have perished at even greater rates. There’s also something more. They also would have collided with psychic catastrophe: without a vessel in which to contain it, or an adequate counterbalance, a one-sided interest in adventure would have created disorders in temperament and fostered mental instability. Nothing prevents us from imagining that the infinite twists and turns and variations of the process of evolution may also have produced individuals, or groups of individuals, who were wholly and exclusively prone to discovery; but at the very same time we must also imagine their elimination, less by the claws of their natural enemies, than by mental explosion, by confusion, by a paleo-madness that represented the outcome of their unconditioned frenzy for novelty. The bottleneck in the flow of evolution could be overcome only by a psyche that prolonged and effectively imitated the nature on which it was superimposing itself: by a psyche that could choose to contain itself, equipping itself with a mechanism of homeostasis; by a psyche that functioned not only as a river, but which also had a river’s banks.
The process of natural selection had formerly worked to the advantage of the female who followed the path of instinct, as expressed through periods of highly visible heat, and attracted the highest possible number of males, thus increasing the probability of a pregnancy. It had likewise rewarded the male who accosted the available females with the greatest possible energy, beating out his rivals, and thus maximizing the probability of being responsible for it.
With the advance of gender specialization—the males becoming hunters, the females gatherers—everything changed. Natural selection now offered the best chances to the females whose menstrual cycles were marked by a less violent period of heat, and by a longer period of sexual availability. This wasn’t however a question of any new and different way of increasing the probability of pregnancy (the period of fecundity within the cycle probably remained much the same); it was rather that sexuality was acquiring a whole new function. In addition to serving the vertical function of transmitting life to a new generation, it was beginning as well to serve the horizontal function of shaping the beginnings of the family, of the stable couple relationship. This relationship, entirely unknown