Starting from research on the relationship between information and personality formation, i.e. on family communication [1], I asked myself if it would be possible to consider the impulses inherent in the "Oedipos complex" and other impulses towards various religious rites in so far as they may be analogous parts of the individual's personality; i.e. as belonging to the same logical level which the individual's personality is formed in. Then I asked myself whether the Oedipus Complex might be a primary cause or only the manifest symptom of another cause acting at the origin; and in the same way, whether the religious impulses were the primary cause of some individual behaviour patterns, or only a symptom of a deeper common cause.

According to this hypothesis, such a primary cause would not have to be sought out in the "Totem and Taboo" or in other myths, but rather in some mistakes in the patterning of the family communication relationship which the distortions of a child's personality development arise from. Such distortions are the cause of other more manifest symptoms which follow a logical sequence and which are the traditional object of Psychoanalysis.

To face such a hypothesis of a common cause at the base of both the Oedipos myths and religious rites, I think it may be sufficient to analyse only one of its symptoms - the Oedipos Complex - which in my opinion is the more significant one. But since I cannot quote all that has already been written about this matter, it is useful to abstract from some writings of Aldo Carotenuto the motivations from which, in the opinion of the Italian authoritative exponent of the Jungian School, the distortions of child's psychological development are formed:

".. From the moment we come into the world we are inserted into an universe of apriori settled values and meanings, of which the Family makes itself the guarantor and carrier... If, as confirmed, the inclination to close intimate and intense binds and relations represents a primary component of human nature... then we can certainly assert that everyone frames oneself on the basis and inside of affective and significant relations,..

The child's absolute dependence on the parental figures,.. confers on the family patterns that inflexibility and that strength, whose damage the therapeutes know so well... The origins of the fractures in the individuaI's identity building and of other troubles regarding the universe of sentiments and the difficulties of entering into relationship with other people, must actually be identified in the dark folds of the family's past...

... Infancy is the theatre of a series of living experiences that see the child like the actor and the spectator of a fatal family saga of which she can represent only the weakest link... The inclinations to the satisfaction of her pleasure suffer heavy censures...

... The abuse of power towards the minor arrives at involving her own identity, starting from her very first years of life... When one speaks about abuse of power on the child, one makes reference to the most subtle psychologlcal violences...

... That the negative living experiences of infancy could obtain durable effects and consequences and take an enormous part in determining the child's future, is already an undoubted item of information. Just to give one example, the studies about violent parents have proved that most of them had suffered violences or inadequate care in their own infancy...

... It is not the chiId who seduces the parent, but it is her who is seduced by the latter... Even the most simple manifestation of affection can hide unconsciaus manoeuvres of seduction towards the child... she answers to the seduction to attract her parents' affections?

From these observations of professor Carotenuto, good evidence emerges that the moment when the Oedipos Complex imprints itself, and when analogue educative conditionings -- including reIigious ones -- probably imprint themselves, can be identified in the first educative relationships and therefore in the family pattern. As we can see, this particular pattern turns on the parent's power and on the child's total dependence, and acts by the tools of violence and seduction to amputate the most noble psychological needs of the child: selfconsciousness and self-realization. This parental power so binds the child to a rigid psychological dependence based on pre-arranged models and rites.

Let's suppose, in the light of everybody's results, that this pathological kind of family model can be identified in a positive and sufficiently unmistakable way on the basis of two typical nodal points, or educative parameters:

- The first parameter concerns the dialogue relationship between the two parents, who can base their behaviour either on the quasi-duty of reciprocal consent - the "No-Contradiction Principle" which would result in the pathological family pattern - or they can base it on a free expression and comparison of opinions. Indeed, it is obvious that the violence which so often characterises a parent-child relationship can be increased if the consent of the other parent is added to the action of the violent parent. Vice versa, such violence can be decreased to the point of annulment if the violent position of a parent is contrasted by the opposite, dialectical position of the other parent. The adoption of a family pattern based on dialectical comparison and reciprocal tolerance of opposite opinions could certainly avoid that distorted and distorting family framework which has been depicted as a "family tripod, where the Totem is realized by the overpower of an anthropophagic mother who presents the father as a Taboo, thus sacred and terrible, inflexible, unquestionable, unapproachable, in a word only hers, as well as, after having devoured her father-husband she also devours her child, now become ill and helpless..."

Furthermore, a family pattern characterised by the strict duty of consent between both parents, can give the child only a rigid behavioural line that s/he could never reject for fear of being rejected by the family. Similarly vice versa, a family communication pattern bringing out the comparison between the two parents serves to open a logical space in which the child has the freedom to try spontaneous and independent patterns of behaviour which share in the family dialectic, and so the child can develop his/her own self-consciousness, self-realization and creative autonomy.

- The other nodal point, or parameter, which characterizes the pathological family pattern concerns so-called "punctuation" [2] of the issue sequence in the family communication relationship. Putting puntuation into a dialogue means to define who speaks as first and who as second; who asks and who answers. In the family communication, such punctuation allows us to determine whether the educational relationship in which the parents transmit all the family values to the child, starts either at the initiative and express requestof the parent, or at the initiative and express request of the child. This priority in the family communication is of great importance because it is very likely that every initiative and every request from the parent to the child becomes in itself an act of seduction, thus characterising the pathological family pattern. It is indeed obvious that such seduction from the parents to the child, with all its known and unhappy results, could undoubtedly be avoided if the parents were informed (they still aren't!) that it might be much better if, before delivering their family values to the child, they waited for the child's definite, necessarily conscious, initiative and request. Hence it seems possible to affirm that many failures which so many parents unintentionally cause to the psychological development of their children might be avoided, or at least be made less intense and dramatic, were parents aware of the two above quoted educative parameters, which they still pursue sub-consciously within their daily family relationship patterning.

The logical sequence that brought me to investigate family communication dynamics upon which a child's psychological development may depend, has not been that of traditional Psychoanalysis. Instead, it has rather been a Christian conception of human existence which led me towards educative research aimed at overcoming such anti-social patterns of behaviour: from consumerism to ecological crisis; from psychological dependence on obsolete stereotypes and totalitarian rites to medicine and drug addiction. Notoriously, these anti-social and selfish behaviour patterns find their origin in that particular common mentality that identifies itself - on an individual level - in the rigid psychodependent personality; a personality incapable of creative autonomy in its flexible sharing in the environment. It really seems impossible to reflect on those products of the common mentality that Bateson called "mistakes of the western mind", and to think about how to get over them, without critically analysing where and how the young individual's mentality is formed. That place is the educational family pattern. In the same way, it seems equally impossible to look at the failures inherent in a faulty setting of the parent-child relationship, without feeling a logical and moral duty to contribute, each according to his or her own means, to its correction and towards the development of a more evolved and modern society.

In this regard, Carotenuto also wrote:
"The development - in the sense of a change - of the individuals' community is however proportional to the individuals' ability to increase and change the values and law traditions on which it bases itself; and that cannot happen without the fight between the crystallized mind models of the cultural tradition which are given to the youth mostly by education, and the new values that constitute the views of the new generations..."

Thanks to Freud, to whom we can undoubtedly attribute the merit of "having thrown light, by bringing us to knowledge, the parental configurations which we ourselves embody and act...", such radical change could begin to be ordered in a scientiflc way. And thanks to Freudian therapy, so many people who would otherwise have been abandoned to pain and expulsion from their families, are now on the track of autonomy and individual self-awareness. Yet, it is well-known that, at the time Freud started his psychoanalytical work, he had been allowed very little space to further investigate the parental configuration as the source of repression, discomfort and isolation of the young individual. But it would be paradoxical if, in all the time from then up to today, Psychoanalysis had fossilized its analytical methodology, thus leaving other disciplines -- or other rites -- the cultural task of bringing these individual and social consequences of what originates from the familyformative mechanisms to light. Indeed, in preference to any other institution, it is just the Freudian school which is in the best position to understand these consequences for the simple reason that it possesses the technical means and the know-how to analyse them.

Let me conclude with an exhortation.

Looking at the tragedy of too many of our children who without any defence are handed over to the many myths, and most of all to the many rites that are choking us today, may Psychoanalysis face up to the social problem of educative research, and proceed to firmly inform the appropriate institutions - in the first place, the Family - about the nature and the social importance of formative educational factors.

To make a positive proposal - the two nodal points of the family triad that I have submitted to this Psychoanalysis and Religion Congress, could costitute the object of an epidemiological inquiry about the aetiology of that obscure evil, that plague, whose existence Freud - nearly two thousand years after J.C., - was able to point out to us.

References:

1. Rossln A.: "Droga&Famiglla", ed. Zielo Este Italy 1990 ISBN 88.85689.13.2
2. Watzlawick P.: Pragmatic of human communication, W.W.Norton &Co. New York 1967

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