The Afterlives of Susan Taubes

In Sigmund Freud’s “Rat Man,” a case history of a neurotic young man, there is a curious footnote about the natural uncertainty of paternity. For a man to believe that his father truly was his father, he had to accept what no evidence could corroborate. Paternity was not a physical relation, Freud explained. It was an idea that sprang, as if already fully formed, from one’s mind. “The prehistoric figures which show a smaller person sitting upon the head of a larger one are representations of patrilineal descent,” he wrote. “Athena had no mother, but sprang from the head of Zeus.”