Oedipus again: a critical study of Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter

In this paper the Oedipus complex is reexamined through a film, The Night of the Hunter. Study reveals a concealed fairy tale structure, a structure that, when presented against a mythic backdrop, is ideal for presenting a certain kind of oedipal situation, that of a vulnerable damaged father and couple (indeed, couples), revealing a skewed oedipal situation. The film, produced in 1954 and looked at forty years later in the context of psychoanalytic writings of the last decade (Bergmann, Feldman, Herman, Simon), provides a matrix with which to reexamine a fundamental psychoanalytic concept, the Oedipus complex. It is the mutual enrichment of art and psychoanalysis that this paper addresses.     

The Myth of Man the Hunter, Man the Killer and the Evolution of Human Morality

Since the discovery of the first man-ape, many have assumed that the earliest humans were hunters and that this was associated with a "killer instinct." The myth of "man the hunter" was repeated in the 1960s in anthropology texts and popular literature. In the 1970s it was adopted by sociobiologists to explain human nature. "Man the hunter" is used to explain not only human biology but also human morality. The morals described, however, often reflect ancient beliefs and appear to be new ways of justifying old morality codes. The newest version of this myth is presented in a recent book, Demonic Males . I will discuss various accounts of this myth and the evidence used to justify them, and will specifically critique the arguments presented in Demonic Males .