Is Parent‐Offspring Conflict Sex‐Linked? Freudian and Darwinian Models

Freud's Oedipal theory sees parent-offspring conflict as a within-gender rivalry, whereas most modern evolutionary models interpret it as a gender-blind disagreement about resource allocation. New analyses of family homicides and a critical review of prior evidence do not support the central Freudian claim of a same-sex contingency in parent-offspring antagonism during the Oedipal phase. Several errors of fact and interpretation in …