SOURCE: "A Psychological Approach to Fantasy in the Dune Series," in Extrapolation, Vol. 23, No. 2, Summer, 1982, pp. 150-58.

[McLean is an American author of children's books. In the essay below, she explores the oedipal theme in Herbert's Dune series.]

Fantasy literature has long suffered from the stigma of childishness and escapism. Only recently have psychologists begun to propose that it actually serves important psychological functions. In The Uses of Enchantment, for instance, Bruno Bettelheim suggests that fairy tales help children to understand and accept their own feelings. Through fairy tales children are able to confront their innermost fears and desires and to resolve their conflicts vicariously. Children, however, are not the only ones who can benefit from the therapeutic effects of fantasy. Like dreams, it addresses feelings that are too threatening to be confronted consciously, but unlike dreams it suggests solutions to the problems it examines. Furthermore, by providing readers with a safe outlet for the expression of repressed emotions, fantasy reduces the power of those emotions to govern their behavior.

The extraordinary popularity of Frank Herbert's Dune series can be attributed in part to the success with which he draws upon the power of repressed emotions by means of familiar fantasy motifs. The world of the Dune series contains standard figures from fairy tales—emperors and dukes, witches and man-eating monsters, swordsmen and superhuman heroes—but it combines them with enough advanced technology to make the story palatable to readers of science fiction. The emotional appeal of the books lies in their underlying themes—of Oedipal conflict, fear of sex, and fear of women—which address, in particular, the anxieties and aspirations of the adolescent males who still make up a large proportion of science fiction readership.

The four books of the series—Dune, Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, and God Emperor of Dune—differ widely in structure and focus, but all are shaped by the same fears and fantasies. The progress of the story is cyclic, in accordance with the theory of history that Herbert expounds in the novels. The first two books recount the rise and fall of Paul Atreides; the second two recount the rise and fall of his son, Leto II. The importance of fantasy themes in shaping the plot diminishes as the series progresses, partly as a result of the reader's increasing estrangement from the protagonist. At the beginning of Dune, Paul is only fifteen years old. Both his age and his situation—as an outcast unjustly deprived of his patrimony—invite the reader to identify with him. By the time of Dune Messiah, he is older and more powerful, but still subject to human weakness and vulnerability. His son Leto, however, is born a freak and becomes a monster. Endowed from birth with the memories of all of his ancestors, Leto neither thinks like a typical nine-year-old nor behaves like one. He brings about the deaths of his father and his aunt, marries his sister, and achieves superhuman strength, invulnerability, and longevity at the price of his own humanity. By the time of God Emperor of Dune, more than three thousand years later, he has evolved into a five-ton monstrosity that is more sandworm than human.

Accompanying the changes in the nature of the protagonists are equally sweeping changes in the focus of the novels. Dune is crammed with action and melodrama. As the series progresses, however, action increasingly gives way to the articulation of political, philosophical, and psychological theories until, finally, God Emperor of Dune is more sermon than story. To find unity and coherence in such a sprawling epic is no easy matter, especially when some of the characters appear to undergo dramatic personality shifts from one novel to the next. Only by examining the psychological themes underlying the story can one perceive the recurrent patterns in the action and the links between seemingly unrelated characters.

One of the most important of the buried themes of the Dune series is the theme of Oedipal conflict. Paul Atreides, the hero of Dune, has a distant relationship with his father, Duke Leto, but a very close one with his young and beautiful mother, Jessica. Jessica is so lovely and desirable that she overshadows every other woman in the book, including Paul's eventual mate, Chani, but Paul never consciously admits that he would like to have his mother to himself and that he resents her devotion to his father. When he hears that his father is dead, he finds himself unable to mourn and even becomes angry with his mother when he sees her crying. However, both incest taboos and his own guilt at having unconsciously willed his father's death prevent Paul from enjoying the possession of his mother. His feelings of guilt are incarnated in constant threats to Jessica's life—from sandstorms, sandworms, sandslides, rapists, Fremen, and even from Gurney Halleck, Paul's life-long friend and mentor. Furthermore, Paul himself comes to fear his mother, transforming his own desire for her into her desire to swallow him up, to control his life completely. Ultimately, Paul settles for acting out his Oedipal fantasies in surrogate form by usurping the throne of Emperor Shaddam IV, who closely resembles Paul's father, and by marrying the emperor's heir, Princess Irulan, who is a beautiful Bene Gesserit witch like Paul's mother.

The cruelty of Paul's treatment of Princess Irulan is difficult to explain except in the context of his Oedipal attachment to his mother. His renunciation of any physical relationship with Irulan no doubt reflects a transference of the incest taboo from his mother to her, but he appears also to transfer to Irulan the resentment which he felt toward Jessica for loving his father and for abandoning Paul by becoming pregnant again. Paul withholds love from Irulan as a way of symbolically punishing Jessica for her coldness to him.

Paul is not the only character in Dune who suffers from Oedipal conflicts: the novel teems with children who try to kill their parents and vice versa. Baron Harkonnen, the chief enemy of the Atreides, is almost poisoned by his nephew and adopted heir, Feyd-Rautha. The baron is later successfully dispatched by his own granddaughter, Alia, just as he is preparing to kill her. Princess Irulan suspects her father, the emperor, of making attempts on the lives of herself, her sisters, and her mother; his children spy on him constantly as a means of self-protection. The emperor likewise is rumored to have plotted the poisoning of his own father. The putative object of all these struggles is power rather than sex, yet the view of life as a deadly battle for supremacy between the generations is merely a generalized version of Oedipal conflict.

If Dune enacts the triumph of Oedipal fulfillment, Dune Messiah examines the guilt that results from acting out such fantasies. Like Oedipus himself, Paul atones for his incestuous and patricidal impulses with blindness, exile, and death. In Dune, he was able to overcome his attraction to his mother by symbolically splitting her character in two, so that he could love her nurturant side, represented by Chani, while rejecting her powerful, threatening side, represented by Irulan. In Dune Messiah, however, Paul finds that he is sexually attracted to his sister Alia. He can escape the possibility of being maneuvered into incest by the Bene Gesserit only by destroying himself.

In Children of Dune, Herbert again examines the Oedipal conflicts associated with coming of age. Like Paul in Dune Messiah, Leto II is in danger of being manipulated by the Bene Gesserit into committing incest with his own sister, Ghanima. Paul escaped the temptation of incest through his love for his Fremen mate, Chani, but Leto rejects a similar relationship with another Fremen woman, Sabiha. Instead, he renounces sexuality entirely in exchange for the power, invulnerability, and near-immortality that he gains when he dons his suit of sandtrout. Leto subsequently leads his father to certain death and marries his sister, but he suffers no guilt for his actions because he reaps no rewards from them. His marriage to Ghanima is a marriage in name only.

Throughout the series, Herbert's portrayal of sexuality steadily darkens. In Dune, many of the villains are associated with self-indulgent, aberrant, or sadistic sexuality, while the sexuality of the heroes is characterized by restraint, tenderness, and affection. Underlying Herbert's distinction between good and bad sexuality, however, is the more sinister assumption that sexuality of any kind is a dangerous source of vulnerability. Duke Leto's enemies attack him through Jessica in Dune, just as Paul's enemies attack him through Chani in Dune Messiah and Leto II's enemies attack him through Hwi Noree in God Emperor of Dune. Conversely, chastity is seen as a source of strength. The greatest threat to Paul's life in Dune comes from Count Fenring, whose main advantage appears to be that he is a genetic eunuch. Likewise, in Children of Dune, Leto II acquires superhuman strength when he surrenders his sexuality.

Of course, sexuality can be a weapon as well as a source of weakness. It is part of the arsenal of the Bene Gesserit, although Jessica uses it sparingly. She refuses to use her sexual power to manipulate her duke, but she does not hesitate to use it to foil would-be rapists. The perversions of sexual power, however, are explored most thoroughly in the characters of Baron Harkonnen and Alia. The baron uses the sexuality of others to trap and enslave them. He forces Dr. Yueh to become a traitor by threatening to torture Yueh's wife, Wanna, and he controls his Mentat assassin, Piter de Vries, through Piter's desire to possess Jessica. Feyd-Rautha tries to use his uncle's own methods against him by planting a poisoned needle in the thigh of one of the baron's catamites; but his assassination attempt fails, and he is punished by being forced to slaughter his own harem. Because Baron Harkonnen uses sex as a means to power, it is fitting that he himself should unwittingly be used by the Bene Gesserit in their breeding schemes, the results of which lead to his own destruction.

It is Alia, the baron's granddaughter, who kills him, but in Children of Dune he has his revenge on her by turning her into a duplicate of himself. He takes over her personality and persuades her to betray her love for her husband, Duncan Idaho, by sleeping with other men—using sex to maintain political power. Like the baron, Alia soon loses all traces of humanity, even plotting to murder her mother, her brother, and her nephew Leto. The perversion of sexuality, Herbert suggests, is the first step toward the perversion of all human feeling.

Leto's renunciation of sexuality in Children of Dune is merely the logical outcome of the increasingly negative view of sexuality that Herbert presents. Paradoxically, Leto's intimate knowledge of sexuality appears partly responsible for his revulsion against it. Both he and Ghanima are exposed, from birth, to the sum of the experiences of all their ancestors. The supposedly traumatic experience of witnessing parental intercourse has become for them an unavoidable commonplace. Their precocious sexual knowledge disturbs and embarrasses everyone around them—a fact that they frequently use to their advantage—but it leaves them unmoved. When Leto, under the influence of a spice trance, experiences the sexual relationship with Sabiha that forms one of his possible futures, he regards it only as a dangerous temptation. He later reminds his cousin Farad'n that the latter's sexual relationship with Ghanima will always leave his back exposed. Leto himself retreats into a life of asexual immortality, avoiding the traumas of puberty by returning to the peaceful and seemingly omnipotent life of infancy. He forces the entire empire to join him in his return to the womb by imposing a universal peace that is to last for four thousand years. He wishes to turn all humans into creatures who rely on their instincts instead of their minds—in short, into babies.

In God Emperor of Dune, Leto's goals are realized. His Fish Speakers, an army composed entirely of women, patrol his empire, acting as symbolic mothers to a population reduced to infantile dependence and awed subjection. They are often mothers in the literal as well as in the figurative sense, both because they freely engage in sex without using contraceptives and because they "often submit to a form of rape at first only to convert this into a deep and binding mutual dependence. The children of the Fish Speakers are totally female-dominated. Like the Bene Gesserit, the Fish Speakers are powerful and dangerous women who control men with a combination of seduction and force. But unlike the Bene Gesserit, the Fish Speakers are themselves under the control of a man, Leto II.

Throughout the Dune series, fear of sexuality is accompanied by fear of women, yet the most frightening women are seen not in their roles as wives or lovers but as mothers. To children, of course, mothers often seem to be powerful and threatening. The witches in fairy tales, according to Jung, are one representation of the child's image of the Terrible Mother who wishes to swallow or destroy the child. Most of the major female antagonists of Paul and Leto II are witches or mothers or both. The actual mothers—Jessica, mother of Paul, and Wensicia, mother of Farad'n—cause trouble through their efforts to control or manipulate their sons. For the sons to achieve independence, their mothers must be removed, either by banishment, as in Wensicia's case, or by voluntary exile, as in Jessica's. Because Paul never fully acknowledges his mother's threat to himself, he never exorcises her power. She returns, in Children of Dune, to threaten her grandson Leto just as she threatened Paul.

The most sinister aspects of the Terrible Mother figure are associated with those characters who are mothers in name only. One such character is Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, a proctor of the Bene Gesserit order and Jessica's surrogate mother. She subjects Paul to a test of character that almost kills him. He is forced to put his hand into a dark box which causes so much pain that he thinks his hand has been burnt away entirely. The box, which the Reverend Mother removes from and returns to a fold of her gown, can be seen as a vagina dentata and the test itself as an image of castration anxiety. The Reverend Mother admits that she wanted Paul to fail the test; and throughout Dune Messiah she continues to plot his death, for which she is finally executed by Alia.

In Children of Dune, Alia herself takes on the role of the Terrible Mother. Although she has no children, Alia is called "the Womb of Heaven." She is both a Reverend Mother and the surrogate mother of Leto and Ghanima. However, like Reverend Mother Mohiam, her real purpose is not to protect the children but to destroy them. For this, Leto forces her to commit suicide. The only witch who is not a mother—either in name or in fact—is Irulan. Consequently, she has no real power. It is her desire to become a mother that leads her to plot against Paul; but because she fails and repents, she is allowed to live.

Those women in the Dune series who are neither witches nor mothers are generally powerless. Despite their vaunted fierceness, the Fremen women are mere possessions of men. They can be won in battle and collected in polygynous marriages. In general, they stay at home, cook, look after children, and do as they are told. Chani is a typical Fremen woman and, as such, her character is one of the weak spots of Dune and Dune Messiah. She is interesting not for anything she does but only for what she means to Paul. Because the powerful women in the series are so threatening, it is not surprising that Paul can be comfortable only with a nonentity. Chani's death in childbirth prevents her from attaining any of the frightening power that accompanies motherhood, but her attempt to take over Ghanima's personality in Children of Dune hints at what she might have become had she lived.

Hwi Noree, in God Emperor of Dune, represents for Leto II what Chani represented for Paul: a woman who is intelligent and loving but in no way threatening. However, like Chani, she is used as a weapon against the man she loves, and she dies as a result of a conspiracy directed against him. Hwi and Chani represent a dream of compatibility and mutuality, but it is a dream that is doomed from the start. Siona, Leto's self-chosen assassin, may at first appear to be an exception to the rule that a woman must be either a witch or a mother to be powerful. She is not a member of the Bene Gesserit nor is she a mother, yet throughout God Emperor of Dune, Leto tolerates her rebellion precisely because of her potential motherhood, in the hope that she will pass on to her offspring her genetic trait of invisibility in prescient visions.

Most of the major enemies of Paul and Leto that are not female are feminized in some way. Baron Harkonnen's masculinity is compromised both by his immense girth, which gives him a roundness usually considered feminine, and by his homosexuality. His nephew Feyd-Rautha is, however reluctantly, an object of the baron's sexual attentions, and the baron's Mentat assassin, Piter de Vries, is repeatedly described as effeminate. Scytale, the Tleilaxu Face Dancer who conspires against Paul in Dune Messiah, actually adopts female form to further his plot. What all four of these characters have in common with the Bene Gesserit is a commitment to deviousness and trickery. Throughout the series, Herbert associates directness, honesty, and integrity with masculinity and deceit and treachery with femininity. The Fremen (whose very name suggests that they are free men) and the Atreides males espouse the former mode of behavior, while the Bene Gesserit, the Harkonnens, the Tleilaxu, and the Ixians adopt the latter. Each side chooses weapons appropriate to its methods. The masculine camp favors a phallic blade, whereas the feminine camp prefers poison, drugs, or mind control.

Jessica and Paul are pivotal figures in the battle of masculinity against femininity. Both have Bene Gesserit training, but both are on the side of the Atreides. Jessica thinks that she can use her deviousness to help the Atreides; however, Paul knows that to remain true to his heritage he must reject trickery. The final split between them occurs when Paul ignores Jessica's suggestion that he use poison or hypnosis against Feyd-Rautha. Feyd-Rautha himself has no such scruples, having made frequent use of each in his gladiatorial combats. Paul's rejection of these methods is meant to be a clear sign of his moral superiority to both his enemy and his mother.

In the later books of the series, the line between integrity and treachery is increasingly blurred. In Dune Messiah, Paul's very integrity is the tool that his enemies use against him. His sister Alia, like her mother, never adopts the masculine code of behavior. Thus, in Children of Dune, she and Jessica both become pawns of the feminine forces that seek to destroy the Atreides. Increasingly, as the series progresses, the avatars of masculine honesty—Stilgar, Duncan Idaho, Farad'n, Moneo—are duped, manipulated, or destroyed by the very Atreides that they serve. Leto II boasts of his own treachery, although his betrayal of laws and of individuals is necessitated by his efforts to preserve all of humanity. Siona's betrayal of Leto is likewise motivated by humanitarian impulses. As pragmatism replaces idealism in the political philosophy that Herbert embodies in his rulers, the masculine code of honor becomes increasingly anachronistic.

Nevertheless, a preference for the masculine over the feminine plays a key role in Herbert's depiction of the world of the Dune series. On Arrakis, destructive things are seen as feminine, and beneficial things are seen as masculine. The sandworms, for instance, appear to be utterly sexless but are always referred to in masculine terms, as "Old Man of the Desert" or "Old Father Eternity." They are essentially phallic in shape and riding one is the Fremen test of manhood. Although they can be dangerous to the unwary, they benefit the Fremen by providing transportation and the all-important longevity spice, melange. On the other hand, the deadly sandstorms on Arrakis are seen as feminine. They range in intensity from a "mother storm," which can kill an unprotected human, to a "great-great-great-grandmother storm," such as the one that accompanies Paul's attack on the emperor at the end of Dune. The Fremen worship a masculine god—Shai-Hulud, the deified sandworm—but they believe in a female death-spirit called Coan-Teen. Herbert's one inconsistency in assigning sexes to objects is that he has Stilgar speak of "the father sun" in Dune. As Herbert undoubtedly realized later, on Arrakis the sun is man's enemy. In Children of Dune, he corrects his mistake by having Duncan Idaho refer to the "Woman-Sun."

The planet of Arrakis itself fits the image of the Terrible Mother, not only in that it denies its "children" the moisture that they need to survive, but also in that it actively tries to destroy them. Paul's conflicts with the planet mirror his conflicts with his own mother. The first stage is defensive: he must avoid his mother's efforts to control him and the planet's attempts to swallow him by means of sandstorms, sandworms, and sandslides. The second stage is aggressive, involving a symbolic rape, first of his mother, then of the planet. The former occurs when he drinks the Water of Life and forces his mother to accompany him to the masculine "place within," where she is terrified by her strangely sexual vision of "a region where a wind blew and sparks glared, where rings of light expanded and contracted, where rows of tumescent white shapes flowed over and under and around the lights, driven by darkness and a wind out of nowhere." The latter occurs when Paul blasts a hole in the Shield Wall and rides sandworms through it. The final stage is expiatory. In Dune Messiah, Paul atones for his aggressive and incestuous impulses by submitting to blinding, a symbolic form of castration. He then wanders into the desert seeking to be swallowed by a sandstorm or a sandworm, thus completing the Oedipal cycle of self-assertion, guilt, and self-destruction.

As the Oedipus myth helps to shape Paul's story, so the myth of the Dying God, in two of its best-known versions, gives form to Leto's. In God Emperor of Dune, Leto takes on the role of a god who chooses to die a painful death in order to save his people. That Herbert is thus alluding to Jesus is made explicit by such details as the appearance of communion wafers at Leto's ritual of Siaynoq and by the identification of Nayla with Judas. A less obvious but no less important allusion, however, is to Dionysus, the Greek god of wine. Like Dionysus, Leto II is the offspring of a "divine" father and a mortal mother who dies at his birth. Leto becomes a god, like his father, and surrounds himself with a band of fanatical female followers who, like the maenads of Dionysus, are ready to kill their own children or rip enemies apart with their bare hands at a word from their god. Finally, like Dionysus, Leto is himself torn apart by his enemies.

Herbert identifies Leto II with Dionysus because to the Greeks Dionysus represented the awesome powers of the irrational which, if suppressed, would invariably break out in violence and madness. One of the themes of the Dune series is the need to accommodate the irrational within everyday life, applying the same laws of balance to the human mind as to politics or ecology. Just as humans cannot tame the deserts of Arrakis without losing the source of melange, or control an empire without creating opposition, so they cannot suppress the irrational—as Alia tries to do—without sinking into madness and murder. Leto and Ghanima cannot overcome their clamorous inner lives, but they can learn to accept them and live with them. Ideally, fantasy helps its readers to do the same.