If Freud had lived and carried on his inquiries in a country and language other than the German-Jewish milieu which supplied his patients’, wrote the philosopher Hannah Arendt, ‘we might never have heard of an Oedipus complex.’ What she meant is that thanks to the father–son tensions unleashed by the very specific conditions that prevailed among the families of some of the most materially successful Jews in Wilhelmine Germany and the Habsburg Empire in the last years of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth, Freud developed a notion of patriarchal society and Oedipal struggle as natural facts about humankind. Nearly all the leading lights of the Frankfurt School – Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer, Löwenthal, Pollock, Fromm, Neumann – were resistant to the Weltanschauung transmitted by paternal authority, and many rebelled in various ways against their fathers who had become very materially successful.