"[1] Malinowski gives a partial explanation of the role of sex in social organization through the synthesis of psychoanalysis and anthropology, considered competing academic disciplines at the time.
In Part 1 (The Formation of a Complex), he lays out the issues related to childhood sexuality through puberty and maternal roles.
Malinowski's studies of the Trobriand islanders challenged the Freudian proposal that psychosexual development (e.g. the Oedipus complex) was universal.
Malinowski reported that boys dreamed of feared uncles, not of beloved fathers, thus, power — not sexual jealousy — is the source of Oedipal conflict in such non–Western societies.
In a brief passage in his 1979 book Broca's Brain, the late science populariser Carl Sagan criticised Malinowski for thinking that "he had discovered a people in the Trobriand Islands who had not worked out the connection between sexual intercourse and childbirth", arguing that it was more likely that the islanders were simply making fun of Malinowski.