Salt was used on the sacrificial fires. The child's confident act of imitation always runs the risk of coming up against the desires of adults, in which case his models will be transformed into fascinating obstacles. As a consequence, to the extent that in his naivete he is exposed to impressions from the adult world, the child is more easily and lastingly scandalized. The adult who scandalizes the child runs the risk of imprisoning him forever within the increasingly narrow circle of the model and the mimetic obstacle, the process of mutual destruction we have so often described. Girard is referring, of course, to Freud's Oedipus complex which he regards as the re-mythologizing of modern psychology.
Mimetic theory explains the phenomena more adequately in at least two ways.
First, it more generally explains the phenomena of rivalry without relating it always to rivalry experienced in childhood with one's parents, while still recognizing the latter's importance since parents are generally one's first models. Second, it doesn't embrace scandal. In other words, it doesn't make the scandalous, rivalrous relationship between parent and child an essential part of our human nature as does the Oedipus Complex. Existentially, that has not been the case, until Jesus was able to grow up in relationship to his heavenly father without falling into the rivalry, the skandalon. And the promise of his Holy Spirit carries the promise of a sanctifying grace by which we might begin to fall back out of the rivalries that have been forged in our lives.