The Heart of Man by Erich Fromm

Author:Erich Fromm
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: AmericanMentalHealthFoundationBooks
Published: 2020-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

V. Incestuous Ties

In the previous chapters we have dealt with two orientations—necrophilia and narcissism—which in their extreme forms operate against life and growth and in favor of strife, destruction, and death. In this chapter I shall deal with a third orientation, incestuous symbiosis, which in its malignant form leads to results similar to those of the two orientations discussed before.

Again I shall start out from a central concept of Freud’s theory, that of the incestuous fixation to mother. Freud believed this concept to be one of the cornerstones of his scientific edifice, and I believe that his discovery of the fixation to mother is, indeed, one of the most far-reaching discoveries in the science of man. But in this area, as in those discussed before, Freud narrowed his discovery and its consequences by being compelled to couch it in terms of his libido theory.

What Freud observed was the extraordinary energy inherent in a child’s attachment to mother, an attachment which is seldom entirely overcome by the average person. Freud had observed the resulting impairment of the man’s capacity to relate himself to women, the fact that his independence is weakened, and that the conflict between his conscious goals and the repressed incestuous attachment may lead to various neurotic conflicts and symptoms. Freud believed that the force behind the attachment to mother was, in the case of the little boy, the strength of the genital libido which makes him desire his mother sexually, and hate his father as a sexual rival. But in view of the greater strength of this rival, the little boy represses his incestuous desires, and identifies himself with the commands and prohibitions of father. Unconsciously, though, his repressed incestuous wishes linger on, even though only in more pathological cases with great intensity.

As far as the little girl is concerned Freud, in 1931, admitted that he had previously underestimated the duration of her attachment to mother. Sometimes it “comprised by far the longer period of the early sexual efflorescence....These facts show that the pre-Oedipal phase in women is more important than we have hitherto supposed.” Freud continues, “It seems that we shall have to retract the universality of the dictum that the Oedipus complex is the nucleus of neurosis.” However, he adds that if anyone feels reluctant to adopt this correction he need not do so for one can either “extend the contents of the Oepidus complex to include all the child’s relations to both parents or one could say that women reach the normal Oedipus situation only after surmounting a first phase dominated by the negative complex....Our insight into this pre-Oedipus phase in the little girl’s development,” concludes Freud, “comes to us as a surprise, comparable in another field with the effect of the discovery of the Minoan-Mycenaean civilization behind that of Greece.” [41]

In this last sentence Freud recognized, more implicitly than explicitly, that the attachment to mother is common to both sexes as the earliest phase of development and that it can be compared with the matriarchal features of pre-Hellenic culture.

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