Psychology of sex - Total No. of Records in System :: 2032

PSYCHOLOGY OF SEXthe myth OEdipus experienced no such feelings,but wascompelled by the oracle and the gods to marry his motherand kill his father unwittingly, in spite of all his ownstruggles to avoid these crimes; but this opposition Freudexplains away by saying that oracle and gods were a glorifiedembodiment of the Unconscious. Freud's (Edipuscomplex, when he first put it forward some thirty yearsago certainly in an incautious way and with a misapplieduse of the word "incest" was, as he frequently stated,greeted with horror and execration. That attitude, to oneof his strong and combative temperament, merely arouseda more emphatic assertion of the doctrine. In some degree,in some form or another, even an inverted form, the CEdipuscomplex, Freud declared, "is a regular and very importantfactor in the mental life of the child." He went onto find that "it does not seem impossible" that the CEdipuscomplex is the source of all perversions and also "theactual nucleus of the neuroses." Rank, at the time closelyassociated with him, showed with the help of his wideliterary culture how frequently and variously this motivehad entered dramatic poetry. Finally in 1913, in Totemand Taboo, Freud developed a conception of the CEdipuscomplex as lying at the root of primitive morality, furnishingthat sense of guilt which to Freud seems "theultimate source of religion and morality," the earliestform of Kant's categorical imperative, and the first embodimentof the great cosmic figures, which, beginning asParents became God, Fate, Nature, what we will.But the psycho-analystswho have thus placed theCEdipus complex at the foundation of a large part ofhuman culture have failed to realize that that complexcan only be associated, if at all, with a particular familyconstitution, and that the family, far from having onlyone single form of constitution, has varied widely. A[9*]