TABOO AND GENETICS 227 



earthly purity and immaculacy. It has been 

 passed on from generation to generation through 

 an unconscious conditioning of the daughter's 

 attitude by suggestion and imitation to resemble 

 that of the mother. Thus it happens that 

 although an increasing amount of liberty, both 

 social and economic, and a more rational and 

 scientific understanding of the womanly nature, 

 have quite revoked this ideal in theory, in actual 

 practice it still continues to exert its inhibitory 

 and restrictive influence. 



Because the standardized family relationship 

 involves so much more radical a readjustment 

 in the life of woman than of man, it has almost 

 always been the feminine partner who has taken 

 refuge in neurotic symptoms in order to escape 

 the difficulties of the situation. After the mar- 

 riage ceremony, the man's life goes on much as 

 before, so far as his social activities are con- 

 cerned, but woman takes up the new duties 

 connected with the care of the home and her 

 child-bearing functions. Moreover, the sexual 

 fife of woman is in many ways more complex 

 than that of man. She has been subjected to 

 more repressions and inhibitions, and as a result 

 there has been more modification of her emo- 

 tional reactions in the field of love. This 

 greater complexity of her love Ufe makes adapta- 

 tion to marriage more problematical in the case 

 of woman. 



