TABOO AND GENETICS 229 



that she feared her fiance as much as she loved 

 him, but felt that she must marry him never- 

 theless. An investigation showed that her 

 almost compulsive feeling about her lover was 

 due to the fact that his gestures and manner 

 of regarding her, in fact his whole bearing, 

 reminded her of her dead father, while in other 

 respects he was totally repugnant to her because 

 his character traits were so far removed from 

 those of her father ideal. 



The conflict between the parental ideal and 

 other phases of the sexual impulse is even more 

 pronounced in men than in women, for two 

 reasons. In the first place, the mother plays by 

 far the largest part in the life of her children, 

 so that the son's fixation upon her is necessarily 

 more intense than the daughter's affection for 

 the father. Yet on the other hand, the sexual 

 desire of the male is more easily aroused than 

 that of the female, and is more apt to centre 

 upon some member of the opposite sex who 

 possesses certain physical attractiveness but is 

 not at all hke the mother ideal. Thus it happens 

 that men often enshrine on their hearthstone 

 the woman who approximates the worshipped 

 mother, while they seek satisfaction for their 

 erotic needs outside the home. In other words, 

 in the masculine psyche there is often a dis- 

 sociation of the sexual impulse in its direct 

 manifestations and the sentiment of love in its 



