Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-ndw9j Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-09T06:04:28.171Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Frustrated Ambivalence of the Mating Instinct

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 February 2018

C. E. H. Turner*
Affiliation:
Towers Hospital, Humberstone, Leicester

Extract

Sexuality is ambivalent because love is expressed biologically in the primitive terms of life—we kill or we die. Mating, according to the psychosomatic theory of family sexuality (Turner, 1947), is accomplished by a portrayal of the conditions of the hunt. The male portrays his hunting of the inferior species. The female in mating, therefore, is identified with the inferior species until the orgasm, when she is identified with the superior species which kills the hunting male. The female loves the male, who pledges his hunting, and the male loves the female, who pledges herself by enacting the environmental realities which he meets when hunting. Thus the young are provided for in ambivalence by a hunting father, and by a mother who teaches them to hunt by presenting to them the conditions of the hunt. Thus by further sublimation of the primitive ambivalence the father is the civilized breadwinner and the mother one's first guide, philosopher and friend.

Type
Part I.—Original Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1950 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

McDougall, W. (1923), An Outline of Psychology, pp. 318 and 329. London: Methuen.Google Scholar
Turner, C. E. H. (1947), “The Psychosomatic Sexual Life of the Family,” J. Ment. Sci., 93, 522.Google Scholar
Wolberg, L. R. (1946), Hypnoanalysis, p. 214. London: Wm. Heinemann.Google Scholar
Submit a response

eLetters

No eLetters have been published for this article.