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Frustrated Ambivalence of the Mating Instinct
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 February 2018
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
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- Copyright
- Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1950
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