ABSTRACT
Sigmund Freud observes that in many myths the great Mother-goddesses are both creators and destroyers—goddesses of life and of death. Yet, his closing words in the essay show how Freud yet again slips away from the Fates, and relates them as much to the relationships of a man with women, including the mother. Following Freud, mainstream psychoanalysis has largely given the significance of Fate scant attention. Kaplan comments that the idea of a psychopathology of fate or what had come to be called a fate neurosis has failed to retain any established place in the structure of psychoanalytic thought. The clinical observations and theoretical formulations, to which the idea of a fate neurosis answered, have been subsumed in the course of things by more fundamental and systematic conceptualizations. The Fates is the figure of Lachesis, who, in the quotation cited by Freud, "seems to denote the accidental that is included in the regularity of destiny".
