ABSTRACT
The unconscious fantasies of mother being available sexually to and gratifying father and not son are partially displaced through masturbatory fantasies and activities. In addition, they are partially gratified via “whore-madonna” enactments and splitting mechanisms. Sigmund Freud’s original description of the whore-madonna splitting mechanism can be applied to an understanding of the repetitively frustrating interpersonal relationships of certain contemporary women who are seemingly unable to establish long-term committed relationships of an emotionally satisfying nature. The precondition that the loved one behave like a prostitute is derived by Freud directly from the “mother complex” and its powerful triangular impact on subsequent love relationships of a seemingly dyadic nature. Freud’s Victorian sexual morality is conveyed in the further assumption that men and women behave differently with regard to the sexual prohibition against intercourse before marriage. The idea of women engaged in an apparently frustrating series of unsuccessful but sensual object attachments to men would probably seem strange to Freud.
