ABSTRACT
Every infant in its weakness can dimly recognize the fact—it is not a fantasy, though a source of fantasies—that this immense mother-creature can easily give bliss, each of which can result from her capacity to engulf her infant. However, the Industrial Revolution has diminished the importance of man’s physical strength; machines work for both sexes. And the children of our most industrialized societies say they no longer need to exaggerate the differences between the sexes much beyond what is anatomically obvious. As a boy disengages himself from his mother’s body and psyche, he finds his father available as, for example, a man with whom to identify, and the girl finds him available as a heterosexual object, aspects of the oedipal situation described long ago by Sigmund Freud. In view of what so many others have said in disagreeing with Freud about a death instinct, it may be no more than beating a dead horse to worry the issue any further.
