On Spiders, Hanging and Oral Sadism

All pregenital instinctual tendencies are ambivalent, that is, they manifest towards the same object and at the same time both friendliness and hostility - the former with the wish to preserve, the latter desiring to destroy. The destructive component represents a danger for the object and this is the greater the earlier the stage of libido development to which the instinctual tendency belongs. The tension of the ambivalence decreases during the course of libido development and almost disappears with sexual maturity. Over a long period of time human beings have known of the ambivalence of the pregenital tendencies and, although this knowledge has not been expressed scientifically, unerring psychological intuition has made man choose two comparisons from the animal world - the spider and the vampire - to represent the oral danger of object love and particularly the danger of being loved. Both of these are symbols to us of the oral destructive danger of being loved and represent the endangered object as a victim of oral aggression. In this way wè betray our depth psychological knowledge of the ambivalence of oral instinctual tendencies.

The significance of the spider as a means of representation of dangerous object love was very early recognized by psychoanalysis. Abraham found it used as a symbol of the mother, the bad mother with dangerous attributes, possessed of a destructive male organ. She is the masculine mother, whose embrace injuries and kills. Freud remarked, in connection with Abraham's findings that the significance of the spider as a symbol was the reflection of a biological fact, since the male spider is weaker than the female and is frequently devoured by the female after coitus. Abraham discovered further that in dreams the spider's web represents the female pubic hair, while the single thread signifies the male genitals. The sucking dry of the object is to be compared with the destruction of the partner's genitals by castration.