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In the lengthy calendar of crimes, matricide is perhaps the rarest and most abhorred. The mother occupies an exalted position in the human psyche, every imaginable device being employed to defend her inviolability: the merest hint of attack upon her sacredness is met with unconstrained reprisals; ancient and modern religions elevated her to godhood; a day is set apart for honoring her, and words which declare or imply her derogation are the most violently reacted to of all in our vocabulary.1 Equally as strong as the love for her is the fear the mother inspires, and the hostility she evokes; else why would she need so many safeguards?
Myth and legend, fairy tale and nursery rhyme, song and story all testify to men's fear of their mothers and to the deep-rootedness of their hostility toward them. So charged with guilt is acknowledgment of such fear and hostility that, to protect against their expression in behavior, reaction-formations and other defenses, all of them significantly overdetermined, are designed to bind the anxiety thereby aroused; indeed, when this anxiety is liberated explosively in an act of matricide, the effects upon the personality of the murderer are always cataclysmic. From the Greek legend of Orestes through Wertham's Gino2, not one was able to retain even a relative integration of the personality under the stress of the act's genesis and fulfilment.