Because feelings and ideas related to incest are displaced onto work, man has ambivalent feelings toward his work: it is a source of sublimated gratification, and a punishment for such gratification. As technological advances reduce man's enslavement to work, his unstable solution of his Oedipal conflict becomes even more precarious. Etymological evidence indicates that the father is seen as an ideal nursing mother, a substitute for the animal preoedipal mother. Everyday language shows many connections between the ideas of deception and of weaving (the prototype of work in general). This is attributed to man's need to maintain his illusions concerning the complex relationships between work, incest, and the role of the father.