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Comment on Dr. Leclaire's Paper. Richard Sterba. Pp. 330-331.
A man, having experienced the equivalent of incestuous relations with his mother at age three in addition to an absent father, postponed consummation of his marriage for ten years. To maintain the necessary psychic force, he appeared to need to maintain the incest prohibition denied him by his father. This suggests that a quantitative force is not intrinsic to the mind as Freud thought, rather that the principle of power, basically genital, is achieved through incest prohibition.
Leclaire objects to using the concept of physical force in connection with the psychic apparatus for, in reality, it is the opposite. Force is an animistic concept rising from the anthropomorphic view of the world. It is a projection into the outer world and is a necessary part of the psychic apparatus. Incest prohibition may not be primarily of cultural origin as Leclaire assumes but derive more fundamentally from maturational proscription or from the build-up of mental forces in childhood which later restrict the sexual instinct.