Blue Velvet by David Lynch: A Fairy Tale About the Developmental Conflicts of Growing from Boyhood to Manhood

In “Contributions to the Psychology of the Love Life” Freud (1912) wrote, “Two currents whose union is necessary to ensure a completely normal attitude in love…. These two may be distinguished as the affectionate and the sensual current” (p. 180). Freud further wrote:

There are only a very few educated people in whom the two currents of affection and sensuality have become properly fused; the man almost always feels his respect for the woman acting as a restriction on his sexual activity and only develops full potency when he is with a debased sexual object; and this in its turn is partly caused by the entrance of perverse components into his sexual aims, which he does not venture to satisfy with a woman he respects [p. 185].

Freud explained this split by pointing to the fact that the Oedipus complex had not been fully dissolved and that respectable women were still embedded with the same incest taboo as infantile love-objects.