Incest as Revenge Against the Pre-Oedipal Mother

The normal and seemingly simple process by which the little girl turns away from her mother and toward father as the object of her love is a difficult one, beset by many obstacles and often poorly accomplished, if at all. Freud points out in his article on Female Sexuality (2) that in many cases where the attachment to the father was peculiarly strong, it had been preceded by a phase of equally strong and passionate attachment to the mother. He states further that the difficulty in resuscitating this early mother attachment in analysis arose “because when I have analyzed women, they have been able to cling to that very father attachment in which they took refuge from the early phase” (3), that is, refuge from the attachment to the mother.

Bergler (1), in his extensive investigation of pre-Oedipal fixation, describes the Oedipal attachment as a “rescue station” from such fixation. He describes the child's fantasy of the mother as the dangerous “giantess of the nursery,” from which the child escapes to the less dangerous Oedipal relationship, which, however, may fall victim to the very vicissitudes of the earlier relationship it was meant to replace.

There is one aspect of this by now familiar analytic problem which is of particular interest. It sometimes develops that a woman, apparently leading an active heterosexual life, is using the man not as an object in himself, but simply as a weapon in her pre-Oedipal struggle with mother. To quote Freud again, these are cases where “the hostile attitude to the mother is not a consequence of the rivalry implicit in the Oedipus complex, but rather originates in the preceding phase and has simply found in the Oedipus situation reinforcement and an opportunity for asserting itself.”

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