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The idealization of love is very tempting to us: “but the greatest of these …”. Our wishful image of love is most clearly reflected in the picture of all-giving maternal love: it is unselfish, enduring, patient and void of any crudeness in its sensuality.
The searching for the mother's ultimate motives for loving is likely to be considered as improper, touching something holy. Apart from the field of psychoanalysis, questions like why a woman wants children, what the sexual gratification of motherhood means for her and what its narcissistic satisfaction is like are rarely heard. In order to avoid unpleasant psychology, it is customary for many people to gratefully resort to totalitarian concepts, created for the concealment of matter at hand, such as the maternal instinct. This particular concept is also otherwise welcomed, because almost unobtrusively, it helps the human being cope with his feelings of helplessness and unimportance originating in his early childhood. The value of the almighty maternal giving is not, after all, attributed to the woman herself. It is only her biology which is manifested in her.
Very rarely do we hear the analogous defensive concept: paternal instinct. On the other hand, even when emphasizing the psychological significance of paternity, it is not customary to idealize it as much as maternity. Does the reduction of the need for these kinds of psychic sheltering reflect that we are inclined to interpret in our innermost thoughts that the man is less willing to give himself emotionally for his children and is less capable of unselfish love. Under the predominance of such an unconscious formation, receiving the gratifications which come from the father would also not arouse unexpiated gratitude in us.