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The restless mind of the young Trotsky* caught a glimpse of the future of the Russian revolution and its predicament, that unless the new system could include as an institution the permanent urge to revolution it would relentlessly metamorphose into the monolithic state and betray its premises. In this paper I wish to demonstrate the sources of this urge to permanent revolution, to distinguish it from the impulse to rebellion, and to show its relation, in psychic reality, to the fact of the discontinuity in the generations and link to the barrier against incest which is fundamental to the human mind.
The basis for this discussion has been laid in the Chapters on “The Emergence from Adolescence” and “The Genesis of the Super-ego-ideal”. But let us start here with the concept, so important in the early days of psycho-analysis and so little mentioned now, the incest barrier or taboo. The latter term betrays the anthropological inspiration to Freud's thinking and the way in which it was linked in his mind to the evolution of religion on the one hand, and the fate of the oedipus complex on the other. A more intimate understanding of the nature of childhood would incline us now to eliminate sibling relations from the concept of incest and limit it to the prohibition, the internal prohibition, against coitus of parent and child. This forms the background of the oedipus complex, resting as it does on the parent's refusal of the child's desire and the actual impotence of the child—the boy's seminal sterility and the girl's reproductive incapacity. We recognise the aim of the true genital trends in infantile sexuality to be a reproductive one primarily—to give and receive babies—rather than one of erogenous zone pleasure, as Freud earlier thought. It is the pregenital trends which, thanks to zonal and geographic confusions and distortions of identity due to projective identification, masquerade as genitality and carry the sensuous greed.
This unconscious situation at the heart