Fear of Life. Dr. Alexander Lowen M.D.

us see how the infantile sexual conflict is solved. Freud observed, “The early efflorescence of infantile sexuality is doomed to come to an end because its wishes are incompatible with reality and with the inadequate stage of development the child has reached. That efflorescence perishes in the most distressing circumstances and to the accompaniment of the most painful feelings.”¹¹ The distressing circumstances are the withdrawal of love and the implied threat of castration. The painful feelings are fear and sadness. As a result, the child suppresses its sexual feelings for the parent of the opposite sex, but this is not the same thing as the natural termination of infantile sexuality. Infantile sexuality comes to a natural end if it is not interfered with. The child moves out into the world at about six years of age (going to school is an example) and forms erotic attachments with its peers. Freud conceded that the child's wishes are unrealistic. Reality and normal growth separate a child from his incestuous involvement with his parent. Suppression under the threat of castration is like pulling out a child's baby teeth rather than waiting for them to fall out naturally under pressure from the permanent teeth. The final results may look alike, but the interaction (threat of castration, pulling out teeth) inflicts a severe trauma on the child.

      The painful termination of childhood and infantile sexuality forces the child to repress the memory of this period. So few persons can recall the feeling of sexual excitement experienced in relation to the parent of the opposite sex. They will deny that there was any jealousy by the parent of the same sex. However, the experience has become structured in their body. While the repression of a memory is a psychological process, the suppression of feeling is accomplished by deadening a part of the body or reducing its motility so that feeling is diminished. The repression of the memory is dependent upon and related to the suppression of feeling, for as long as the feeling persists, the memory remains vivid. Suppression entails the development of chronic muscular tension in those areas of the body where the feeling would be experienced. In the case of sexual feeling, this tension is found in and about the abdomen and pelvis.

      Since the experience is different for each individual, the tension will reflect that experience. In some persons the whole lower half of the body is relatively immobilized and held in a passive state; in others the muscular tensions are localized in the pelvic floor and around the genital apparatus. If the latter sort of tension is severe, it constitutes a functional castration; for, although the genitals operate normally, they are dissociated in feeling from the rest of the body. Any reduction of sexual feeling amounts to a psychological castration. Generally the person is unaware of these muscular tensions, but putting pressure upon the muscles in the attempt to release the tension is often experienced as very painful and frightening.

      In the attempt to avoid the fate of Oedipus, modern man becomes neurotic. The neurosis consists in the loss of full orgastic potency and in the formation of a character structure that binds the modern individual to a materialistic, power-oriented culture with bourgeois values. If the suppression of sexual feeling is not severe, the individual can make an adjustment to the cultural mores without developing symptoms of emotional illness. This is not to say that such a person is emotionally healthy. His neurosis would be characterological and expressed in rigidity of attitudes. If it is severe, the person will develop symptoms of emotional illness or a state of emotional deadness like Margaret and Robert.

      If repression is equated with neurosis, then the price of avoiding Oedipus’ fate is to become emotionally ill. But we have to question whether this maneuver is really effective in helping us escape that fate. One result of repression is to fixate part of the personality at the level of the repressed conflict and thus to create an unconscious compulsion to act out the suppressed desire. Further, the loss of orgastic potency undermines an individual's maturity and reduces him to feeling childlike at times. Without being aware of it, many men seek women who remind them of their mothers and toward whom they adopt a juvenile or passive position. Fate acts in strange ways. Do we not, as neurotics, end up marrying our mothers or women who are so much like them that it amounts to the same thing? And if we marry a woman who is not like our mother, do we not treat her like our mother and, in effect, turn her into a mother figure?

      The same is true of a woman. If her sexual feelings for her father were suppressed, with a concomitant repression of the memory, the desire remains fixated upon the original love object and can only be transferred to someone who reminds her of that person or to whom she can relate in the same way. This is the basic reason young women marry older men, as we all know. In other cases, though, the acting out of the suppressed desire may not be so evident; but careful, analysis shows that the marital situation replicates the oedipal one.

      The following case illustrates this principle. I began by remarking to one patient, Bill, that most men marry their mothers. He immediately countered by saying, “My wife is not at all like my mother.”

      I answered that often the personalities are different, but we men treat them as if they were the same. And we insist that they treat us as our mothers treated us.

      “Oh, no!” Bill said. “My mother was never home to take care of me. She was always out playing cards. One of my problems with my wife stems from the fact that I did demand that she stay home to take care of the kids and of me. She complained that I never allowed her any independent activity. She has started something for herself now, and I am letting her do it. This is a new attitude for me and it seems to be working out better in our relationship.”

      I should add that Bill and his wife were constantly fighting with each other and their relationship was not a happy one. Each felt deeply frustrated in the relationship, yet Bill assured me that they cared deeply for each other.

      It would seem, therefore, that my thesis was not applicable to this case. Bill made demands on his wife that he had never been able to make on his mother. But how did it work out in practice? Did his wife take care of him as he demanded?

      “No,” Bill said. “She wasn't capable. It turned out to be the other way around. I took care of her.” Bill, then, admitted that this was his father's attitude toward his mother and that his own attitude toward his wife was the same. He also admitted that the two women had many personality traits in common. His wife was anxiety ridden as his mother had been. “When I or the children are away, she becomes a nervous wreck just like my mother.” And both, as we saw, were relatively helpless-needed taking care of.

      “In appearance, however,” Bill added, “my wife and my mother are different. I could not have married a woman who looked like my mother because I didn't like the way my mother looked.”

      Bill made the point that his wife was sexually attractive to him, which his mother wasn't (we know that this last remark isn't true). “She still is attractive to me, but she is afraid of sex. We don't have much sex because she is sexually unresponsive.” As a result, his own sexual feelings steadily decreased, causing a further deterioration in the relationship.

      What a twist of fate. Bill married his wife thinking it was going to be different because of his strong sexual excitement with her, only to find that it ended on the same note as his first love affair-that with his mother-sexual frustration and the loss of sexual feeling. Symbolically, he had taken his father's place with his mother. His father had had no greater fulfillment.

      At this point the discussion turned to his wife, Joan. Bill remarked, “I am the exact opposite of her father. He was five feet, two inches tall, I am six feet, two. He was always broke and never home. I am financially successful and caring. He never touched his daughter, would not permit her to sit on his lap, and was ashamed of showing affection. This is not true of me.”

      We do not consciously choose mates who are like our parents. If anything, we seem to pick those who, on the surface, are just the opposite. However, as I pointed out earlier, on the unconscious level each boy marries his mother as each girl marries her father. Unconsciously, we choose as spouses those who have traits or features in common with the loved parents. From what I could determine, Bill's wife and his mother had in common the fact that on an emotional level both were little girls who needed and were looking for a father.

      Bill was aware that Joan's fear of sex stemmed from her experience of rejection by her father. That rejection was due to sexual feelings that made her feel guilty. I knew that Bill, too, suffered