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

his parents say or do but, as Fenichel points out, even more from “the general attitude of the parents toward sex, which is constantly manifested by them, with or without their knowledge.”⁷

      But this statement only locates the problem in the preceding generation. To understand how this guilt arose in the first place, we must study the origin of those cultural forces that created the oedipal situation. In a subsequent chapter we will undertake this study by analyzing the mythology and history of ancient Greece. We can anticipate its result by saying that fear and hostility between parents and children and sexual guilt are both results of the change from the matriarchal to the patriarchal principle of relationships. That change occurred at the beginning of civilization, when mankind gained power over nature. The acquisition of power led to a struggle for power that goes on to this day in all “civilized” societies.

      Finally, the complex also includes a murderous rage on the part of the child toward the parent of the same sex. The child wants to kill the parent, but is more afraid that he will be killed by the parent. Because of the great fear, the rage is suppressed and comes out only in death wishes against the parent or as fear that the parent will die or be killed in an accident. In the end, the child is made to feel guilty about his hostility toward the parent.

      The Freudian position has been that the child's rage and hostility against the parent is directly related to and associated with his incest wishes. Thus, Erik Erikson writes, “The ‘Oedipus’ wishes (so simply and so trustingly expressed in the boy's assurance that he will marry his mother and make her proud of him and in the girl's that she will marry her father and take much better care of him) lead to secret fantasies of vague murder and rape. The consequence is a deep sense of guilt-a strange sense, for it forever seems to imply that the individual has committed a crime which, after all, was not committed but would have been biologically quite impossible. This secret guilt, however, helps to drive the whole weight of initiative toward desirable ideals immediate practical goals.”⁸ This view supports the idea that the Oedipus complex is not only biologically determined but essential to the continued progress of culture. Doesn't it seem strange that such lovely feelings on the part of a child for a parent could lead to “secret fantasies of vague murder and rape”? It makes more sense to me to assume that it is only after the child is made to feel guilty about his incest wishes that the secret fantasies of murder and rape arise.

      This was also the view of my teacher, Wilhelm Reich. In his study, Der Triebhafte Charakter (The Impulsive Character), published in 1925 while he was still a member of the psychoanalytic movement, he writes, “The Oedipal phase is among the most meaningful in human experience. Without exception its conflicts stand at the core of every neurosis and mobilize powerful guilt feelings…These guilt feelings develop with particular intensity into attitudes of hate, which are part and parcel of the Oedipus complex.⁹ Note that the hate is derived from the guilt, not the other way around. Reich also had a different view of the value of the guilt feelings. Erikson saw them as furthering cultural progress. For Reich, they stemmed from a sex-repressive upbringing, the function of which “is that of laying the foundation for authoritarian culture and economic slavery.”¹⁰

      Having delineated the Oedipus complex, we are interested next to learn its fate in the personality. How are the conflicts contained within it resolved? If it was merely a question of the sexual feelings of a child for his parent, these, being infantile in nature, would be superseded in the course of natural growth. No child hangs onto its baby teeth forever. They are pushed out by the permanent teeth as the latter emerge. The same should be true for infantile sexual feelings. With the onset of mature sexuality in puberty, the young person would direct his sexual feelings toward objects outside the family. Unfortunately, in our culture this natural development does not occur without disturbance. The infantile sexual feelings are too entangled with feelings of guilt, fear, and hatred for such a simple resolution to occur. The whole complex is repressed.

      The repression of the Oedipus complex takes place under the threat of castration. In this, both Freud and Reich are in accord. The boy gives up his striving to be sexually close to his mother and his hostility to his father out of fear of castration. Freud says specifically that “the boy's Oedipus complex succumbs to the dread of castration.”¹¹ The child is afraid that his penis will be cut off or taken away. When children are threatened with punishment for masturbation, this threat to the genitals is often explicitly stated. But even where neither parent makes such an overt threat, the fear of castration is not absent. The boy is aware that he is competing with his father, and he can sense the latter's hostility. Since the penis is the offending organ, it is only natural to assume that it will be injured or cut off. Human castration was practiced in past times. People had their hands cut off for stealing. It is not difficult to see why boys would develop this image of the threatened punishment. Many people have typical anxiety dreams about this possibility. A patient of mine related one from his youth. He dreamed that his penis elongated and passed out the window, down the front of the building, across the street, and up the front of the building opposite to enter a window. On this street there was a tram railway. Just as his penis was about to enter the window, he heard the clang of an approaching streetcar. In all haste he was trying to get his penis back into his room before the car ran over it, when he awoke.

      I could advance another hypothesis to account for the fact that all my patients have a fear of castration. Any hostility directed at a child for his sexuality by a parent will produce in the child a pulling up and contraction of his pelvic floor. Hostility will have this effect, even though it takes the form of a hateful look. And as long as the child is frightened of the parent, the tension in the pelvic floor will remain. Since tension and fear are equivalent, the contraction of the pelvic floor is associated with a fear of injury to the genitals. The person will not be conscious of the fear if he is not conscious of the tension. In that case, the fear of castration may be expressed in dreams or slips of the tongue. However, using body techniques that help the person become aware of the tension often brings the fear to consciousness.

      My female patients also suffer from a fear of castration, experienced as a fear of injury to the genital area. However, in most cases this fear is not conscious, and it may require considerable analytic and body work before the person allows herself to feel the fear. Generally it is easier for the patient to experience the hostility of the parent as a threat to life. Such threats, because of the fear they evoke, function as threats of castration. In addition, girls are shamed and humiliated for any overt expression of sexual feeling, especially toward the father. Since the fear of humiliation produces a suppression of sexual feeling, it acts like a threat of castration.

      The most effective weapon a parent has to control a child is the withdrawal of love or its threat. A young child between the ages of three and six is too dependent on parental love and approval to resist this pressure. Robert's mother, as we saw earlier, controlled him by “cutting him out.” Margaret's mother beat her into submission, but it was the loss of her father's love that devastated her. Whatever the means parents use, the result is that the child is forced to give up his instinctual longing, to suppress his sexual desire for one parent and his hostility toward the other. In their place he will develop feelings of guilt about his sexuality and fear of authority figures. This surrender constitutes an acceptance of parental power and authority and a submission to the parents’ values and demands. The child becomes “good”, which means that he gives up his sexual orientation in favor of one directed toward achievement. Parental authority is introjected in the form of a superego, ensuring that the child will follow his parents’ wishes in the acculturation process. In effect, the child now identifies with the threatening parent. Freud says, “The whole process, on the one hand, preserves the genital organ, wards off the danger of losing it; on the other hand, it paralyzes it, takes its function away from it.”¹²

      The effective suppression of the feelings associated with the Oedipus complex leads to the development of the superego. This, as we have seen, is a psychic function that represents the internalized parental prohibitions. But while this psychic process has been adequately described in the psychoanalytic literature, little has been written about the fact that the suppression of feeling occurs in the body. The mechanism for this suppression is the development of chronic muscular tensions, which block the movements that would express the feeling. For example, if a person wants to suppress an impulse