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PARTISAN REVIEW
an important amplification in the normal fate of the so-called "Oedi–
pus complex."
A further complication arises when the constitutional factor we
call bi-sexuality is more strongly developed in the child. Then, under
the influence of the threat to virility by castration, the tendency is
strengthened to deflect in the direction of effeminacy, to put oneself
in the place of the mother and take over her part as the object of the
father's love. Only the fear of castration makes this also impossible.
The child understands that he must suffer castration if he wants to be
loved by the father as a woman. Thus, both impulses, hatred for the
father and being in love with the father,
be~me
repressed. There is a
certain psychological difference in the fact that the hatred of the
father is abandoned in consequence of the fear of an external danger
(castration), while the amorous feeling towards the father is treated
as an inward impqlse danger, although fundamentally it goes back
to the above-mentioned external danger.
What makes hatred for the father untenable is fear of the father:
castration is terrible, both as a punishment and as the price of love.
Of the two factors which repress the hatred of the father, the first,
the direct dread of punishment and castration, may be called the
normal one, the pathogeneous reinforcement seems to come only
with the second factor, the fear of the feminine attitude. Thus a
stron bi-sexual predisposition becomes one of the conditions or con-
rmations of the neurosis. Such a
predispositio~st
certainly be as–
sumed in Dostoevski and shows itself in a possible form (latent homo–
sexuality) in the important part played by male friendships in his
life, in his extraordinarily gentle attitude to rivals in love, and in his
remarkable understanding of situations which are explainable only
through repressed homosexuality, as many examples from his novels
show.
I regret, although I cannot alter the facts, that these ideas about
these attitudes of hate for and love of the father and their trans-
...-
formation under the influence of the threat of castration, will appear
unsavoury and incredible to readers unfamiliar with psychoanalysis.
I should expect that it would be the castration complex that would
arouse the most general repugnance. I can only assert that psycho–
analytic experience has put these relations beyond the reach of doubt,
and has taught us to recognise in them the key to every neurosis. This
key we must then apply to our author's "epilepsy." So strange to our
consciousness are the things by which our unconscious psychic life is
controlled! The consequences of the repression of the hatred of the
