CHAPTER V INCEST The family romance has been presented by the Freudians as complicated by actual incestuous entanglements. Adler on the other hand has shown that the incestuous situation is rather an "as if" introduced by the neurotic as a part of his absurd life plan. Barring a few exceptions, the small boy does not desire his mother sexually nor does the small girl feel erotic at the thought of her father. That such incestuous desires arise at the time of puberty cannot be doubted. But they are observed mostly in neurotics to whom the incestuous situation suggests, as I pointed out in the previous chapter, to the boy, food, comfort, the mother's easily won love, to the girl, the protection and the attentions of the strong father. In many cases too, homosexual and incestuous practices among the children in one family mean nothing but the neurotic search for the line of least effort. Freud seeks at times very far fetched explanations for very simple phenomena in order to show the sexual motive at the bottom of them. He states in his _Introduction to Psychoanalysis_ that a girl may show great affection for a younger sister "as a substitute for the child she vainly wished from the father." The truth is that the older daughter, in her close imitation of her mother, also starts "mothering" a child. "A boy," Freud states in the same book, "may take his sister as the object of his love to replace his _faithless_ mother." He rather imitates his father and starts to protect and order about a little female of his age, which at times, when both have witnessed the parental embraces, may lead to actual incest. =The Incest Fear.= Incest is at the present day the form of sexual relation which provokes the most powerful expression of disapproval on the part of civilised and uncivilised races alike. In fact the primitive races seem obsessed by a panicky fear of incest. In many tribes, brothers and sisters are not allowed to meet or speak to each other and, in certain cases, they must even avoid the sight of each other and eschew every mention of each other's names. In the Fiji Islands, where the rules against incest are especially rigorous, there are, on the other hand, special holidays on which orgies are held in which incest becomes permissible. In other words, the natives of those islands, while recognising the irresistible nature of the incest temptation and taking all sorts of measures in order to prevent the commission of that sin, supply at stated intervals an outlet for incestuous cravings. Innumerable details of primitive legislation separate the son-in-law from the mother-in-law, the father-in-law from his son's bride. The Basogas of the Upper Nile loathe incest to such a degree that they punish it even in animals whenever it can be observed among them.