Taboo and genetics : $b A study of the biological, sociological and psychological foundation of the familyKnight, Melvin M. (Melvin Moses)
Science
Taboo and genetics : $b A study of the biological, sociological and psychological foundation of the family
Knight, Melvin M. (Melvin Moses)
Sex (Biology); Sex (Psychology); Taboo; Women
According to social tradition, sexual activity (at least in the case of
women) is to be exercised primarily for the reproduction of the group.
Thus the institutions of marriage and the family in their present form
provide only for the woman who possesses both the sexual and maternal
cravings. Contraceptive knowledge has enabled a small number of women
(which is rapidly growing larger) to fit into these institutions in
spite of their lack of a desire for motherhood. There have been a few
hardy theorists who have braved convention to the extent of suggesting
the deliberate adoption of unmarried motherhood by women who are
consumed by the maternal passion but have no strongly erotic nature.
Whether their problem will be solved in this manner, only the course of
social evolution in the future can show.
Besides the differences in natural instinctive tendencies which make it
difficult for many women to fit into a uniform type of sexual
relationship, modern society, with its less rigid natural selection,
has permitted the survival of many neurotic temperaments which find
marriage a precarious venture. The neurotic constitution, as Adler[1,2]
has pointed out, is an expression of underlying structural or functional
organic deficiency. It is a physiological axiom that whenever one organ
of the body, because of injury, disease, etc., becomes incapable of
properly discharging its functions, its duties are taken over by some
other organ or group of organs. This process of organic compensation,
whereby deficiency in one part of the body is atoned for by additional
labours of other parts, necessarily involves the nervous mechanism in
ways which need not be discussed in detail here.
In children the process of compensation, with its formation of new
nervous co-ordinations, is manifest in the inability to cope with their
companions who have a better biological endowment. This gives rise to a
feeling of inferiority from which the child tries to free itself by
every possible means, ordinarily by surpassing in the classroom the
playmates whom it cannot defeat on the playground. The feeling of
inferiority continues throughout life, however, although the mechanism
of physiological compensation may have become so perfected that the
functioning of the organism is quite adequate to the needs of the
environment. As a result, the ruling motive of the conduct becomes the
desire to release the personality from this torturing sense of inability
by a constant demonstration of the power to control circumstances or to
dominate associates.
This abnormal will to power finds expression in the marital relationship
in the desire for supremacy over the mate. The domineering husband is a
familiar figure in daily life. The wife who finds it more difficult to
rule her husband by sheer mastery achieves the same ends by developing a
fit of hysterical weeping or having a nervous headache when denied her
own way in family affairs.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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