“King Œdipus, who has struck his father, Laius, dead and has married his mother, Jocasta, is nothing,” says Freud,[66] “but the realized wish of our childhood.... His fate moves us only for the reason that it might have been ours, for the oracle has put the same curse upon us ... as upon him.” He adds that, unless we have become psycho-neurotics, we have since “succeeded ... in withdrawing our sexual impulses from our mothers and in forgetting our jealousy of our fathers,”--and presumably we have withdrawn, too, from the cousins, aunts, godparents and teachers listed by Jung. If these impulses have found their way into the unconscious, however, they must have become eternal. Psycho-analysis drags them into consciousness, not to kill them but to give them a transfer. The patient, it is said, always falls in love with the operator as a half-way step on the road to cure. But in regard to “falling in love with one member of the parental couple and hatred of the other,” Freud does not think that “psycho-neurotics are ... sharply distinguished from ordinary human beings.”[67] The only way to preserve normality, then, without calling in the doctor, would be never to lose consciousness of our original polymorphus perversities. In such a case, how is a transfer to be brought about? Not by discipline, evidently. Considering the dire horrors said to lie in the wake of any attempt to thwart the perversities in question, the natural conclusion is that children should just grow, like Topsy, without having to suffer the stern and perilous ordeal of being brought up. And does not such a scheme leave perversity in control? Certainly the effect of the study of Freudianism everywhere has been to make parents afraid of resorting to corrective measures when their children are “naughty.” A stern word, let alone a sound spanking, may (according to the Freudian theory) cause a suppression of desire, a thrusting of a native impulse into the Sheol of the lower psychic locality, “where ... wishes ... recall the legendary Titans who from time immemorial have borne the ponderous mountains which were once rolled upon them by the victorious gods, and which even now quiver from time to time from the convulsions of their mighty limbs.”[68] Must one, then, totally abstain from mountain-rolling for fear of earthquakes? A boy’s “libido” is first excited by his mother, so that he wants to murder his father because the fellow is this woman’s husband and the boy would like to be her husband himself. Is this to go on? And of the two ways out of the situation, which shall we chose? Let the boy murder the father? Or shall we let him marry the mother? It seems to be a Hobson’s choice. We do not want to run the risk of creating a “complex” by harshly thwarting either of these amiable desires, for a complex, Freud assures us, may produce psycho-neurotic symptoms ranging all the way from a mild hysterical excitement to paralysis, blindness and homicidal mania.