Page:Freud - Group psychology and the analysis of the ego.djvu/134

122 opposition between sexual love and group ties is also a late development. Now it may seem as though this assumption were incompatible with our myth of the primal family. For it was after all by their love for their mothers and sisters that the troop of brothers was, as we have supposed, driven to parricide; and it is difficult to imagine this love as being anything but unbroken and primitive—that is, as an intimate union of the tender and the sensual. But further consideration resolves this objection into a confirmation. One of the reactions to the parricide was after all the institution of totemistic exogamy, the prohibition of any sexual relation with those women of the family who had been tenderly loved since childhood. In this way a wedge was driven in between a man's tender and sensual feelings, one still firmly fixed in his erotic life to-day. As a result of this exogamy the sensual needs of men had to be satisfied with strange and unloved women.

In the great artificial groups, the church and the army, there is no room for woman as a sexual object. The love relation between men and women remains outside these organisations. Even where groups are formed which are composed of both men and women the distinction between the sexes plays no part. There is scarcely any sense in asking whether