Rollo May

the boy is deathly afraid of castration (losing his power), but it is the mother who castrates him, not the father.

are the Greeks implying that since the child is blood of the mother’s blood and flesh of her flesh, he will always be bound by his tie to her, and that the mother relationship will always tend to be conserving rather than revolutionary, oriented to the past more than to the future?

That is to say, the prohibition against incest makes for greater differentiation in human development, and requires that integration be found not through sameness, but on a higher level. Thus we can add to our statement at the beginning of this chapter, that the continuum of differentiation which is the life pilgrimage of the human being requires developing away from incest and toward the capacity to “love outwardly.”