Proponents of the Westermarck effect too often prefer to misrepresent the position of the psychoanalytic school on the subject of its alleged "incestuous complex" in human psychical make-up(the Westermarck effect is named after the nineteenth century anthropologist Edward Westermarck who first proposed that people who grow up together as siblings tend to avoid sexual relationship with each other, an observation which evolutionary biologists propose a genetic basis).
Proponents of the Westermarck effect would often claim that the psychoanalytic school of thought proposes a universal incestuous urge in the male (in particular) for the female parent.
This is not true in its details as we shall see.
Psychoanalytic theory identifies two stages in the psychological development of the individual: the pre-pubertal (pre-sexual) and the post-pubertal.
In the pre-pubertal or pre-sexual stage of psychosexual development the individual's libidinal urges are centered primarily on the basic physiological functions of the body such as feeding, voiding and sleeping.
Thus, developmental psychologists recognize stages in the development of the individual such as the oral, in which the child's libidinal urges are attached to the physiological functions of feeding (suckling) and the anal stage in which the child's libidinal urges are centered on the excretory functions of the gastrointestinal system.
Sexual libido is largely latent in childhood but comes to the fore at puberty.
The child's libido fixation to its mother is, therefore, only latently sexual.
His libido fixation to the mother being the natural consequence of her special role in the satisfaction of his physiological and emotional needs (feeding, warmth, love etc).
Rankian psychoanalytic theory proposes that the pre-natal role of the mother in supporting the child's life in a physiologically optimized womb environment is the primal act which cements the physiological libido fixation of the child to its mother.
Mother fixation flows naturally from the facts of biology, the mother having been the child's "life support system" in early life.
It is in the context of the special psychobiological bond between the mother and child that special consequences arise(especially for the male child) in the transition from pre-pubertal to post-pubertal stages of life: special consequences which do not holdin the case of father-daughter and brother-sister heterosexuality.
According to psychoanalytic theory, healthy individuals accomplish the pre-pubertal to post-pubertal transition by a successful transference of the now primarily sexualized libido from the biological mother to a mother substitute in a "love choice.
" (This is very far from saying that normal people have incestuous designs for their mother).
There are however certain individuals who fail in this critical transitional stage in psychosexual development.
Individuals who develop a sexualized libido which fails to detach itself successfully from the biological mother as love object.
Such individuals unable to come to terms with their incestuous urges repress it (i.
e.
bury it in the unconscious) and suffer, rather, as consequence, a myriad of psychoneurotic manifestations which reflect the conflict between the individual's unconscious and the conscious Ego(which rejects its unconscious wishes).
The failure of the psychoneurotic, from the perspective of psychoanalytic theory, rests, therefore, on a core failure of psychosexual developmental transference from the mother to a "love object"as substitute: a failure which the Ego punishes itself for in psychoneurotic anxiety.