The mother/whore dichotomy is hard to shake. In Christian cultures, the story of Jesus and his two Marys is mainlined into the unconscious from birth. One variant on this triangle is what Freud dubbed "the family romance," wherein the young boy fantasizes that his mother is a whore (or more politely, an adulteress) and that the identity of his real father is therefore up for grabs. This fantasy confers several benefits. It diminishes the authority of the father, who in the child's imagination becomes a mere cuckold, and it allows the child to libidinize his mother, to obsess over her imagined sexual transgressions and the punishments they deserve. (Freud wrote about this syndrome only from the male point of view, but there's obviously a female... More >>>