CHAPTER VI

The Dual Struggle within the Germ

The struggle for assimilation proceeds with violence as early as in the fertilized germ. The plasma characteristics of the mother and the father grapple with each other. It is a dual fight for the attributes, and first of all for the victory of the masculine or the feminine in the embryo. And when one of them has prevailed, then the other one does not stop rebelling within the individual throughout the whole of his life.

Under conditions that approximate psychoses, the dual struggle will again become apparent as a split of the personality.

Much can be regarded as a basis for the split belief and disbelief, vacillation between love for the father and for the mother, between hate and love. But we must expect the enormous split in the inner life of man without preconception at a place where nature itself has intrinsically drawn the great line of separation; in the division into the masculine and the feminine. This split touches all bases.

The split within neurotics is the continuation of the struggle which the fighting powers have carried on in the embryonic bioplasm.

It is precisely for this reason that all alert analysts find a latent homosexual tendency in the inner lives of their patients; except that it is not right to regard this tendency as a concomitant phenomenon. The split of man into his two original, inimical camps is the basis for the uncertainty of his role, of sexual confusion, of doubt, and of compulsion.

The origins of the split are to be sought where the double principle of the decisive fight was determined: in the embryonic overpowering of one of the two by the other.