hemselves and their child the
bond of the higher love, the further spiritual love, the sympathy of
the adult soul.

And this is fatal. It is a sort of incest. It is a dynamic _spiritual_
incest, more dangerous than sensual incest, because it is more
intangible and less instinctively repugnant. But let psychoanalysis
fall into what discredit it may, it has done us this great service of
proving to us that the intense upper sympathy, indeed the dynamic
relation either of love-will or love-sympathy, between parent and
child, upon the upper plane, inevitably involves us in a conclusion of
incest.

For although it is our aim to establish a purely spiritual dynamic
relation on the upper plane only, yet, because of the inevitable
polarity of the human psychic system, we shall arouse at the same time
a dynamic sensual activity on the lower plane, the deeper sensual
plane. We may be as pure as angels, and yet, being human, this will
and must inevitably happen. When Mrs. Ruskin said that John Ruskin
should have married his mother she spoke the truth. He _was_ married
to his mother. For in spite of all our intention, all our creed, all
our purity, all our desire and all our will, once we arouse the
dynamic relation in the upper, higher plane of love, we inevitably
evoke a dynamic consciousness on the lower, deeper plane of sensual
love. And then what?

Of course, parents can reply that their love, however intense, is
pure, and has absolutely no sensual element. Maybe--and maybe not. But
admit that it is so. It does not help. The intense excitement of the
upper centers of sympathy willy-nilly arouses the lower centers. It
arouses them to activity, even if it denies them any expression or any
polarized connection. Our psyche is so framed that activity aroused on
one plane provokes activity on the corresponding plane, automatically.
So the intense _pure_ love-relation between parent and child
inevitably arouses the lower centers in the child, the centers of sex.
Now the deeper sensual centers, once aroused, should find response
from the sensual body of some other, some friend or lover. The
response is impossible between parent and child. Myself, I believe
that biologically there is radical sex-aversion between parent and
child, at the deeper sensual centers. The sensual circuit _cannot_
adjust itself spontaneously between the two.

So what have you? Child and parent intensely linked in adult
love-sympathy and love-will, on the u