Dr. N. N. Shipov. About maternal instinct

Dr. Shipov's book, the title of which we have just written down, is read with great interest. Since gender plays an extremely important role in a person’s life, we cannot help but be interested and will not cease to be interested in everything that concerns the study of a person in sexual and family relations. To study his subject, N. Shipov used not only extensive literature, but also a personal survey, according to a specific program, of 426 women and 248 men. Based on such a survey, the first chapters of the book were compiled - about the maternal instinct in women and about the maternal (i.e. paternal or parental) instinct in men. The next part of the book deals with the place of the maternal instinct in the mental sphere of a person (Chapter IV), the reasons influencing the strengthening and weakening of maternal instincts (Chapter V) and the role of maternal instincts in social life (VI). On page 137, the author gives us a general diagram of human mental life, based on three forces: selfishness, egoism and altruism. Self-love depends on the feeling-instinct of self-preservation and encourages a person to protect and defend his life from all harmful influences, encourages him to abstain from excessive work, from pleasures and from caring for his family if they can harm his health. Egoism attracts a person to sensual pleasures of both higher and lower order, often even to the detriment of his health, and often encourages him to forget about his family and the interests of others. Altruism is in close connection with the maternal instinct and encourages a person to love his neighbor and suppresses selfishness and selfishness when it manifests itself. Thus, the author places motherhood at the basis of a person’s entire ethical life: first it generates love for one’s children, then love for one’s husband or wife, for parents, relatives, for other people’s children, and in general for everything weak and helpless. “The maternal instinct is the only force in the human soul that distracts him from selfishness and selfishness and encourages him to altruism, love for his neighbor and self-sacrifice, often even to the detriment of himself. Therefore, only the maternal instinct in the human soul can be called a completely moral and even holy feeling, while sexual love and the desire for glory, despite all their attractiveness and sublimity, carry within themselves a manifestation of strong human egoism.” The difference noted in the book, reaching the point of antagonism, between the maternal instinct and the sexual instinct must be recognized as significant. The maternal instinct is an altruistic attraction that encourages a person, forgetting himself, to love and care for others, weaker ones. On the contrary, sexual desire is a passion more conscious than the maternal instinct, and requiring for its manifestation certain pleasant positive qualities of the beloved being. In contrast to the maternal instinct, sexual desire is selfish, having in the foreground the personal pleasure and happiness of the lover. Driving a person towards personal egoistic pleasure, sexual love often, although of course not always, must fight maternal instincts, which in the foreground require self-forgetfulness and sacrifices for others. The maternal instinct is, as it were, a force of attraction and centralization, uniting people into one family; sexual attraction is, as it were, a force of repulsion, prompting a person to strive outside the family and look there for new beings to replenish himself. Therefore, maternal instinct and sexual desire, with a mutual physiological connection, are far from being the same feeling, but feelings that are often mutually exclusive. For the sake of maternal desires, many women are ready to sacrifice their personal egoistic pleasures and sexual love. On the contrary, women whose maternal instinct weakens and their sexual desire for a man increases begin to neglect their children, avoid breastfeeding them and begin to resort to artificial miscarriage in order to terminate the pregnancy and preserve their youthful, virgin body shape as long as possible. Based on this, the author develops the ethics of family life. Here the author also points out the root of the difference between men and women: in the first, the sexual instinct predominates, in the second, the maternal instinct. The book notes the close connection between the disclosure of sexual passion and the development of spiritual activity. “Together with the growth of sexual sensuality and sensual drives,” the author writes, the ability to manifest a strong ideological mental life and volitional energy also grows among animals and among tribes in people, and in each individual in particular, especially in men, in whom sexual sensuality predominates compared to women. In a boy, the logic of ideas develops along with the growth of his sexual feelings; and the strongest mental abilities of a man appear in his middle age, when his sexual feelings reach their greatest heights; Over the years, as a man gets older, his sexual sense weakens and his mind weakens. Children whose sexual desire awakens early are often very smart children, as can be seen, for example. on Lermontov or on Sofya Kovalevskaya. Talented people are usually distinguished by strong sexual ability and passion in connection with sexual abstinence; idiots and weak-minded people usually have very poorly developed sexual sensuality.” But the author does not stop there. If there is a correspondence between the awakening of sensual passion and the awakening of mental energy, then there is a strict dependence and a certain antagonism between the satisfaction of mental and the satisfaction of sexual sensual aspirations. Namely, base sexual passions weaken the demand for higher ideological mental work; and strong mental work weakens the tendency to voluptuous pleasures. Strong mental work can only occur with more or less strong sexual abstinence. Talented people were more or less abstinent people, especially at the time when they wrote their wonderful works. In a person, the growth of mental abilities, motivating him to ideological life and strong tension of energy, begins with the development of puberty; sexual excesses act extremely harmfully on the mental faculties and energy of a person, while sexual abstinence contributes to their strength. The lower races, still mentally underdeveloped, in their sexual relations, indulge in exclusively sensual love and extremely promiscuous sexual relations and have poorly developed modesty; more cultured races introduce an element of spiritual affection into sexual relations, and their sexual life is regulated by marriage, marital fidelity and chastity. The history of peoples proves that the sexual abstinence of peoples and their purity of morals always exists at the time of their highest mental flowering and highest political power; with the decline in purity of morals, the political and intellectual dominance of a given nation also falls, and it leaves the historical stage, being defeated by other more temperate peoples... This preaching of abstinence by a representative of medical science should be considered especially valuable for our time, when holy voluptuousness is sung so loudly and captivatingly!.. Also valuable and obviously designed for the modern wandering of minds are those pages that reveal the importance of Christianity for the prosperity of family life. “A religious cult, the main commandment of which is: “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,” and which demands endless forgiveness, must devote its greatest care to the support, strengthening and strengthening of the maternal instincts among its followers. And indeed, Christianity devotes its main attention to strengthening the maternal instincts in the hearts of believers, which is noticeable in the social life of Christians, in church rituals and regulations, and in the dogmas of the faith itself; Therefore, Christianity, more than any other religious cult, can be called the “religion of women.” The methods that Christianity resorts to to develop and strengthen maternal instincts in the hearts of believers are falling apart; firstly, on means that suppress sexual sensuality and egoistic sensual sexual love, which, as is known, is in conflict with maternal instincts. Secondly, on means that generally suppress egoistic sensual drives, which, when they appear, easily drown out maternal instincts that require self-sacrifice and deprivation in the name of love for their children or, in general, for the small, weak and suffering. And in z-for funds that excite maternal instincts and strengthen and enhance family virtues.” Considering Christianity from these points of view, the author, in particular, focuses his attention on Orthodoxy, since “even in Christianity, not every confession equally influences the strengthening and preservation of maternal instincts among believers”... “So, in particular, the faces of Orthodox saints bear the stamp of greatness and peace. The unnaturalness and tension of the saints’ poses alienates the person looking at them from everything earthly. No freedom or showiness of poses is allowed in Orthodox icons. Catholicism partially returned to the sensual cult of the classical world, allowing luxurious statues into its churches and, in part, showing believers the physical beauty of saints on icons. Lutheranism destroyed its icons and statues of the Catholic model, but it did not, like Orthodoxy, give in its churches the ideals of asceticism, the ideals of peace, chastity and abstinence. “The very hymns and prayers of the Orthodox Church do not contain anything that excites voluptuousness, but, on the contrary, call for abstinence and distract from sensual attractions, recalling the vanity of vanities of all earthly things.” You might be interested in: