The legend of the unicorn: an illumination of the maternal split

The legend of the unicorn, which pervaded art and literature in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, has been curiously ignored by psychoanalytic writers. A close study of two forms of the legend - the early "virgin capture" and its later, expanded version, the "Holy Hunt," both of them Christian allegories - reveals, first, that the story is a reflection of oedipal conflicts and, second, that it clarifies the nature of these conflicts. Above all, the dual nature of the virgin, her simultaneous innocence and perfidy, is symbolic of the child's double image of the mother during this period. On the one hand, the oedipal child longs to restore the early mother-child fusion; hence the innocence and purity of the virgin who lures the unicorn. On the other hand, the child perceives the danger of his longing; hence the virgin's duplicity in leading the unicorn to his capture. This oedipal double image of the mother reawakens and validates the maternal split of infancy, elucidated by Klein. The result is an unhealable division, persisting through adulthood, in the perception of the love-object, and above all in male perceptions of the female love-object. Misogyny is thus shown to be the product of archaic conflicts, strengthened by the oedipal crisis.