“The idea that boys want to sleep with their mothers strikes most men as the silliest thing they have ever heard. Obviously, it did not seem so to Freud, who wrote that as a boy he once had an erotic reaction to watching his mother dressing. But Freud had a wet-nurse, and may not have experienced the early intimacy that would have tipped off his perceptual system that Mrs. Freud was his mother. The Westermarck theory has out-Freuded Freud.”

Canadian cognitive psychologist and public intellectual

Steven Arthur Pinker is a Canadian cognitive psychologist, psycholinguist, popular science author, and public intellectual. He is known for his work on the mind, language, and human nature, and for presenting those subjects to a wide general audience. Pinker supports evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind. He is the Johnstone Family professor of psychology at Harvard University, and his writing often returns to questions about how people think, speak, and understand the world.