The craving for food and safety, gratified in our mother's arms, the craving for safety gratified by the strong father's presence, develop in our nerves automatic reactions of love or hatred (fear) toward other human beings endowed with or lacking our mother's and father's fetishes. Exposure to pleasurable or painful stimuli in infancy produces in our nerves a modification which could be roughly compared to the modification produced surgically in the brain of the dog mentioned in Chapter II.
Even as a dog can be conditioned to "prefer" turning to the right and to "hate" (or fear) running down stairs, a human being can, thru continued exposure to the sight of red hair in infancy, become conditioned to "prefer" red hair.
Many other factors, however, complicate the question of our likes and dislikes. A child's environment contains many sources of stimulation besides[Pg 30] the mother's and the father's fetishes, all of them varying in intensity, duration and character (pleasant or unpleasant).
Besides, the child is forced at some period of his life into a more or less sudden and more or less pleasant contact with the outside world. That contact, which at times is a conflict, often causes some of the early impressions made upon the infant's or child's nerves to be "repressed," thereby originating a conflict in the individual's nervous system.
And thus we are brought to a consideration of the family romance which various conflicts within the family circle and with the outside world, not infrequently transform into a family feud.
The Oedipus Complex. The complication designated by Freud as the Oedipus Complex is one of the most potent, altho at times one of the least obvious factors in family conflicts and in the mental disturbances which those conflicts occasion.
The Oedipus Complex is named after the Greek legend according to which Oedipus killed his father and later married his mother without being aware of their identity.
This is the form in which the Oedipus situation appears in real life:
A male child may become overattached to his[Pg 31] mother and develop a morbid, more or less concealed, hostility to his father. The female child may become overattached to her father and manifest a more or less overt hostility to her mother.
There is no case of neurosis in which analysts do not discover a more or less marked maladjustment of that type. In fact Freud has gone as far as stating that the Oedipus Complex is the central complex of every neurotic disturbance.
The Freudian View. Freudian analysts have somewhat dramatised the Oedipus complex which they consider as due to incestuous longings. Those incestuous longings, according to Freud, are in their last analysis, a yearning of the child to return to the mother's body where the child enjoyed, in its prenatal life, absolute peace and comfort.
The average child manages to free himself gradually from the mother's body, first seeking pleasurable sensations in his own body, sucking his thumb, playing with his genitals, later becoming interested in other children like himself, finally, at puberty, seeking human beings of the opposite sex, etc.
Some children, on the other hand, never seem to free themselves from the parent of the opposite sex. They are technically designated as the victims of a[Pg 32] mother fixation in the case of boys, of a father fixation in the case of girls.
Jung's Interpretation. Jung, head of the Swiss school of psychoanalysis, considers the Oedipus complication from a broader point of view. To him the father and mother are not real persons, but more or less symbolic and distorted figures created by the imagination of the child. The yearning of the child for its mother, its jealousy toward the father are simply due to its desire to monopolise a perfect provider and protector.
Pseudo-Incest. To Adler of Vienna, the Oedipus complex is a fiction created unconsciously by the neurotic who is trying to fall back on the father or mother for support. The boy, afraid of life and of the responsibilities imposed upon a man by a normal sexual life, is naturally inclined to cling fondly to his mother, from whom he receives a love and adoration which need not be won or paid for or reciprocated and which in their demonstrativeness only stop short of sexual gratification.
The neurotic girl dreams of monopolising the father's affection and financial support which are not to be repaid by sexual intercourse with its consequences, etc.
Freud's interpretation explains certain details of[Pg 33] behavior in boys with a mother fixation but the yearning to return to the mother's body does not explain a father fixation in a woman.
On the other hand, Jung's explanation fails to account for some of the grossly sexual details in the behavior of the fixation child, such as great curiosity directed toward the parent of the opposite sex, at times, even, attempts on the part of a boy to possess the mother in her sleep, etc.
The Neurotic Life Plan. Adler has clearly seen that the Oedipus situation is not the cause, but merely one of the details of the neurotic life plan. A human being adopts that plan because, owing to some inferiority, real or imaginary, (real to him), he feels unable to compete with other human beings on a footing of equality. The neurosis supplies him with a short cut to power along the line of least effort. That short cut is selfish, unsocial and, hence, productive of unpleasant results. The mother-fixation man, the father-fixation woman shirk their biological duties, thereby leading an easier, cheaper, self-centered life which, in the end, vouchsafes them no real positive gratification.
What Adler has left unexplained is how the parent fixation establishes itself in the neurotic.
Imitation. The Oedipus situation is simply one[Pg 34] of the consequences of the imitation by the child of the parent of the opposite sex.
Imitation plays a tremendous part in human life and, as far as behavior is concerned, is an infinitely more powerful factor than heredity.
Heredity endows us with a certain set of physical organs, hence with a number of potentialities. But the utilisation of those potentialities is left to the individual's destiny determined by his environment.
If the son of a splendidly developed prize fighter finds himself in an environment which countenances and lauds prize fighting, physical power will probably become his goal early in life. If his environment casts disobliging reflections on ring activities or if those activities have an unpleasant financial connotation for him, (father disabled and poor), the same boy will abstain from athletic training, remain physically undeveloped, perhaps even grow weak and stunted.
The Glands. As we shall see in another chapter, the various glands of our body have a good deal to do with the shaping of our personality but the pressure of the social herd within which we live is also a tremendous factor for it compels us to adopt as models for imitation certain physical and intellectual types which are acceptable to the herd.
[Pg 35]
The degree of the pressure exerted by the herd varies greatly with social conditions. The pressure is not the same in an Alaska camp and in a New England village. Unnoticeable in an artists' colony, it may become difficult to bear in a large family group including several members of the clergy.
Children become grown ups by imitating grown ups. A boy acquires a man's behavior by imitating his father. A girl acquires womanly manners by imitating her mother.
At the same time a boy with a strong organism and, consequently, a fair amount of self confidence, is not as slavish in his imitation of his father's ways as one who is cursed with a delicate constitution or who may have been made timid by fear-producing or humiliating experiences.
The former is more adventurous in every way and will, not only roam farther away from his home, but let his eyes also roam on men outside of the family circle, whom he will pick out as secondary models.
The weak boy, seeking safety and following the line of least effort, will cling to the closest model, his father, and in extreme cases, will identify himself with him.
The Identification Mania. An exaggerated[Pg 36] mania for identification is always a symptom of weakness and inferiority.
The weak man joins numberless organisations and derives a great deal of pride from the mere fact of his membership in them. In general he will not allow anyone to discuss or criticise those organisations. The anonymous citizen of Chicago or Chillicothe is easily aroused by criticisms of his native city overheard elsewhere, for he identifies himself with his native city for lack of any distinction of his own. Members of so called "aristocratic" families, themselves incapable of any achievement, are most unbearable owing to their family pride. They obscurely feel that if their relationship to some more or less distinguished ancestor was taken away from them they would sink into complete obscurity. The stupid traveler who constantly flaunts the flag of his country wherever he happens to be, is also an inferior who is trying to claim all the virtues which the jingoes of his land consider as national characteristics.
Close imitation and identification with the person we imitate cannot but lead to conflicts, for it sooner or later means that we encroach upon the rights of our model.
Early Conflicts. The little boy who imitates his[Pg 37] father, identifies himself with him and tries to "become" his father, may only provoke mirth when he dons his father's garments or carries his father's walking stick.
When he carries his imitation to the point of handling his father's razors or sampling his cigars, he may court what, to him, is a very unintelligible, illogical and humiliating form of punishment.
"If father is always right, why do I get spanked for doing what father does?" the child asks himself with a child's pitiless logic.
A profound hostility to the oppressive father may then grow in the mind of the imitative child, in no wise due to sexual complications.
This is also the way in which a rivalry may arise between son and father for the non-sexual possession of the mother, the freedom of her room and her bed, the sole enjoyment of her caresses, the sole disposal of her time, the sole domination over her.
The father enjoys all those privileges, and in order to be exactly like him, the son must also enjoy them "exclusively" which is logically impossible and leads to unconscious death wishes.
Death Wishes. The death wishes that lurk in the son's mind when his father and rival is concerned and reveal themselves thru dreams, are not simply[Pg 38] murderous cravings. They are symbolical, like the death wishes which some fond mother may express thru her dreams when her beloved child has interfered too much with her activities in her waking hours.
The imitative boy, beaten in the race for all of his father's possessions, of which the mother is the most valuable, wishes his father "out of the way." If there are female children, the imitative boy may, after giving up the mother as an unattainable goal, adopt toward one of his sisters the attitude of protection and ownership his father assumes toward his mother. In such cases, the feud is far from being as serious as it would be otherwise. A sister fixation, it goes without saying, is far less dangerous than a mother fixation. The sister is younger than the mother, the obsession of her image being unlikely to attract the brother later to women much older than himself. The love which a sister returns is also far from being as unselfish, intelligent and indulgent as that which a mother lavishes on her child.
Almost everything which has been said about the mother fixation applies to the father fixation in girls. But we must bear in mind that owing to the tremendous biological importance of the mother, a mother[Pg 39] fixation is likely to have a deeper influence on a boy than a father fixation on a girl.
Our Preferences. Thus it is that the "preferences" we show when grown up, for a certain human type, are determined by the appearance and behavior of the males and females which were closest to us in the formative years of our life.
In the majority of cases it is the mother type or the father type which proves most attractive to boys and girls respectively, the type being represented or symbolised by certain physical or mental fetishes.
In many cases, the mother or father type have been modified or replaced by other masculine or feminine types which took the place of the mother or father during that important period of our life.
The woman who suckled us or fed us and attended to our various physical needs, nurse or nurse maid, may become the bearer of our fetishes.
In Europe where the wet nurse and the nurse girl are infinitely more common than in this country, the ancillary type of love, love for servants and menials, is observed with much greater frequency than here.
The Southern man does not show the same repugnance as the Northern man to consort sexually with colored women of the servant class. The[Pg 40] colored mammy's fetishes are found competing successfully in many cases with those of the white mother.
Craig's Birds. Those who believe that heredity, instinct, the call of the blood, etc., have much to do with the choice of a mate, should read reports of experiments performed by William Craig on pigeons. Ring doves and passenger pigeons never mate. When the eggs of a passenger pigeon, however, have been hatched by a ring dove, the young male passenger pigeons will, at mating time, ignore entirely the females of their species, "their flesh and blood," and mate with female ring doves (the mother image) exclusively.
The fetishes which to them meant food and safety in the nest mean to them beauty and eroticism when they reach adulthood.