Psychology of sex - Total No. of Records in System :: 2032

PSYCHOLOGY OF SEXfeeling of hostility to the father seldom, under normalconditions, entered at any The stage. reason is fairlyobvious. The babyis new and arouses new feelings; thefather has been there from the first; nothing occurs tochange the attitude towards him; he isaccepted as amatter of course.But, we see also, the situation is undoubtedly favorableto morbid and emotional developments in constitutionallyneurotic subjects, especially under the influence of injudiciousparental behavior, such as favoritism or carelessneglect. We may then have the whole chain of manifestationsdescribed by psycho-analysts. It is necessary to bealive to these possibilities,and prepared to unravel such acase fearlessly, for the path of psychology cannot be followedexcept with courage. But it is not necessary to generalizefrom a single case or even from many cases.Andit is fatal to all sound conclusions to set out with a predeterminedpattern and to attempt to fit every case onto it.All this is now becoming clearer and isbeginning to beadmitted even by psycho-analysts.Thus Rank, who wasso active in developing the conception of the (Edipuscomplex in its early stages, twenty years later, in his suggestivework on Modern Education remarks that "the(Edipus complex, as the attraction to the parent of theopposite sex and jealousy of the parentof the same sex,is not so clearly found in practiceas mythology representsit and as Freud at first believed," adding that it has notbeen easily possible even for psycho-analyststo maintainit. Elsewhere Rank observes that the famous "mothercomplex" is not so much a real fixation of the child onthe mother as merely a sign of the prevalence today of thebelief in the influence of the mother in the child's education.[963