The father’s part in the home is something, however, far more
hypersomatic than that, more spiritual. The truly husbanded wife will
make the egoistic-social aspects of home-keeping so much her own business
that she will tend to appropriate more than she should really have. And
the thoughtless man will let her and wonder why she is tired and cross.
If rugs have to be beaten and windows washed, and there is no money to
hire a man to do it, the wife will do it, frequently, and the husband,
who does not husband his wife’s health and beauty will let her. And so
on up the egoistic-social scale till we reach the millionaire who might
do certain things for his wife much more acceptably than hirelings, but
dissociates himself more and more from her.
The management of the children is really an egoistic-social affair, in
which some men are much better able to plan, and execute plans than
are most women. The management of very young children in the home is
something that no _paterfamilias_ can afford to leave entirely to women.
This is by all odds the most important part of the child’s life.
It does not mean that the banker or politician should spend hour after
hour in the nursery, though, indeed, he should know pretty well what
goes on there. The nature of the personal contacts the child gets in
the nursery is a determining factor in many cases, in the way in which
he will later behave in his marital existence. In the nursery, meaning
by that any locality where the child spends most of his playtime and
sleeping time, he gets the experiences from which later he may develop
neuroses, phobias, and other emotional disorders. He forms there usually
his mother-imago, for even if he belongs to the class of children who
never see their own mothers except on the rarest occasions, he will form
his mother ideal from his hired nurse, or from any other woman with whom
he comes into close contact.
Here then, the egoistic-social trends of the parents play an important
rôle in determining the erotic life of the child. The egoistic-social
pressure exerted on one or both parents withdraws them from their
children, and partly or wholly orphans them. Many a child’s father is no
more personal than a checking bank.
Not only, therefore, does the absorption of the parents by
egoistic-social trends diminish the chances of their own erotic
development as husband and wife, a development that takes time, energy
and imagination, but it deprives their children of the proper environment
in which to develop the germs of future wholesome erotism.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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