If we are ever disposed to see some demonic power at work controlling mortal destiny, surely we can see it here in these melancholy silent tragedies working themselves out slowly, torturingly, in the sick souls of our neurotics. Some, step by step, continually struggling against the unseen powers, do free themselves from the clutches of the demon who forces his unsuspecting victims from one savage mischance to another: others rise up and win to freedom, only to be dragged back later to the old paths, caught in the noose of the neurosis. You cannot even maintain that these unhappy people are neurotic or "degenerates." If we normal people examine our lives from the psychoanalytic standpoint, we too perceive how a mighty hand guides us insensibly to our destiny and not always is this hand a kindly one.[157] We often call it the hand of God or of the Devil, for the power of the infantile constellation has become mighty during the course of the centuries in affording support and proof to all the religions. But all this does not go so far as to say that we must cast the blame of inherited sins upon our parents. A sensitive child whose intuition is only too quick in reflecting in his own soul all the excesses of his parents must lay the blame for his fate on his own characteristics. But, as our last case shows, this is not always so, for the parents can (and unfortunately only too often do) fortify the evil in the child's soul, preying upon the child's ignorance to make him the slave of their complexes. In our case this attempt on the part of the father is quite obvious. It is perfectly clear why he wanted to marry his daughter to this brutish creature: _he wanted to keep her and make her his slave for ever_. What he did is but a crass exaggeration of what is done by thousands of so-called respectable, educated people, who have their own share in this educational dust-heap of enforced discipline. The fathers who allow their children no independent possession of their own emotions, who fondle their daughters with ill-concealed eroticism and tyrannical passion, who keep their sons in leading-strings, force them into callings and finally marry them off "suitably," and the mothers who even in the cradle excite their children with unhealthy tenderness, later on make them into slavish puppets, and then at last, out of jealousy, destroy their children's love-life fundamentally, they all act not otherwise than this stupid and brutal boor. It will be asked, wherein lies the parents' magic power to bind their children to themselves, as with iron fetters, often for the whole of their lives? The psychoanalyst knows that it is nothing but the sexuality on both sides. We are always trying not to admit the child's sexuality. That view only comes from wilful ignorance, which happens to be very prevalent again just now.[158]