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 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 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.