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 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
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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