Freud has drawn attention to the occurrence of a curious case of displacement--not infrequent among men and of very considerable importance for subsequent sexual life--which seems to depend to some extent at any rate, upon an arrest in the Unconscious at the stage of secondary mother hatred or contempt to which we referred on p. 59[129]. In such cases the mother is not pitied for having to suffer unwelcome advances from the father, but hated and despised for permitting or encouraging these advances. The father, being, according to the estimation of the child's Unconscious, a partner altogether undesirable, one who would under no circumstances be preferred to the child himself by any woman of good taste, the mother is regarded as a person quite lacking in such taste, a woman who indeed might give herself to _anybody_ (a view which of course also encourages the hope that she may some day give herself to the child). If this view should persist in the Unconscious, the mother may come subsequently to be regarded as a sort of _prostitute_. [Sidenote: The dissociation of sexual attractiveness and esteem] Now although such a sequence of ideas in the Unconscious may lead to contempt of the mother, it has not deprived her of her original power of attracting love and admiration; it leads rather to a mental splitting up of these original attractive attributes, the more purely and directly sexual ones being separated from the other characteristics in virtue of which she stands as an example of all that is morally desirable in womanhood. These two different aspects of the mother attributes are then in later life sought and found in different individuals--the sexual attributes in prostitutes or in women of inferior morality, education, intelligence or social station; the other attributes--objects of tender love and admiration--in women of a higher standing, towards whom however no physically sexual attraction can be felt. [Sidenote: The importance of this dissociation] This dissociation of purely sexual attraction from tenderness, esteem and the other components of fully developed love, is, if we take account of its presence in minor as well as in major degrees, of such frequent occurrence, that it has been regarded by some as a normal feature of the sex impulse in the human male. It is at the same time a feature which cannot but be productive of harm in a monogamous society, so that if Freud's explanation of its origin should prove to be one that is at all generally valid, this aberrant process of development must be regarded as one that entails very serious consequences of an ethical and sociological as well as of a psychological nature, and one therefore to whose incidence, genesis, growth and history a little further consideration may perhaps not unprofitably be devoted here. [Sidenote: Influences in later life which are liable to reinforce it]