Tendencies, which, like those revealed in the Œdipus myth and its numberless variations, have continued to manifest themselves in the productions of the popular and the artistic mind for many generations, would seem to show by their universality and tenacity that their origins lie deeply embedded in the very foundations of human life and character; and this view of their importance is corroborated by the very significant place which they are found to occupy as etiological factors in the production of neuroses. Freud has gone so far as to say that the tendencies centering round the Œdipus situation form the "nuclear complex of the neuroses," _i. e._ the fundamental point of conflict in the mind of the neurotic, about which the other conflicts gather and upon which they are to a great extent dependent. In the light of Freud's fruitful conception of the neuroses as due largely to the fact that a part of the emotional energy has suffered an arrest at, or a "regression" to, a relatively early stage of mental development, this fundamental rôle of the Œdipus complex in the neuroses would seem to indicate that the proper development and control of the child's psychic relations to his parents constitutes at once one of the most important and one of the most difficult features of individual mental growth. That this is in fact the case has been shown both by the researches of Freud himself and by those of all other psycho-analytic investigators, and may without difficulty be confirmed from the experience of ordinary life by those whose eyes have once been opened to the full significance and innumerable manifestations of the psychic relationship between parents and children. [Sidenote: The normal course of development of the child's affections] [Sidenote: Auto-erotism] [Sidenote: Object love]