This process of identification is not however operative only with regard to hatred. It may exert also a powerful influence upon the direction of love and is often of special importance where parents definitely select a favourite from among their children, this favourite child being then invested with the love that was formerly directed to the favourite parent[209]. For this reason too parents may often be desirous that their children should adopt the profession, mode of life, beliefs or habits of their (the childrens') grandparents[210]. [Sidenote: The effect of parent-child love on the attitude of parents to each other] In all cases where a parent resents the coming into being or the presence of children, and especially in those where the resentment is based largely upon jealousy, some degree of displeasure is apt to be directed upon the other parent, who is regarded as responsible for the existence of the unwelcome intruder or as transferring to him an undue proportion of attention and affection. In this respect the situation recalls in the parents mind the earlier one in which, in his own childhood, he resented the love of his parents for each other, and in consequence of which the love which he himself bore to one of his parents became converted into, or was mixed with, hatred and contempt (_cp._ p. 110). Thus a father may experience towards his wife something of those feelings of outraged jealousy which he had formerly harboured towards his mother--a resuscitation and transference of feelings of this kind being rendered all the easier by the fact that his wife is very probably already to some extent unconsciously identified with his mother, so that the whole original situation is lived through again with the substitution of wife for mother and of child (especially of course in the case of a boy) for father. [Sidenote: The Couvade] It has recently been shown by Reik[211] that this last mentioned factor of the resentment against the wife together with the previously discussed jealousy and hatred of the child are capable of throwing a very considerable amount of light upon certain customs practised amongst primitive peoples upon the occasion of the birth of a child--customs the origin and nature of which it appears at first sight very difficult to understand. To these customs we may well devote a brief consideration here, since they seem peculiarly adapted to bring out some of the most important aspects of the unconscious feelings of parents toward their offspring and--incidentally--toward one another. The customs in question are generally comprehended under the single term Couvade and may be divided, following Frazer, into two main groups:-- (1) the pre-natal or pseudo-maternal Couvade, which aims primarily and ostensibly at a magical transference of the mother's labour pains on to the person of the father, the father pretending to undergo what the mother experiences in reality;