The psycho-analytic study of the familyFlugel, J. C. (John Carl)
Science
The psycho-analytic study of the family
Flugel, J. C. (John Carl)
Families; Marriage; Parent and child; Psychoanalysis
Of the two main groups of tendencies to which we have above
referred--which we may briefly call the love and hate groups--the former
opens up a number of problems in this connection which would seem to be
in some significant respects deeper, more important and more complex than
those raised by the latter. The hate tendencies are, indeed, as regards
the cause and nature of their origin and development, in the main not so
very difficult to understand. Psychologists are pretty well agreed as to
the circumstances which give rise to anger and fear--the emotions which
chiefly underlie the attitude of hate. Anger arises when the activities,
tendencies or wishes of the individual are interfered with or when
the individual is unwillingly forced to undergo some disagreeable or
undesirable experience, and it is directed to the object from which such
interference or such infliction of undesired experience is forthcoming.
Fear arises when harm is threatened to the individual or to that which he
possesses or holds dear, and is directed to the threatening object[216].
Now, as we have seen, the normal conditions of family life necessarily
give rise to some extent to the situations which arouse these emotions.
Through the mere exercise of ordinary parental authority and care,
and more especially through the process of elementary moral training
and education, the parent invariably interferes in some ways with
the primitive desires and tendencies of the child, and threatens the
child with punishment in the event of his transgressing the parental
prohibitions; the conditions are therefore present for the arousal in the
child's mind of anger and fear towards the parent, should the child be at
all susceptible to these emotions.
[Sidenote: Jealousy as a necessary consequence of marriage]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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