(5) Another factor of great importance in mental and moral development, as regards which the early direction of love on to the parents plays an important part, is one to which we have already often had occasion to refer--the development of object love as distinct from the more primitive levels of sexuality manifested in Autoerotism and Narcissism. The full social and ethical implications of this change are not yet completely understood--the whole subject of the Narcissistic trends and their manifestations, normal and abnormal, having only recently been studied by the psycho-analytic method--but it is abundantly clear that these are of very considerable significance. Failure to carry out the change successfully would seem to bring with it almost inevitably certain grave defects of character, involving an exaggerated egoism and a correspondingly deficient altruism; defects which must seriously detract from the social value of the individual, and which when present in large numbers of the population, must imperil the success or even the existence of the social organism. It is essential therefore that the stage of object-love should become firmly established in at least a majority of individuals if society is to prosper, and, as we have seen, the transition from Autoerotism to object-love is under normal human conditions brought about in connection with the child's relations to its parents. How indeed could this transition be more easily and surely achieved than through this relationship--at once the earliest, the most necessary and, in many ways, the most intimate which the individual ever knows? Through the affection which the child feels towards those who supply its elementary needs, it learns the meaning of attachment to an object outside itself--an attachment which, in its further development, leads to the tendency to seek the goal of effort and desire in the outer world rather than in intimate connection with the self, the tendency upon which all altruism is ultimately based. Just as the early awakening of the sexual impulses ensures that these impulses shall have time and opportunity to devote the great motive power at their disposal to the work involved in mental growth and education, so the early arousal of object-love in connection with the parents ensures that these impulses shall take that direction which alone will enable the child to become a useful and a pleasant member of society. [Sidenote: The Narcissistic love elements are also satisfied by incestuous affection]