We must remember, however, that there very often _are_ reasons to the contrary. In many cases, for instance, the love or dependence fixations in an individual's mind are such that continued intimacy with the parents will seriously detract from that individual's capacity to make the best of life. Frequent meeting with the parents may sap his energy or deprive him of initiative and self-reliance in the manner we have studied: or again, it may cause serious interference with his love life, as where the constant arousal of the not wholly outgrown love impulses to father or mother may appreciably diminish the affection available for husband or wife respectively, thus producing an unhappy marriage. For similar reasons frequent meetings between brothers and sisters may often be disadvantageous. Still more clearly is it undesirable to continue family intimacies where not love but hatred is the predominant tendency aroused and fostered by these intimacies. In such cases it is evident hypocrisy for the parties concerned to meet more often than is absolutely necessary: the frequent stirring up of conscious or unconscious hatred can only cause unhappiness, unprofitable and dangerous mental conflict or deterioration of character; and the more that relatives who are unable to "get on" with one another keep apart, the better it will be for all concerned. With these wide and sweeping reservations however, it would probably seem to accord best with psychological and sociological considerations if at any rate some moderate degree of connection be maintained between relatives, whom circumstances have not definitely set apart. Given freedom from all undesirable fixations (whether of hatred or of love), brothers and sisters have at least as good reasons for being permanently helpful and agreeable to one another as have friends who have been intimate with one another in the course of school, college, social or professional life. Still closer perhaps in some ways are the bonds that may permanently unite parents and children. The long period through which they have been bound to one another by ties that are biologically justifiable and necessary would seem to produce a psychological effect that inevitably tends to persist in some degree throughout the remainder of life. The relations of child to parent and of parent to child are so fundamental to all human existence and human intercourse, that most, if not all, of our mental life, in so far as it has reference to our fellow creatures, is to some extent reminiscent of them, or affected by them. We can never root out from our mind the tendencies connected with this most intimate and essential of human connections; and this being so, it would only be in accordance with the most fundamental promptings of our nature to permit a certain proportion of the energy involved in these tendencies to continue to flow in its original direction.