CHAPTER III THE ORIGIN OF CONFLICT IN RELATION TO THE FAMILY [Sidenote: The primitive a-moral nature of the child] In the emotional and affective attitudes of the child towards its parents and the other important persons in its environment, so far as we have now traced them, the child's conduct is in some respects more nearly allied to that of the fully developed human being than is generally recognised or admitted. In the depth and intensity of its love and hate, in its sexual or quasi-sexual activities and in its distinctive attitude towards persons of different sex, the child reveals characteristics which have often hitherto been regarded as exclusive manifestations of the adult or adolescent mind. In another very important respect, however, the child's conduct and feeling differ markedly from those of the adult. The emotional and affective reactions with which we have been dealing exhibit a straight-forwardness and simplicity which is not found in the more developed minds of normal adult persons, and which is due to the fact that the child's early conative tendencies are able, to a relatively large extent, to work themselves out without any serious opposition, hindrance or modification caused by the presence of other conflicting tendencies within the mind. The child's mind is a relatively dissociated one; incompatible thoughts, emotions, feelings and desires may successively invade the seat of consciousness, lead to their appropriate reactions and be but little modified or checked by one another. For this reason the child is, during the earliest part of its life, a relatively a-moral being, for morality implies the possibility of two or more courses of thought or action--a better and a worse--and the lack of integration in the child's mind only permits of this possibility to a very limited extent. Thus it comes about that the very young child is able to indulge openly in the expression of sexual or hostile tendencies in a manner which is impossible in later life; for to the child the expression of these tendencies does not yet possess the moral and affective meaning which it is destined subsequently to acquire. In the earliest years of life the manifestations of quasi-sexual love, even in an incestuous direction, are at first only the natural expression of a desire, which is gratified as a matter of course and without any hesitation produced by a sense of the immorality of these manifestations. Similarly, when the child seeks, by death or otherwise, to bring about the permanent removal of a rival or competitor, the ideas of death and murder are, as Freud points out[15], at first quite uncomplicated by the thoughts, feelings and sentiments which later come to be associated with them; the infliction of death--real or imaginary--is simply the most natural way of dealing, at the earliest stages of emotional development, with unwanted persons who interfere with the child's desires and tendencies.