Jung's present position is, in many respects, a reaction against Freud's views as to the extreme importance of the sexual tendencies in mental life. With Freud the term Libido had been used to signify the sum total of these tendencies taken in a sense much wider than that which seems to have been contemplated by any previous writer; so wide indeed that many inferred that there could be but a small field left over for the operation of the other instincts and tendencies. With Jung the reaction against this attitude takes place not by a restriction of the term Libido to its former narrower sense, but by a still further extension of its meaning so as to include all the conative tendencies which manifest themselves in mental life. By so doing Jung is enabled to take up a relatively non-committal attitude as regards the sexuality or non-sexuality of many of the factors which Freud had regarded as definitely sexual in character, while at the same time he succeeds in minimising the importance of certain unmistakably sexual manifestations by ignoring their specific character and regarding them rather exclusively from the point of view of the development and value of the individual as an independent vital unit. [Sidenote: The family and the development of the individual] As regards the application of this general attitude to our own immediate problem, Jung appears to look upon the family influences as principally of importance in so far as they afford the necessary conditions and mental environment for the growth of the general life force of the individual personality. The child at birth is entirely dependent on his parents for the satisfaction of his vital needs. His development and education would appear to consist ultimately in the process of learning to satisfy these ever increasing needs himself. Hence if the child remains dependent on his parents for an abnormal length of time or to an abnormal extent, we may infer that an arrest of development has taken place. Such arrests are however liable to occur in a great many cases, since the process of learning to satisfy our own needs by our own efforts is an arduous business which (in virtue, we may suppose, of some aspect of the law of inertia) many of us would fain escape if we could. Undue dependence on the family would therefore appear to indicate a shirking of the "life task," _i. e._ an unwillingness to make the effort which adult life itself demands, manifesting itself in an exaggerated tendency to remain at the stage of relatively slothful ease and maintenance through the efforts of others which is enjoyed in infancy and early childhood. [Sidenote: Attachment to the parents regarded as symbolic of deficient individual development]