With men, too, it is possible that an overstrong affection and admiration for the father may lead to a corresponding result. In these cases we should expect the homosexuality to be of a deeper and more fundamental character than that referred to above, the members of the lover's own sex exercising attraction, as it were, on their own merits, and not merely as substitutes for the forbidden members of the opposite sex; the objects selected being correspondingly typical of their own sex, _i. e._ womanly women and manly men[38]. The existence of such a type of homosexuality has indeed been demonstrated by Ferenczi[39] (though here, as in most cases of "types" in psychology, it is probable that the types themselves are only extreme forms between which there exist an indefinite number of intermediate characters, the majority of individuals partaking to some extent of the nature of both types). So far as the evidence goes, however, it would seem that the fixation of love on the parent of the same sex plays a lesser part in the development of this kind of homosexuality than might have been expected; the homosexuality in question being more frequently and to a greater extent due to a displacement of a primitive love of self (Narcissism, in psycho-analytic terminology) projected on to others, so that in loving those of his own sex the individual is directing his affection to those who, by his unconscious mind, are selected as the most suitable representatives of his own beloved Ego. [Sidenote: Idealisation of the loved parent] It is an important characteristic of the phenomenon of fixation on the parent, that this parent who is loved in the unconscious is not so much the parent as he or she actually exists when the child has attained to adolescence or maturity, but rather the parent as he or she appeared to the child when young, _i. e._ in the case of the father, a being of immeasurable strength, wisdom, knowledge, authority and (perhaps) love; in the case of the mother, one of unsurpassable beauty, tenderness and mercy and an ever available source of comfort, help and protection in face of the difficulties and dangers of an unknown and often hostile world. This idealisation of the loved parent is especially liable to exercise a potent influence in all cases where the parent in question dies young and is therefore never subject to the criticism at the hands of his children to which he would, later on, have inevitably to some extent become exposed. In any case, however, it is not surprising that in comparison with these beautiful products of the child's imagination (for we can scarcely doubt that, here as elsewhere, the passage of time has served to embellish still further the originally exaggerated estimate of the admirable qualities of the loved parent) the actual imperfect specimens of humanity who are available as love objects in the real world have but little power of attraction[40].