The sexual aspects of initiation are apt to be particularly prominent in the case of boys entering a criminal or anti-social "gang". Thus an acute student of this subject writes to me: "I have often found that a delinquent boy was initiated into sexual knowledge and practices on the first evening that he joined his "gang"; _e.g._ in one such gang every new member had to exhibit himself. He was asked if he knew "what it (the penis) was for"; this was explained; and after certain criticisms were passed, the leader, after a thorough inspection, declared "you will do". There was also a catechism: "Do you know what your mother and father do..." etc; the result being to discredit them in the eyes of the boy and to lead him to emulate them or at least to defy and despise them."] [Footnote 82: A. Schweiger, "Der Ritus der Beschneidung." _Anthropos._ 1914.] [Footnote 83: K. Weule, "Negerleben in Ostafrika," 304. Quoted by Reik., _op. cit._] [Footnote 84: Chazac, "La religion des Kikuyu." _Anthropos_ II. 317, 1910.] [Footnote 85: Sir J. G. Frazer, "Totemism and Exogamy." II. 144.] CHAPTER X THE DEVELOPMENT OF PARENT SUBSTITUTES Our last two chapters have again been something in the nature of a digression--a digression however which, we will hope, has not been altogether unprofitable, inasmuch as it has opened to our view some of the wider aspects of our problem, and afforded us a glimpse of the extent to which the aspects of family life which are forcing themselves on the attention of psychologists at the present day, are the same as those which have exercised the greatest influence upon mankind in all places and of all degrees of culture, and have manifested themselves everywhere in human beliefs and institutions. It is now time, however, to resume our previous problem--the study of the influence of the family upon the development of the individual in its more remote, indirect and abnormal aspects. [Sidenote: Varieties and abnormalities as regards the displacement of parent-regarding tendencies] In the failures and abnormalities of development with which we were concerned in Chapters VI and VII, the principal characteristic was the persistence of, or return to, an infantile or childlike relationship towards the _parents_. In normal development, as we have seen, this relationship is outgrown largely by the help of the mechanism of Displacement, in virtue of which the emotional attitude towards the parents is transferred to other persons, who (at any rate in the early stages of the process) are connected with the parents by some associative link. Supposing development to have proceeded normally along these lines for a certain period, it is still possible for an arrest or regression to occur, as a result of which any of these later stages may become permanent instead of transitory, in precisely the same manner as in the case of the earlier stages in which the emotions and feelings are still directly related to the parents themselves.