CHAPTER IV
The Family Romance and the Family Feud
The craving for food and safety, gratified in our mother's arms, the craving for safety gratified by the strong father's presence, develop in our nerves automatic reactions of love or hatred (fear) toward other human beings endowed with or lacking our mother's and father's fetishes.
Exposure to pleasurable or painful stimuli in infancy produces in our nerves a modification which could be roughly compared to the modification produced surgically in the brain of the dog mentioned in Chapter II.
Even as a dog can be conditioned to "prefer" turning to the right and to "hate" (or fear) running down stairs, a human being can, thru continued exposure to the sight of red hair in infancy, become conditioned to "prefer" red hair.
Many other factors, however, complicate the question of our likes and dislikes. A child's environment contains many sources of stimulation besides the mother's and the father's fetishes, all of them varying in intensity, duration and character (pleasant or unpleasant).
Besides, the child is forced at some period of his life into a more or less sudden and more or less pleasant contact with the outside world. That contact, which at times is a conflict, often causes some of the early impressions made upon the infant's or child's nerves to be "repressed," thereby originating a conflict in the individual's nervous system.
And thus we are brought to a consideration of the family romance which various conflicts within the family circle and with the outside world, not infrequently transform into a family feud.
The Oedipus Complex. The complication designated by Freud as the Oedipus Complex is one of the most potent, altho at times one of the least obvious factors in family conflicts and in the mental disturbances which those conflicts occasion.
The Oedipus Complex is named after the Greek legend according to which Oedipus killed his father and later married his mother without being aware of their identity.