In Europe where the wet nurse and the nurse girl are infinitely more common than in this country, the ancillary type of love, love for servants and menials, is observed with much greater frequency than here.
The Southern man does not show the same repugnance as the Northern man to consort sexually with colored women of the servant class. The colored mammy's fetishes are found competing successfully in many cases with those of the white mother.
Craig's Birds. Those who believe that heredity, instinct, the call of the blood, etc., have much to do with the choice of a mate, should read reports of experiments performed by William Craig on pigeons. Ring doves and passenger pigeons never mate. When the eggs of a passenger pigeon, however, have been hatched by a ring dove, the young male passenger pigeons will, at mating time, ignore entirely the females of their species, "their flesh and blood," and mate with female ring doves (the mother image) exclusively.
The fetishes which to them meant food and safety in the nest mean to them beauty and eroticism when they reach adulthood.
CHAPTER V
Incest
The family romance has been presented by the Freudians as complicated by actual incestuous entanglements. Adler on the other hand has shown that the incestuous situation is rather an "as if" introduced by the neurotic as a part of his absurd life plan.
Barring a few exceptions, the small boy does not desire his mother sexually nor does the small girl feel erotic at the thought of her father.
That such incestuous desires arise at the time of puberty cannot be doubted. But they are observed mostly in neurotics to whom the incestuous situation suggests, as I pointed out in the previous chapter, to the boy, food, comfort, the mother's easily won love, to the girl, the protection and the attentions of the strong father. In many cases too, homosexual and incestuous practices among the children in one family mean nothing but the neurotic search for the line of least effort.