4. A corresponding displacement of incestuous desires, leading to a similar repression and reversal of emotion, may occur in the case of the mother-in-law herself, who, in virtue of this displacement, identifies her son-in-law with a son of her own (either real or imaginary); the one re-awakening in her incestuous tendencies originally aroused in connection with the other. Or again, the primary motive on the part of the mother-in-law may be unconscious sexual jealousy of her daughter, to whom she grudges the superior attractiveness of youth and the pleasures of dawning sexual life—a life which for the mother may be largely or entirely at an end. In this case she may unconsciously identify herself with her daughter, imagining, as it were, that it is she herself, and not her daughter, that is married to her son-in-law. In either case it is often the less tender and more sadistic elements of the mother-in-law's love which are directed to the son-in-law, since these are more easily reconciled with the maintenance of the requisite degree of repression than would be the case with the more gentle and affectionate components.
Only less important than the relations of child-in-law and Step-child and Step-parent parent-in-law are those of step-child and step-parent[111]; and such lesser degree of importance as these have is due rather to the lesser frequency of their occurrence than to any lesser significance which they possess for the individuals actually concerned. The generally outstanding feature of these relations is the manifestation of a more intense, or at any rate a more open, form of those feelings and tendencies which would normally exist between the child and the corresponding blood parent. A boy, for instance, who may successfully have displaced or repressed his original feelings of jealousy or hostility towards his own father, may often prove incapable of carrying out a similar re-adjustment in the case of a subsequently acquired step-father. The latter may have none of the glamour which belonged to the former in virtue of his position as head of the family (and therefore centre of the child's world) during the infancy of the child (cp. p. 55) and which may have helped to inhibit the original hostility experienced towards him through arousal of the opposite emotions of love, gratitude or admiration. The step-father, therefore, may easily re-awaken in his step-son any remnants of the hatred which the latter may have experienced towards his real father, without re-awakening in corresponding degree the compensating forces which kept the hate in check.
Furthermore, the boy's mother only marries the step-father after a period of widowhood during which the boy may have appeared to possess the sole, or at any rate the chief, claim upon her interest and affection. By her re-marriage she will probably seem to the boy's unconscious mind to have been, in a very real and poignant sense, unfaithful to himself, and to have rejected his own love for that of an outsider; an idea which may appear in consciousness in the rationalised form of an imputation of unfaithfulness towards the mother's previous husband—the boy's own father. It is a complex of feelings of this kind which, as Ernest Jones[112] has so convincingly shown, underlies and forms the principal psychological motive in "Hamlet" as a study of this relationship Shakespeare's tragedy of "Hamlet". It is this which is the cause of Hamlet's vacillation in regard to the contemplated murder of his step-father; the latter had only done what Hamlet himself would fain have done before him, but was inhibited from doing. The contemplation of Claudius's ill deeds serves dimly to call up the buried tendencies which at one time prompted Hamlet himself to commit a similar atrocity—the murder of the king (his father)—for a similar end—the possession of the queen (his mother)—and the paralysing effect of the arousal of such feelings makes itself felt as an inability to carry out the punishment of one with whom he thus has much in common, and whom he feels to be in a sense no worse than himself, the would-be punisher. Moreover, in virtue of his marriage with the queen, Claudius now really stands in the old king's place; in killing him, therefore, Hamlet is to his own unconscious mind becoming guilty of the very crime of Œdipus which had tempted him before his father's death; hence the resistance to the consummation of the act which hatred of the interloper prompts him to perform.
In the case of a girl, corresponding feelings may be called The wicked step-mother in fairy tales up towards her step-mother on the re-marriage of her father—feelings which have found expression in the very numerous and familiar myths and fairy tales (such as those of Cinderella, Snow White, Mother Holle), of the wicked step-mother who kills, beats, neglects, falsely accuses, drives out or otherwise ill-treats her step-daughter[113]. Here the feelings of the girl, like those of the boy under similar circumstances, are given free vent towards the step-mother, where they were formerly inhibited by emotions of an opposite character (or at least repressed by considerations of general or traditional morality) in the case of the girl's true mother; the step-mother thus serving as an object capable at once of arousing, and of becoming the recipient of, hostile and jealous feelings, which had hitherto successfully been held in check.
These feelings of hostility on the part of children to their The attitude of step-parents towards their step-children step-parents are of course bound to call up some degree of reciprocal feeling on the part of the step-parents themselves. The feelings thus aroused, however, are often reinforced by more direct causes of hostility, such as are liable to affect in any case the attitude of parent towards child (Cp. Ch. XVI). Here, however, the absence of the real bond of parenthood, with its accompanying incentives to tender feeling, may easily cause the hostile tendencies to meet with less resistance than usual so that genuinely cruel or neglectful behaviour is more likely to occur.
Although it is the displacement of hate which manifests The displacement of love on to step-parents itself most openly and strongly in the relations of step-children to step-parents, the displacement of love from the original dead parent to the new parent may also play an important (though nearly always more or less unconscious) part in these relations[114]. The taboo on incest works less powerfully in regard to the feelings towards the new parent than it did in regard to those towards the old. The new parent is, as a rule, no relative by blood, nor is the surviving real parent felt to have the same exclusive rights over his or her new partner as over the old; therefore the step-parent, when of the opposite sex to that of the child, is often made the object of a displacement of those feelings of tenderness and love which were formerly directed to the real parent of this sex; this state of affairs leading of course in the majority of cases to a corresponding re-awakening of jealousy or bitterness towards the surviving original parent. This love of step-child to step-parent (and particularly that of step-son to step-mother) and the contest between both of these and the remaining parent, is one which has indeed been used for ages as a mild form of displacement of the tendencies and affects originally aroused when both the child's parents were alive, and one which has found very frequent expression in myth, legend and literature[115].
All that we have here said as regards the feelings of Re-marriage after divorce children to their step-parents holds good to an even greater extent than usual in the case of the re-marriage of parents after a divorce or on their acquiring a fresh sexual partner after separation from their lawful husband or wife. Here indeed the feelings and emotions aroused are apt to be still further intensified by the fact that the children have been, in the nature of the case, more or less compelled to take sides in the previous struggle or disagreement that has taken place between the parents. A child's feelings of love and hate towards his parents are usually intensely stirred by all manifestations on their part of conjugal unhappiness or infidelity and when the barriers which prevent the full expression of these feelings towards the child's real parents are removed by the substitution of a step-parent, this new parent will often receive the full force of the love or hate which had hitherto been pent up.
In this chapter we have been concerned with the displacement of the parent-regarding emotions and tendencies on to persons who resemble the parents in that they are connected with the child by some close tie of family relationship. In the next chapter we shall proceed to discuss some of the other associative mechanisms through the operation of which this displacement may be effected.