The exercise of such restraint or guidance, even within necessary and desirable limits and with all the care, refinement and regard to the child's own natural course of development which modern methods of training may dictate, is bound to give rise to some feeling of resentment, especially in children of self-willed, obstinate or independent character or in those with whom the tendencies in need of guidance or restraint are unusually vigorous or persistent. Much more so even is this liable to be the case where (as may often happen) the child's upbringing is carried out with but little regard for, or understanding of, its own feelings, susceptibilities or tendencies. In all such cases the hostile sentiments aroused by the conflict of parental authority with the impetuous desires of childhood may be such as to outlast the period of early life to which they properly belong and to furnish a basis for a pathological fixation at the stage of parent-hatred, as a result of which this hatred may constitute an important—and usually maleficent—component of the individual's character throughout his life.
We have already, in the earlier chapters, discussed the Displacement of hate on to parent substitutes manner in which parent hatred of early origin (together with most other aspects of the young child's attitude towards its parents) should, in the course of normal development, be overcome. We have already seen, however, that certain of the secondary hatreds consequent upon incestuous love are in many individuals incapable of being completely and satisfactorily resolved in any of the normal ways, but become, instead, displaced on to parent substitutes in the same way as the love impulses which they accompany. The same fate of displacement awaits, in most cases, those more direct and primary hatreds which are consequent upon the parent's interference with the child's more general wishes and desires. In the course of the individual's life, the authority over his expressions, activities and general mode of living originally exercised by the parents, passes in succession, wholly or partly, to a number of other persons; to whom the feelings directed to the parents in virtue of the exercise of this authority is then transferred. Among those to whom such transference most frequently and regularly takes place are to be found—nurses, teachers, school prefects, police officers, employers, professional or military superiors, or persons occupying general positions of command, such as magistrates, statesmen or kings.
There can be little doubt that much of the general This displacement may lead to rebellion against authority and the persons who exercise it resistance to, and intolerance of, authority, that may be exhibited by certain individuals, or at times by whole sections of a community (or even by whole peoples) derives its motive power from a persistence in the Unconscious of parent hatreds of this kind. A very considerable proportion of criminal actions in the individual are also due to the same unconscious source, the still existing desire to resist the authority of the parents finding outlet in a displaced form in infringements of the laws, conventions, or regulations imposed by the authority of society or of the State. Particularly is this true of crimes against persons who embody or exercise this authority—emperors, kings and other persons in high places, and it would seem probable indeed that many cases of regicide or of attempts on the lives of official personages have been committed by those suffering from insufficiently controlled parent hatreds of unusual strength. Bearing in mind the dangers that beset a community in which tendencies to anarchy, lawlessness or unreasonable opposition to governmental authority are widespread, it is obvious that the frequent occurrence of violent and persistent parent hatreds in children, leading, as they so often do, to displacements of this kind, is a matter of very serious sociological and political importance[141].
These same persons in authority, who thus become the Displacements of respect and esteem recipients displaced enmity towards the parents, may however also serve in later life as substitutes for those aspects of the parents in virtue of which these latter were in childhood reverenced as the possessors of unlimited power, wisdom, virtue or knowledge (Cp. above p. 54). Especially is this the case perhaps with regard to ecclesiastical authorities; the priest, as the interpreter of wisdom that transcends earthly knowledge and the transmitter of commands that transcend earthly authority, being peculiarly suitable as an object of this emotional attitude. The head of the Roman Catholic Church has indeed, through the doctrine of infallibility, been explicitly endowed (with reference to a certain sphere of thought) with the character of perfect knowledge and perfect wisdom, which the young child with the sense of its own immense inferiority in these respects, is liable to attribute to its parents. The teacher too, in his position of moral and intellectual authority, frequently becomes the recipient of similar feelings; the additional influence which he possesses over his pupils through the latter's childish over-estimation of his knowledge and capacity often receiving frank acknowledgment in the fact of his unwillingness ever to appear to have been mistaken or to have been ignorant with regard to any matter, lest the realisation of his fallibility should detract from the suggestive power that he has hitherto enjoyed.
The displacement on to medical advisers and attendants Medical practitioners as parent-substitutes originally directed to the parents, has frequently been recognised. Here again, it is more particularly the attribute of benevolent omniscience that is liable to be transferred. Three factors contribute especially to this result:—(1) The physician's knowledge on matters of the highest interest and importance, about which others are relatively ignorant (particularly perhaps "medical" matters, in the sexual sense of that euphemism); (2) the fact that the situations in which his assistance is called in, for the most part urgently demand some kind of action which he alone can adequately perform; the sense of helplessness which others feel in these situations being similar in many respects to that frequently experienced in early years when, as children, we were dependent upon the efforts of our parents in many of the important affairs of life; (3) the fact that this sense of helplessness and the general attitude of suggestibility are still further increased in the case of the patient by the general regression to a relatively childish state of mind which illness so frequently brings in its train. The physician's capacity to stimulate and maintain the power of suggestion, which he possesses in virtue of this attitude on the part of those who consult him, is undoubtedly the secret of much real success in medical practice, inasmuch as the mental factors in disease—the importance of which is now becoming fully recognised, although their nature is not yet always clear—are to a large extent directly affected by the patient's belief in his doctor's ability to understand and cure the complaint from which he suffers.
This suggestive power plays of course a specially prominent The rôle of parent-regarding tendencies in suggestion and hypnosis part in dealing with disorders of a directly psychopathic nature[142] and peculiarly so where a condition of enhanced suggestibility is deliberately induced and utilised with a view to the cure of such disorders, as in the practice of hypnotism. The work which has been directed to the study of hypnotism from the psycho-analytic point of view has brought out very clearly the similarities between the condition in hypnosis and some of the mental characteristics of early childhood; and has led to the conception of the hypnotic trance as a regression to a relatively infantile state of mind, the rapport between operator and subject being regarded as, in certain important respects, a repetition or revival of the relations which had previously existed between parent and child. Ferenczi[143] has gone so far as to regard the different methods of inducing hypnosis as depending upon a revival in a displaced form of the child's typical attitude towards its father or its mother respectively; the stern, commanding, confident tone, adopted by some operators, tending to bring about a relationship between them and their subjects that constitutes a revival of the former relationship between father and child, the calming, soothing, soporific methods of others serving to recall the attitude of the child towards its mother, as when in early infancy it was lulled to sleep by its mother with the aid of a very similar procedure.
In the practice of psycho-analysis, too, the displacement of "Transference" in psychoanalysis emotional attitudes originally adopted with reference to the parents has been shown to play an important part, though the therapeutic effect of the method is not, as has sometimes erroneously been supposed, due to the simple action of suggestion[144]. Psycho-analysis aims at producing a state of greater co-ordination in the patient's mind by giving him an understanding of the nature and direction of his unconscious mental trends, thus putting him in a position to bring about a state of relative harmony between the different impulses which formerly, by their mutual antagonisms, were responsible for the production of the neurosis. A mere understanding of the nature of the unconscious processes involved is however, as has frequently been shown, powerless to effect the desired result, unless the conative and affective sides of these processes are also loosened from their fixations in the Unconscious and made available for use in other directions. It is here that the transference of tendencies originally directed to the parents becomes important. Just as, in the first unfolding and development of the child's emotional capacities, the direction of the love impulses on to the parents was the means of bringing the child beyond the primitive stages of auto-erotism and narcissism, so now in the emotional re-education that psycho-analysis involves, the further process of displacement of the parent love on to new objects is one of fundamental importance and is often an essential condition of the necessary readjustment and integration of the emotional life. Not of course that the parent-love is the only impulse requiring displacement in this way, but, inasmuch as the Œdipus Complex is (as Freud has put it) the nuclear complex of the neuroses, it is just the emotions that centre round the parents that usually constitute the most fundamental and far-reaching, as well as in themselves the most massive and weighty, of those that need readjustment as regards their object. In this process of readjustment, the analyst himself—as is now well recognised—usually plays a highly important, though a transitory, rôle; the emotions loosened from their fixations by the process of analysis being temporarily displaced on to his person, (on their way to more suitable and permanent objects) both because he is the first available object, and because his position of authority as the conductor of the analysis naturally suits him for the part[145].
It is principally because a displacement of this sort can be Transference and the cure of neuroses much more easily produced in certain kinds of neurosis than in others, that neuroses differ from one another markedly in their amenability to treatment; what Freud has called the Transference Neuroses[146] (such as Hysteria or Obsessional Neurosis), in which the patient, though unable to adjust his emotions to the level required for satisfactory adult life, has nevertheless for the most part attained—and retained—the stage of object-love, comparing very favourably in this respect with the Narcissistic Neuroses (such as Paranoia), in which the patient has regressed beyond the stage of object-love to the relatively infantile level at which his emotional outlets are sought only in, or in connection with, his own person.
All the displacements with which we have been hitherto The displacement of parent-regarding feelings, on to objects other than individuals concerned have at least this one important feature in common, that the feelings and tendencies originally directed to the parents are transferred to definite individuals. There are, however, certain forms of displacement, of very considerable sociological importance, in which this is no longer the case, the parent substitutes being found, not in any individual persons, but in groups, places, societies and institutions.
Thus in many cases the home, as the place in which the Home parents lived and in which the feelings of love, tenderness and admiration towards the parents were first developed, acquires and retains throughout life a peculiar attractiveness, in which piety, tenderness and pride are intermingled and which is, it would seem, to a very large extent derived from the emotional attitude of the child towards the parents themselves. The attachment to the home in this sense frequently manifests itself in home-sickness whenever the individual is compelled to leave his native place or native land; those who suffer from home-sickness to an unusual degree or for an unusual length of time being in most cases burdened with an overstrong attachment to and dependence on their family, or certain members of it, having failed to free themselves adequately from their infantile fixations in this direction.