It may indeed from certain points of view appear touching or even admirable, when, for instance, a mother and a son or a father and a daughter have remained strongly and intimately attached to one another long after the son or daughter has reached adolescence or maturity. In what direction, it might be asked, could the child be more appropriately drawn by ties of deep and permanent affection than to one to whom it owes its very existence, to whom it is indebted for the care, nourishment, and protection that were necessary to it in its early years and who is responsible for the first awakening and the first reciprocation of its love? We now know, however, that the maintenance of such a tie when the biological causes that bind child to parent have ceased to act, is liable to be achieved at the cost of some grave failure of development. The "good" son or daughter frequently becomes a bad husband or wife, an inferior individual and an unsatisfactory member of society. The conduct of the child who thus sacrifices the unfolding of his own personality to a primitive affection which should have been outgrown, should indeed arouse pity or contempt rather than admiration, while the corresponding conduct of the parent, who thus hinders the development of the child he loves, can be regarded scarcely otherwise than as ignorantly and pathetically selfish.
In order to avoid such conduct it will be necessary for The loosening of the filio-parental tie requires a readjustment of the parent's life parents to keep a close watch, not only on the development of their children's emotional life, but on the course and direction of their own affections. Only by the gradual replacement in the parent's mind of that love and interest which centred round the child by a corresponding absorption in some other direction (whether in other children, in the sexual partner or in some totally different matter) can the necessary readjustment of the filio-parental relations be successfully and painlessly accomplished. This is a duty which, difficult as it may sometimes appear, the requirements of the true mental development of their children would seem inevitably to impose on parents. For this reason it is obviously unwise for parents ever to immerse themselves to such an extent in their children and their children's affairs, that these absorb the whole of their emotional and intellectual capacities. If they should do so, it will be additionally difficult for them to pick up the threads of their previous interests and activities when the growth of the children renders such a readjustment necessary[269].
Supposing that fixation of the love impulse upon the Displacement of the parent-regarding tendencies actual person of the parent has been successfully avoided, there remains the possibility of fixation upon the numerous parent substitutes that we considered in Chapter X. These fixations really imply, as we have seen, an incomplete detachment of the erotic impulses from the parental images as they exist in the Unconscious, and should not occur in cases where real freedom from the secret domination of these images has been achieved. Nevertheless we must remember that such freedom is at best only relative; the associative connections that bind the earliest to all subsequent objects of love (either directly or through a series of intermediate links) would seem Complete emancipation from incest tendencies is never achieved never to be really broken; in all probability they continue throughout life to exercise a certain measure of influence upon the direction of the affections. All that we can reasonably demand under these circumstances is that these unconscious forces shall not so blind the individual as to cause him to bestow his love upon an object which is intrinsically unsuitable. So long as this is avoided there is little to complain of, and it would seem very probable that a deeper psychological and ethical insight into the nature of the processes concerned will, on the whole, produce a relaxation rather than a further restriction of the liberty that is now permitted in these matters. This at any rate would appear to be the direction in which moral sentiment is moving as culture increases; the maximum of restriction is reached in those communities where, as in parts of Australia, a highly complex system of exogamy allows only a very limited range of choice for the selection of husband or wife; from this point upwards in the scale of development there is a marked tendency for the number of forbidden relationships to become smaller as culture advances, and there These tendencies become less repressed and more influenced by reason, as development proceeds is every reason to suppose that in the main this tendency is still at work. Indeed we have only recently witnessed an example of its action in this country in the removal of the ban upon the marriage with a deceased wife's sister.
The same result emerges if we consider the matter, not from the point of view of sociology, but from that of an enlightened system of morality. The evidence available shows, for instance, that little if any harm is likely to ensue from the marriage of first cousins, so long as the stock is a healthy one: much the same is probably true as regards the marriage of half brother and half sister or even full brother and sister. Our condemnation of such unions is due to influences emanating from the repression of the incest tendencies, and not to any sound appreciation or experience of their ill effects; and in so far as the taboos consequent upon repression give way to more balanced moral judgments based on a real understanding of the issues involved (and this is the general tendency of ethical development), the disapproval of these unions between near kin will be continued only in so far as real dangers are to be apprehended from them. Among such real dangers there may be found the biological one of the possibility of inferior offspring, especially in the case of families with marked hereditary defects, and the psychological one of too little emancipation from the family influences, with all the consequences that this may involve. As regards this latter, however, it will have to be recognised that complete emancipation may often be beyond the bounds of possibility and that it is often advisable to permit some degree of indulgence to overstrong unconscious tendencies, so long as this indulgence is not too persistent or too definitely pathological.
CHAPTER XIX
ETHICAL AND PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS—DEPENDENCE ASPECTS
All that we have said with regard to the weaning of the Our conclusions with regard to the love and hate aspects hold good for the dependence aspects child from the love relationship that binds him to the family applies with but little alteration to the dependence relationships. During his earliest years the child is necessarily dependent on his parents (or their substitutes) both for the actual means of his subsistence and for guidance and protection. As he grows up however (as we have seen specially in Chapters III and IV) the dependence on his family should gradually diminish, so that at maturity he should be able in most respects to face the world as an independent individual.
The duty of the parents, or failing them of the community, The duty of parents to provide for offspring now well recognised in regard to the provision of material necessities for offspring is now sufficiently recognised, so that there is little need to insist upon it here. We may perhaps only suggest in passing that the profound and complex nature of the satisfactions which parents have in their children, and which we had occasion to refer to in Chapter XIV, would very possibly make the communistic rearing of children on a large scale as unsatisfying and inadequate from the point of view of the parents as it would probably be from that of the children themselves.
The duty of the parents or their substitutes in the direction The necessity for the gradual loosening of the dependence tie is however not fully realised of gradually weaning the child from his initial condition of dependence has however received less adequate recognition nor has the difficult and delicate nature of this duty been sufficiently appreciated. On the economic and social sides indeed it is admitted that it is incumbent upon parents to provide their children with the means of earning their living and of taking their place generally among their social equals; though with regard to girls the views as to what was necessary as regards education for these purposes has, up till comparatively recently, often been lamentably narrow. In this country there is even now in many quarters a failure to realise the full nature of parental responsibilities with regard to daughters; much less financial provision being frequently made in their case, both for higher and professional education and for the expenses incidental to marriage, than in the case of sons; lack of adequate provision in these respects inevitably tending of course to produce an undue degree of dependence—economical and moral—on the parents.