Page:Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology (1916).djvu/176

 CHAPTER III

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE FATHER IN THE DESTINY OF THE INDIVIDUAL

Ducunt volentem fata, nolentem trahunt.

has pointed out in many places with unmistakable clearness that the psycho-sexual relationship of the child towards his parents, particularly towards the father, possesses an overwhelming importance in the content of any later neurosis. This relationship is in fact the infantile channel par excellence in which the libido flows back when it encounters any obstacles in later years, thus revivifying long-forgotten dreams of childhood. It is ever so in life when we draw back before too great an obstacle—the menace of some severe disappointment or the risk of some too far-reaching decision—the energy stored up for the solution of the task flows back impotent; the by-streams once relinquished as inadequate are again filled up. He who has missed the happiness of woman’s love falls back, as a substitute, upon some gushing friendship, upon masturbation, upon religiosity; should he be a neurotic he plunges still further back into the conditions of childhood which have never been quite forsaken, to which indeed the normal is fettered by more than one link—he returns to the relationship to father and mother. Every psychoanalysis carried out at all thoroughly shows this regression more or less plainly. One peculiarity which stands out in the works and views of Freud is that the relationship to the father is seen to possess an overwhelming importance. This importance of the father in the moulding of the child’s