Page:Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology (1916).djvu/179

 The fact of the extreme similarity between the reaction-type of the offspring and the parents is matter for thought. The association experiment is nothing but a small section from the psychological life of a man. At bottom daily life is nothing but an extensive and many-varied association experiment; in essence we react in life just as we do in the experiments. Although this truth is evident, still it requires a certain consideration and limitation. Let us take as an instance the case of the unhappy mother of forty-five years and her unmarried daughter of sixteen. The extreme word-predicate type of the mother is, without doubt, the precipitate of a whole life of disappointed hopes and wishes. One is not in the least surprised at the word-predicate type here. But the daughter of sixteen has really not yet lived at all; her real sexual object has not yet been found, and yet she reacts as if she were her mother with endless disillusions behind her. She has the mother’s adaptation, and in so far she is identified with the mother. There is ample evidence that the mother’s adaptation must be attributed to her relationship to the father. But the daughter is not married to the father and therefore does not need this adaptation. She has taken it over from the influence of her milieu, and later on will try to adapt herself to the world with this familial disharmony. In so far as an ill-assorted marriage is unsuitable the adaptation resulting from it is unsuitable.

Clearly such a fate has many possibilities. To adapt herself to life, this girl either will have to surmount the obstacles of her familial milieu, or, unable to free herself from them, she will succumb to the fate to which such an adaptation predisposes her. Deep within, unnoticed by any one, there may go on a glossing over of the infantile disharmony, or a development of the negative of the parents’ character, accompanied by hindrances and conflicts to which she herself has no clue. Or, growing up, she will come into painful conflict with that world of actualities to which she is so ill adapted till one stroke of fate after another gradually opens her eyes to the fact that it is herself, infantile and maladjusted, that is amiss. The source of infantile adaptation to the parents