Page:Psychology of the Unconscious (1916).djvu/35

 early stage of childhood the mother has any real sexual significance for the child.

The demands of the child upon the mother, the jealousy so often exhibited, are at first connected with the role of the mother as protector, caretaker and supplier of nutritive wants, and only later, with the germinating eroticism, does the child’s love become admixed with the developing sexual quality. The chief love objects are still the parents and he naturally continues to seek and to find in them satisfaction for all his desires. In this way the typical conflict is developed which in the son is directed towards the father and in the daughter towards the mother. This jealousy of the daughter towards the mother is called the Electra complex from the myth of Electra who took revenge on her mother for the murder of the husband because she was in this way deprived of her father.

Normally as puberty is attained the child gradually becomes more or less freed from his parents, and upon the degree in which this is accomplished depends his health and future well-being.

This demand of nature upon the young individual to free himself from the bonds of his childish dependency and to find in the world of reality his independent existence is so imperious and dominating that it frequently produces in the child the greatest struggles and severest conflicts, the period being characterized symbolically as a self-sacrifice by Jung.

It frequently happens that the young person is so closely bound in the family relations that it is only with