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 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 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.

[Sidenote: These tendencies become less repressed and more influenced by reason, as development proceeds]

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.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 265: It would seem that children who have never known their parents or any normal parent substitutes, such as those who are brought up entirely in orphanages and other institutions, nevertheless do actually find corresponding objects on to whom their parent-regarding tendencies can be directed; if not in reality, at least in imagination--imagination that tends to find a real equivalent as soon as a suitable object presents itself. This is amusingly and instructively illustrated in Jean Webster's recently successful book and play "Daddy Long Legs".]

[Footnote 266: It is scarcely necessary to point out the Neo-Malthusian bearings of these considerations. They add one more argument to the many that already exist in favour of the practice of birth-control, which is now adopted by the more cultured classes of nearly all civilised communities--a practice the ethical justifications of which are becoming constantly more manifest.

On the other hand, the desirability of a limitation of the size of the family must not of course blind us to the fact that a very small family, especially one where there is an only child, will often have certain difficulties of its own, from which larger families may be relatively free. There can be very little doubt that, in the case of the only child, the emancipation of the individual from the family influences may frequently present more than the usual amount of difficulty: where this is so, the tendencies towards emancipation will need a correspondingly greater amount of assistance and encouragement.]

[Footnote 267: Hence the desirability, which has repeatedly been urged by psycho-analytic writers, of the sleeping room of the child being separate from that of the parents, even at a very early age.]

[Footnote 268: _Cp._ from the psycho-analytic point of view: Freud, "Zur sexuellen Aufklärung der Kinder" and "Über infantile Sexualtheorien", Sammlung kleiner Schriften zur Neurosenlehre, II, 151, 159. Jung, "Collected Papers on Psycho-Analysis", 132, ff.]

[Footnote 269: The dangers and difficulties which we have here in view are, it is almost needless to say, in most cases more liable to beset the mother (with her more intensive preoccupation with the children in their early years) than the father (who is usually less intimately and continuously in contact with them).]