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not by experiencing the practical consequences, but by parental re–
straint, enforced by punishments, far more complicated in aspect than
a fall or a cut finger. The same prohibitions and punishments are used
against aggressive and disrespectful behavior. Since the reasons are
equally incomprehensible, it is not surprising that a child should
not at first distinguish between the withdrawing of his hand from a
hot iron and from his penis, and that because of this early associa–
tion accidents and the excitement of physical dangers often replace
as "screen memories" painful incidents and excitements of quite an–
other kind.
But obviously, as we noted in examining Little Red Riding Hood,
the relation of parents to children is not chiefly one of coercion and
restraint. The child not only finds within the family his comfort, his
security and his happiness, but he becomes humane and social by
constant imitation of those about him, by making their ways his own.
He repeats not only the actions and words of other members of his
family, but also their emotional responses to objects and incidents
with which he has had little direct experience. Even their forbidding
what he wants to do becomes part of him, and conscious or uncon–
scious inhibition takes the place of external restraint. It is very difficult
to say at what point this imitated material becomes his own, to distin–
guish between original impulses and the remembered actions of others,
between original thoughts and the echoes of what others have said, a
difficulty that makes it easy to understand paranoia and other phe–
nomena of projection, in which one's own thoughts and wishes are
mistaken for the words and deeds of other men.
Peculiar to the individual is the selection and organization, con–
scious or unconscious, of this social material, which is deeply involved
emotionally with the people from whom it is adopted. And some of it,
for reasons discussed earlier, becomes repressed. Attached to these
repressed impulses are the parental
~ggressions
against them, which
make the parents seem "bad objects." These feelings occasion anxiety
and a sense of separation which leads in turn to a desire to be identi–
fied with the parents in their "good" aspects, to be reunited with them
in security and love.
Repressed destructive feelings are disintegrative, not only be–
cause they split up the relationship with loved persons, but because
they isolate a part of the self. Love is integrative, and of this integra–
tion, which is social in character, the specifically sexual is only a part
and seldom a dominant part. Premature or excessive sexuality in
children results from emotional insecurity, and in later life sexuality
can be used as a social instrument, as Alexander R. Martin has said,
