ions of this feeling are
very dim and at times may completely disappear. In this "love" is
contained a germ of desire, of erotic appropriation-to-self. Any woman in
the environment and especially the mother must needs supply the ideal of
the desired woman. In so far as the father is perceived as an obstacle to
the love towards the mother he must, in the elementary tendency, be killed
to remove the obstacle, and there arises the murder impulse belonging to
the OEdipus Complex. [The child has no clear idea of death. It is only a
matter of wishing to have some one out of the way. If this primal motive
appears to us subsequently as a "killing," it is again only because of the
error of superposition, just as in the later mentioned "rape."] In so far
as the mother herself does not meet the desired tenderness or in refusing,
acts as a corrective agent, while carrying on the education, she, too,
becomes an obstacle, a personality contrasting with the "dear" mother, a
contrast which plunges the psyche in anxiety and bitterness. Anxiety comes
principally from the conflict of psychical tendencies, which result from
the same person being both loved and hated. The correlative to the denying
action of the mother is to commit rape on her. Another cause of the
attraction towards the mother besides the erotically toned one, is the
desire for her care, called forth by the hardships encountered elsewhere
in the world. It is an indolence opposed to the duties of life. The
propensity towards ease is psychologically a very important factor. The
home is in general the place of protection; the characteristic embodiment
of this is preeminently the mother. We speak of maternal solicitude but
less of paternal solicitude. I have noted the solicitous mother type in
the story of the three feathers, where the mother toad bestows the gifts
from the big box. In so far as the solicitous person refuses the requests
made of her and for reasons of necessity thrusts the child out into the
world, or in so far as any other obstacles (demands of life) stand in the
way of the gratification of the lazy, "feed me" state of mind, like the
angel with the flaming sword before the entrance to paradise, so far the
obstructing power appears as the type of the "terrible" mother, a picture
whose terribleness is yet intensified by the working of the incest
conflict. In this aspect therefore the otherwise beloved mother is a
hostile personality.

To the process of education