l life, a precocity in feeling tending toward
fixation of childhood habits, which are thus carried over into adult
life.

=Fixation of Habits.= Fixation is the word that expresses all
this,--fixation of childish habits. A neurotic is a person who made
such strong habits in childhood that he cannot abandon them in
maturity. He is too much ruled by the past. His unconscious emotional
thought-habits are the complexes which were made in childhood and
therefore lack the power of adaptation to mature life.

We saw in Chapter IV that Nature takes great pains to develop in the
child the psychic and physical trends which he will need later on in
his mature love-life, and that this training is accomplished in a
number of well-defined periods which lead from one to the other. If,
however, the child reacts too intensely, lingers too long in any one
of these phases, he lays for himself action lines of least resistance
which he may never leave or to which he may return during the strain
and stress of adult life.

In either case, the neurotic is a grown-up child. He may be a very
learned, very charming person, but he is nevertheless dragging behind
him a part of his childhood which he should have outgrown long ago.
Part of him is suffering from an arrest of development,--not a leg or
an arm but an impulse.

=Precocious Emotions.= The habits which tend to become fixed too soon
seem to be of four kinds; the habit of loving, the habit of rebelling,
the habit of repressing normal instincts, and the habit of dreaming.
In each case it is the excess of feeling which causes the
trouble,--too much love, too much hate, too much disgust, or too much
pleasure in imagination. Exaggeration is always a danger-signal. An
overdeveloped child is likely to be an underdeveloped man. Especially
in the emotions is precocity to be deplored. A premature alphabet or
multiplication table is not nearly so serious as premature intensity
of feeling, nor so likely to lead later to trouble. Of course fixation
in these emotional habits does not always lead to a serious breakdown.
If the fixation is not too extreme, and if later events do not happen
to accentuate the trouble, the arrest of development may merely show
itself in certain weaknesses of character or in isolated symptoms
without developing a real neurosis.

Let us examine each of these arrested habits and the excess emotion
which sets the mold before it is ready for maturity.

=Too Much Self-Love.=