In the chapter on the reproductive instinct, we
found that the natural way to learn to love is by successively loving
oneself, one's parents and family, one's fellows, and one's mate. If
the love-force gets too much pleasure in any one of these phases, it
finds it hard to give up its old love and to pass on to the next
phase. Thus some children take too much pleasure in their own bodies
or, a little later, in their own personalities. If they are too much
interested in their own physical sensations and the pleasure they get
by stimulating certain zones of the body, then in later life they
cannot free themselves from the desire for this kind of satisfaction.
Try as they may, they cannot be satisfied with normal adult relations,
but sink back into some form of so-called sex-perversion.

Perhaps it is another phase of self-love which holds the child too
much. If, like Narcissus, he becomes too fond of looking at himself,
is too eager to show off, too desirous of winning praise, then forever
after he is likely to be self-conscious, self-centered, thinking
always of the impression he is making, unable ever to be at leisure
from himself. He is fixed in the Narcissistic stage of his life, and
is unadapted to the world of social relations.

=Too Much Family-love.= We have already spoken of the danger of
fixation in the second period, that of object-love--the period of
family relationships. The danger is here again one of degree and may
be avoided by a little knowledge and self-control on the part of the
parents. The little girl who is permitted to lavish too much love on
her father, who does not see anybody else, who cannot learn to like
the boys is a misfit. The wise mother will see that her love for her
boy does not express itself too much by means of hugs and kisses. The
mother who shows very plainly that she loves her little boy better
than she loves her husband and the mother who boasts that her
adolescent boy tells her all his secrets and takes her out in
preference to any girl--that deluded mother is trying to take
something that is not hers, and is thereby courting trouble. When her
son grows up, he may not know why, but no girl will suit him, and he
will either remain a bachelor or marry some older woman who reminds
him subconsciously of his mother. His love-requirements will be too
strict; he will be forever trying either in phantasy or in real life
to duplicate his earlier love-experiences. This, of course, cannot