childhood with, so to speak, a suppressed libido.[8] But owing to
the delay of sexual maturity time has been gained for the erection
beside the sexual inhibitions of the incest barrier, that moral
prescription which explicitly excludes from the object selection the
beloved person of infancy or blood relation. The observance of this
barrier is above all a demand of cultural society which must guard
against the absorption by the family of those interests which it needs
for the production of higher social units. Society, therefore, uses
every means to loosen those family ties in every individual, especially
in the boy, which are authoritative in childhood only.[9]

The object selection, however, is first accomplished in the imagination,
and the sexual life of the maturing youth has hardly any escape except
indulgence in phantasies or ideas which are not destined to be brought
to execution. In the phantasies of all persons the infantile
inclinations, now reenforced by somatic emphasis, reappear, and among
them one finds in regular frequency and in the first place the sexual
feeling of the child for the parents. This has usually already been
differentiated by the sexual attraction, the attraction of the son for
the mother and of the daughter for the father.[10] Simultaneously with
the overcoming and rejection of these distinctly incestuous phantasies
there occurs one of the most important as well as one of the most
painful psychic accomplishments of puberty; it is the breaking away from
the parental authority, through which alone is formed that opposition
between the new and old generations which is so important for cultural
progress. Many persons are detained at each of the stations in the
course of development through which the individual must pass; and
accordingly there are persons who never overcome the parental authority
and never, or very imperfectly, withdraw their affection from their
parents. They are mostly girls, who, to the delight of their parents,
retain their full infantile love far beyond puberty, and it is
instructive to find that in their married life these girls are incapable
of fulfilling their duties to their husbands. They make cold wives and
remain sexually anesthetic. This shows that the apparently non-sexual
love for the parents and the sexual love are nourished from the same
source, _i.e._, that the first merely corresponds to an infantile
fixation of the libido.

The nearer we come to the deeper