disturbances of the psychosexual
development the more easily we can recognize the evident significance of
the incestuous object-selection. As a result of sexual rejection there
remains in the unconscious of the psychoneurotic a great part or the
whole of the psychosexual activity for object finding. Girls with an
excessive need for affection and an equal horror for the real demands of
the sexual life experience an uncontrollable temptation on the one hand
to realize in life the ideal of the asexual love and on the other hand
to conceal their libido under an affection which they may manifest
without self reproach; this they do by clinging for life to the
infantile attraction for their parents or brothers or sisters which has
been repressed in puberty. With the help of the symptoms and other
morbid manifestations, psychoanalysis can trace their unconscious
thoughts and translate them into the conscious, and thus easily show to
such persons that they are in love with their consanguinous relations in
the popular meaning of the term. Likewise when a once healthy person
falls sick after an unhappy love affair, the mechanism of the disease
can distinctly be explained as a return of his libido to the persons
preferred in his infancy.

*The After Effects of the Infantile Object Selection.*--Even those who
have happily eluded the incestuous fixation of their libido have not
completely escaped its influence. It is a distinct echo of this phase of
development that the first serious love of the young man is often for a
mature woman and that of the girl for an older man equipped with
authority--_i.e._, for persons who can revive in them the picture of the
mother and father. Generally speaking object selection unquestionably
takes place by following more freely these prototypes. The man seeks
above all the memory picture of his mother as it has dominated him since
the beginning of childhood; this is quite consistent with the fact that
the mother, if still living, strives against this, her renewal, and
meets it with hostility. In view of this significance of the infantile
relation to the parents for the later selection of the sexual object, it
is easy to understand that every disturbance of this infantile relation
brings to a head the most serious results for the sexual life after
puberty. Jealousy of the lover, too, never lacks the infantile sources
or at least the infantile reinforcement. Quarrels between parents and
unhappy marital