41G MICHAEL E. STOCK 



emotion, and there cherish it) or he can intensify his identifica- 

 tion with his father (we can evade aggressors by identifying 

 with them) .'^ This latter alternative is termed the more 

 normal, for it confirms the masculinity of the boy, and allows 

 him to retain a certain affection for his mother, i. e. after the 

 pattern of his father's with whom he has now identified him- 

 self. The relative strength of the masculine-feminine disposi- 

 tions in the child determines, in Freud's early opinion, which 

 identification will preponderate. 



Insofar as the boy identifies with his father, not only does 

 he preserve his relationship to his mother as love object, but 

 his relationship to his father as love object (the inverted 

 element in the complete Oedipus complex) is dropped. Simi- 

 larly, in renouncing his mother as primary object of love, and 

 in overcoming his jealousy towards her, he will achieve by 

 identification an affection for the father, patterned on the 

 mother's. The Oedipus complex is now wholly resolved, as 

 the boy is strongly identified with his father and mildly with his 

 mother, and affectionate towards both, hostile towards neither.^^ 



(4) The superego is born. 



The identification with the two parents is the beginning of 

 the superego, the origin of the sense of right and wrong, the 

 starting point for ' morality,' religion and culture. In virtue 

 of the identification of himself with his parents, into which he 

 has been pressed by the need of overcomnig the Oedipus 

 complex and the conflict which ensued from it, the child 

 unconsciously and unreservedly makes his own the attitudes 

 towards right and wrong which have been expressed by his 

 parents, for his very sense of rightness and wrongness is the 

 introjected image of parental approval or disapproval. Hence- 

 forth he feels inwardly that he must do the things dictated 

 by parental images he has absorbed, and this is the sufficient 



^^ Cf. Anna Fred, The Ego and Mechanisms of Defense, pp. 117 seq. (Hogarth 

 Press, London, 1954) 



"■" Freud, The Ego and the Id, pp. 40-46. 



