use it
accelerates the sexual maturity, and also because it "spoils" the child
and makes it unfit to temporarily renounce love or be satisfied with a
smaller amount of love in later life. One of the surest premonitions of
later nervousness is the fact that the child shows itself insatiable in
its demands for parental tenderness; on the other hand, neuropathic
parents, who usually display a boundless tenderness, often with their
caressing awaken in the child a disposition for neurotic diseases. This
example at least shows that neuropathic parents have nearer ways than
inheritance by which they can transfer their disturbances to their
children.

*Infantile Fear.*--The children themselves behave from their early
childhood as if their attachment to their foster-parents were of the
nature of sexual love. The fear of children is originally nothing but an
expression for the fact that they miss the beloved person. They
therefore meet every stranger with fear, they are afraid of the dark
because they cannot see the beloved person, and are calmed if they can
grasp that person's hand. The effect of childish fears and of the
terrifying stories told by nurses is overestimated if one blames the
latter for producing the fear in children. Children who are predisposed
to fear absorb these stories, which make no impression whatever upon
others; and only such children are predisposed to fear whose sexual
impulse is excessive or prematurely developed, or has become exigent
through pampering. The child behaves here like the adult, that is, it
changes its libido into fear when it cannot bring it to gratification,
and the grown-up who becomes neurotic on account of ungratified libido
behaves in his anxiety like a child; he fears when he is alone, _i.e._,
without a person of whose love he believes himself sure, and who can
calm his fears by means of the most childish measures.[7]

*Incest Barriers.*--If the tenderness of the parents for the child has
luckily failed to awaken the sexual impulse of the child prematurely,
_i.e._, before the physical determinations for puberty appear, and if
that awakening has not gone so far as to cause an unmistakable breaking
through of the psychic excitement into the genital system, it can then
fulfill its task and direct the child at the age of maturity in the
selection of the sexual object. It would, of course, be most natural for
the child to select as the sexual object that person whom it has loved
since