in the emotions is precocity to be deplored.  A premature alphabet or multiplication table is not nearly so serious as premature intensity of feeling, nor so likely to lead later to trouble.  Of course fixation in these emotional habits does not always lead to a serious breakdown.  If the fixation is not too extreme, and if later events do not happen to accentuate the trouble, the arrest of development may merely show itself in certain weaknesses of character or in isolated symptoms without developing a real neurosis.

Let us examine each of these arrested habits and the excess emotion which sets the mold before it is ready for maturity.

=Too Much Self-Love.= 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 satisfy the demands of a mature man.  He will be torn between conflicting desires, unhappy without knowing why, unable either to remain a child or to become a man, and impelled to gain self-expression in indirect and unsatisfactory ways.