Chapter 4 Chapter 2 The Theory of Love-2

(2) The love between parents and children The infant is terrified at the moment of birth, if a merciful fate does not protect the infant from the fear of leaving the womb.But for a while after birth the baby is not much different from what it was before; he still cannot recognize objects, is not aware of his own existence and the existence of the world outside his body.He only needs warmth and food, but he does not distinguish between warmth and food and a mother who gives warmth and food.The mother is the warmth, the food, the happy stage when the baby feels content and safe.This stage uses Freud's concept to be the narcissistic stage.Surrounding realities, people and objects, have meaning for him only if they cause satisfaction or disappointment within his body.The baby can only be aware of his internal requirements; the external world is only realistic if it is related to his needs, and it does not make any sense whether the external world has nothing to do with his requirements.

As a child grows and develops, he begins to have the ability to accept things as they are.The mother's breast is no longer the only source of food.At last he could distinguish his own thirst, his breast-feeding milk, his breast, and his mother.He comes to know that other objects have their own existence independent of him.At this stage, the child learns to call objects by their names, and at the same time learns how to treat them; he begins to understand that fire is hot and scalds people, wood is hard and heavy, and paper is light and can be torn.He also began to learn how to deal with people: he saw that if he ate, his mother would smile; if he cried, his mother would hug him;All these experiences coalesce and complement each other into one experience: that is, I am loved.I am loved because I am a mother's child.I am loved because I am alone.I am loved because I am cute and can be liked by others.In short, I am loved because I have the capital to be loved—more precisely: I am loved because I am me.The experience of maternal love is a negative experience.I can win my mother's love by doing nothing, because mothers are unconditional, I just need to be mother's child.Maternal love is a blessing, it is peace, it does not need to be earned or worked hard for.But unconditional maternal love has its flawed side.This kind of love not only does not need to be exchanged for hard work, but also cannot be won at all.Where there is maternal love, there are blessings; without maternal love, life would be empty—and I have no power to evoke this maternal love.

The main problem for most children between the ages of eight and ten is still to be loved, to be loved unconditionally.A child under the age of eight does not know how to love, and his response to being loved is gratitude and joy.At this stage of the child's development a new element emerges—a new feeling, which is to call forth love by one's own efforts.For the first time, the child feels a need to give the mother (or father) something—write a poem, draw a picture, or make something else.The concept of love in his life - for the first time from "being loved" to "loving others" to "creating love".But there are many years to go from the first stage of love to the mature stage of love.As the child enters adolescence, at last he overcomes his egocentric stage, other people cease to be the means by which his wishes are fulfilled, and the demands of others are as important—perhaps even more important, in fact—as his own.Giving is more satisfying and joyful than giving. To love is more important than to be loved.By loving him he is liberated from his narcissistic loneliness, he begins to experience caring and unity with others, and he also feels the power of love to evoke love.He is no longer dependent on receiving love and having to make himself weak, isolated, sick, or obedient in order to win it.Innocent, childish love follows the principle: "I love because I am loved." The principle of mature love is: "I am loved because I love." Immature, childish love follows: " I love you because I need you" and mature love is: "I need you because I love you."

Closely connected with the development of the capacity for love is the development of the object of love.The first months and years of life are most closely related to the mother.This relationship begins before a person is born, when the pregnant woman and fetus are both one and two.Birth changes the situation in a sense, but by no means as much as it seems.Babies living outside the mother's body are also almost completely dependent on their mother.As the child begins to walk, talk, and see the world, the relationship with the mother loses some of its solidarity and the relationship with the father begins to gain.

In order to understand this change it is necessary to understand the fundamental difference in the nature of maternal and paternal love.We have already talked about maternal love above.Maternal love is by its very nature unconditional.A mother loves a newborn baby, not because it fulfills her special desires and fits her imagination, but because it is her child. (The mother's love or father's love I mentioned here refers to the "ideal type", that is, the ideal type mentioned by Max Weber or in the sense of Jung's archetype, rather than referring to every mother and every father. This way of loving children. I mean more of that essence that manifests itself in mothers and fathers.) Unconditional motherly love is not only the child, but each of us deeply desires.Hard-earned love viewed from another angle is often suspicious.People think: Maybe I am not bringing joy to the person who is supposed to love me, maybe I am doing something wrong—in short, people are afraid that this love will disappear.Furthermore, hard-earned love often leads to a painful feeling: I am loved because I make the other person happy, not because I want to—in the end, I am not loved, I am needed That's all.Given this situation, it should come as no surprise that all of us, children and adults alike, retain a craving for maternal love.Most children are blessed with maternal love (we'll talk to what extent later.) In adults this longing is more difficult to fulfill.This longing is always a component of erotic love in its satisfactory development; but it is also frequently present in religious or, more still, in neurotic forms.

The relationship with the father is completely different.Mother is our home, nature, land and sea.And the father does not embody any kind of natural origin.During the first few years the child has little contact with the father, whose role at this stage is hardly comparable to that of the mother.Although the father does not represent the natural world, he represents the other extreme of human existence: the world of ideas, the world of things created by man, such as law, order, and discipline.The father is the one who educates the child and shows him the way to the world. Closely related to the paternal role is another role related to socioeconomic development.With the advent of private property and the inheritance of property by a son, the father was especially interested in the future heir to his property.The father always chooses as his successor the son he thinks is the most suitable, that is, the son who is most like him, and therefore most pleasing to him.A father is conditional love.The father's principle is: "I love you because you fit my requirements, because you fulfill your responsibilities, and because you are like me." Like unconditional motherly love, conditional fatherhood has its positive side and its negative side.The negative side is that father's love must be won by hard work, and father's love will be lost if he fails to live up to his father's expectations.The essence of paternal love is: obedience is the greatest morality, disobedience is the greatest sin, and those who disobey will be punished by losing paternal love.The positive side of fatherly love is equally important.Because fatherly love is conditional, so I can win this kind of love through my own efforts.Unlike motherly love, fatherly love can be dominated by my control and effort.

Parents' attitude towards their children is in line with their children's requirements.Babies need the unconditional love and care of their mothers both physically and psychologically.Around the age of six, children need their father's authority and guidance.The role of the mother is to give the child a sense of security in life, while the task of the father is to guide the child to face up to the difficulties he will encounter in the future.A good mother does not prevent her child from growing and encourages her child to seek help.The mother should believe in life and not panic and transmit her emotions to the child.She should want the child to be independent and eventually detached from herself.Fatherly love should be governed by certain principles and make certain demands, it should be tolerant and patient, and it should not be aggressive and domineering.Father's love should make the child have more and more self-confidence in his own strength and ability, and finally make the child his own master, so as to be able to break away from the authority of the father.

A mature person eventually reaches the heights where he is both his own mother and his own father.He developed a mother's conscience and a father's conscience.His mother's conscience said to him: "No sin, no crime of yours will deprive you of my love and my blessing for your life and your happiness." His father's conscience said: "You have done wrong, you You have to suffer the consequences; the main thing is that you have to change yourself so that you can be loved by me.” The mature person detaches himself from his external images of mother and father but builds them up inside.Contrary to Freud's "superego" theory, man does not establish father and mother by merging the two images, but builds the mother's conscience on his own ability to love, and the father's on his own capacity to love. own reason and judgment.The mature man lives with both his mother's conscience and his father's conscience, although the two seem to contradict each other.If a man develops only his father's conscience, he becomes harsh and inhuman; if he has only his mother's conscience, he is in danger of losing his self-judgment, and hinders his own and others' development.

A person develops from a close relationship with his mother to a close relationship with his father, and finally achieves synthesis, which is the basis for a person's soul to be healthy and mature.If people do not develop in this way, it will lead to neurosis.Due to space limitations, it is impossible for me to explain my point of view in detail here, but I can only briefly mention it. One cause of neurosis, for example, may be a boy who has a very loving but doting mother and at the same time a cowardly or uninterested father.In this case, the little boy will firmly grasp the connection with the mother and develop into a very dependent person.Such a person is often isolated, needs protection, and is unlikely to acquire some of the father's characteristics: discipline, independence, and the ability to manage life.He will try to find the figure of "mother" in all people, sometimes in women, sometimes in men of authority.On the contrary, if the mother is cold, insensitive, or very authoritarian, the child will transfer the need for maternal love to the father, and will become a single person who develops in the direction of the father.Such people are often only subject to the principles of law, order, and authority, but are incapable of wishing for or receiving unconditional love.If his father was authoritative and close to him, this development would be strengthened.Other investigations have also concluded that certain forms of neurosis, such as obsessive-compulsive neurosis, are associated with the patient's single-father connection, while others, such as hysteria, alcoholism, inability to face real life, and world-weariness, are associated with the mother. due to a single connection.