its future intensity.  She considers her actions as asexually “pure” love, for she carefully avoids causing more irritation to the genitals of the child than is indispensable in caring for the body.  But as we know the sexual impulse is not awakened by the excitation of genital zones alone.  What we call tenderness will some day surely manifest its influence on the genital zones also.  If the mother better understood the high significance of the sexual impulse for the whole psychic life and for all ethical and psychic activities, the enlightenment would spare her all reproaches.  By teaching the child to love she only fulfills her function; for the child should become a fit man with energetic sexual needs, and accomplish in life all that the impulse urges the man to do.  Of course, too much parental tenderness becomes harmful because 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]