Marriage and Morals/Chapter XIV

I wish to consider in this chapter how the character of the individual is affected by family relations. This subject is threefold: there is the effect upon children, the effect upon the mother, and the effect upon the father. It is, of course, difficult to disentangle these three, since the family is a closely knit unit, and anything that affects the parents affects also their influence upon the children. Nevertheless, I shall attempt to divide the discussion into these three heads, and it is natural to begin with the children, since everybody is a child in the family before being a parent.

If we are to believe Freud, the emotions of a young child towards the other members of his family have a somewhat desperate character. A boy hates his father, whom he regards as a sexual rival. He feels, in regard to his mother, emotions which are viewed with the utmost abhorrence by traditional morality. He ​hates his brothers and sisters because they absorb some part of the parental attention, of which he would like the whole to be concentrated upon himself. In later life, the effects of these turbulent passions are of the most diverse and terrible kinds, varying from homosexuality at best to mania at worst.

This Freudian doctrine has caused less horror than one might have expected. It is true that professors have been dismissed from their posts for believing it, and that the British police deported one of the best men of his generation^[1] for acting upon it. But such is the influence of Christian asceticism that people have been more shocked by Freud’s insistence upon sex than by his picture of infantile hatreds. We, however, must try to make up our minds without prejudice as to the truth or falsehood of Freud’s opinions concerning the passions of children. I will confess to begin with that a considerable experience of young children during recent years has led me to the view that there is much more truth in Freud’s theories than I had formerly supposed. Nevertheless, I still think that they represent only one side of the truth, and a side which can ​easily, with a little good sense on the part of parents, be rendered very unimportant.

Let us begin with the Oedipus complex. Infantile sexuality is undoubtedly stronger than anybody thought before Freud. I think, even, that heterosexuality is stronger in early childhood than one would gather from Freud’s writings. It is not difficult for an unwise mother quite unintentionally to centre the heterosexual feelings of a young son upon herself, and it is true that, if this is done, the evil consequences pointed out by Freud will probably ensue. This is, however, much less likely to occur if the mother’s sexual life is satisfying to her, for in that case she will not look to her child for a type of emotional satisfaction which ought to be sought only from adults. The parental impulse in its purity is an impulse to care for the young, not to demand affection from them, and if a woman is happy in her sexual life she will abstain spontaneously from all improper demands for emotional response from her child. For this reason, a happy woman is likely to be a better mother than an unhappy one. No woman, however, can make sure of being always happy, and at times of unhappiness a certain amount of self-control may be ​necessary to avoid demanding too much of children. This degree of self-control is not very difficult to practise, but in former times the need for it was not realized, and a mother was thought to be behaving quite properly in lavishing continual caresses upon her children. The heterosexual emotions of young children can find a natural, wholesome and innocent outlet with other children; in this form they are a part of play, and like all play, they afford a preparation for adult activities. After the age of three or four, a child needs, for his or her emotional development, the company of other children of both sexes, not only brothers and sisters, who are necessarily older or younger, but contemporaries. The modern small family, unadulterated, is too stuffy and confined for healthy development during the early years, but that does not mean that it is undesirable as an ingredient in the childish environment.

It is not only mothers who are liable to arouse in the young child undesirable kinds of affection. Servant girls and nurses and, in later years, school teachers, are quite as dangerous, indeed even more so, since they are, as a rule, sexually starved. Education authorities are of opinion that those who have to deal with the ​young ought always to be unhappy spinsters. This view shows gross psychological ignorance, and could not be entertained by any one who had watched closely the emotional development of young children.

Jealousy of brothers and sisters is very common in families, and is sometimes a cause, in later life, of homicidal mania as well as of less serious nervous disorders. Except in mild forms, it is not at all difficult to prevent, provided parents and others who have charge of the young take a little trouble to control their own behaviour. There must, of course, be no favouritism—the most meticulous justice must be observed in regard to toys and treats and attention. At the birth of a new brother or sister, pains must be taken to prevent the others from imagining that they have become less important to their parents than they were. Wherever serious cases of jealousy occur, it will be found, I think, that these simple precepts have been disregarded.

We arrive, therefore, at certain conditions which must be fulfilled if the psychological effect of family life upon children is to be good. The parents, and especially the mother, must if possible not be unhappy in their sexual life. ​Both parents must avoid that kind of emotional relation with their children that calls for a response not suitable in infancy. There must be no kind of preference as between brothers and sisters, but all must be treated with a completely impartial justice. And after the age of three or four the home should not be the sole environment of the child, but a considerable part of its day should be spent in the society of contemporaries. Given these conditions, the bad effects feared by Freud are, I think, very unlikely to occur.

On the other hand, parental affection, when it is of the right sort, undoubtedly furthers a child’s development. Children whose mothers do not feel a warm affection for them are apt to be thin and nervous, and not infrequently they become kleptomaniacs. The affection of parents makes infants feel safe in this dangerous world, and gives them boldness in experimentation and in exploration of their environment. It is necessary to a child’s mental life to feel himself the object of warm affection, for he is instinctively aware of his helplessness, and of his need of a protection which only affection can ensure. If a child is to grow up happy, expansive, and fearless, he needs a cer​tain warmth in his environment which it is difficult to get except through parental affection.

There is another service which a wise father and mother can perform for their children, although until quite recent times they hardly ever did so. This is, that they can introduce them to the facts of sex and parenthood in the best possible way. If children learn of sex as a relation between their parents to which they owe their own existence, they learn of it in its best form and in connection with its biological purpose. In old days, they practically always learned of it first as the subject of ribald jokes and as a source of pleasures considered disgraceful. This first initiation, by means of secret indecent talk, usually made an indelible impression, so that it was ever after impossible to have a decent attitude on any subject connected with sex.

To decide whether family life is on the whole desirable or undesirable, we must, of course, consider what are the only practical alternatives. They seem to be two: first, the matriarchal family, and second, public institutions such as orphan asylums. To cause either of these to become the rule would require con​siderable economic changes. We may suppose them carried out, and consider the effect upon the psychology of children.

To begin with the matriarchal family. Here one supposes that the children will know only one parent, that a woman will have a child when she feels that she wants one, but without expecting the father to take any particular interest in it, and not necessarily choosing the same father for different children. Assuming the economic arrangements to be satisfactory, would children suffer much by such a system? What, in effect, is the psychological use of a father to his children? I think perhaps the most important use lies in the point last mentioned, namely, the connecting of sex with married love and procreation. There is also, after the first years of infancy, a very definite gain in being brought into contact with a masculine as well as a feminine outlook on life. To boys especially, this is intellectually important. At the same time, I cannot see that the gain is very profound. Children whose fathers have died while they were infants do not, so far as I know, turn out on the average any worse than other children. No doubt the ideal father is better than none, but many fathers are so ​far from ideal that their non-existence might be a positive advantage to children.

What has just been said depends upon the supposition of a convention quite different from that obtaining at present. Where a convention exists, children suffer through its being infringed, since there is hardly anything so painful to a child as the feeling of being in any way odd. This consideration applies to divorce in our present society. A child who has been used to two parents and has become attached to them both, finds a divorce between them destructive of his whole sense of security. Indeed, he is likely in these circumstances to develop phobias and other nervous disorders. When once a child has become attached to both his parents, they take a very grave responsibility if they separate. I think, therefore, that a society in which fathers have no place would be better for children than one in which divorce is frequent though still regarded as exceptional.

I do not see much to be said for Plato’s proposal to separate children from their mothers as well as from their fathers. For the reasons already mentioned, I think that parental affection is essential to a child’s development, ​and that while it might suffice to receive this affection only from one parent, it would certainly be very regrettable if it were not received from either. From the point of view of sexual morals, which is that with which we are primarily concerned, the important question is the utility of the father. As to this, while it is very difficult to say anything positively, the conclusion seems to be that in fortunate cases he has a certain limited usefulness, while in unfortunate cases he may easily, by tyranny and ill-temper and a quarrelsome disposition, do far more harm than good. The case for fathers, from the point of view of children’s psychology, is not therefore a very strong one.

The importance of the family, as it exists at present, in the psychology of mothers is very difficult to estimate. I think that during pregnancy and lactation a woman has, as a rule, a certain instinctive tendency to desire a man’s protection—a feeling, no doubt, inherited from the anthropoid apes. Probably a woman who, in our present rather harsh world, has to dispense with this protection tends to become somewhat unduly combative and self-assertive. These feelings, however, are only in ​part instinctive. They would be greatly weakened, and in some cases wholly abolished, if the State gave adequate care to expectant and nursing mothers and to young children. I think perhaps the chief harm that would be done to women by abolition of the father’s place in the home would be the diminution in the intimacy and seriousness of their relations with the male sex. Human beings are so constructed that each sex has much to learn from the other, but mere sex relations, even when they are passionate, do not suffice for these lessons. Cooperation in the serious business of rearing children, and companionship through the long years involved, bring about a relation more important and more enriching to both parties than any that would exist if men had no responsibility for their children. And I do not think that mothers who live in a purely feminine atmosphere, or whose contacts with men are trivial, will, except in a minority of cases, be quite so good for their children from the point of view of emotional education as those who are happily married and cooperating at each stage with their husbands. One must, however, in a great many cases set other considerations over against these. If a woman is ​actively unhappy in her marriage—and this, after all, is by no means an uncommon occurrence—her unhappiness makes it very difficult for her to have the right kind of emotional poise in dealing with her children. In such cases she could undoubtedly be a better mother if she were quit of the father. We are thus led to the entirely trivial conclusion that happy marriages are good, while unhappy ones are bad.

Much the most important question in relation to the family in individual psychology is the effect upon the father. We have already repeatedly had occasion to point out the significance of paternity and its attendant passions. We have seen what part it played in early history in connection with the growth of the patriarchal family and the subjection of women, and we can judge from this what a powerful passion paternal feeling must be. For reasons not easy to fathom, it is not nearly so strong in highly civilized communities as it is elsewhere. Upper-class Romans in the time of the Empire apparently ceased to feel it, and many intellectualized men in our own day are nearly or quite destitute of it. Nevertheless, it is still felt by the great majority of men, even ​in the most civilized communities. It is for this reason, rather than for the sake of sex, that men marry, for it is not difficult to obtain sexual satisfaction without marriage. There is a theory that the desire for children is commoner among women than among men, but my own impression, for what it is worth, is exactly the contrary. In a very large number of modern marriages, the children are a concession on the part of the woman to the man’s desires. A woman, after all, has to face labour and pain and possible loss of beauty in order to bring a child into the world, whereas a man has no such grounds for anxiety. A man’s reasons for wishing to limit his family are generally economic; these reasons operate equally with the woman, but she has her own special reasons as well. The strength of the desire men feel for children is evident when one considers the loss of material comfort that professional men deliberately incur when they undertake to educate a family in the expensive manner that their class considers necessary.

Would men beget children if they were not going to enjoy the rights which paternity confers at present? Some people would say that if they were not going to have responsibilities ​they would beget them recklessly. I do not believe this. A man who desires a child desires the responsibilities which it entails. And in these days of contraceptives a man will not often have a child as a mere incident in his pursuit of pleasure. Of course, whatever the state of the law might be, it would always be open to a man and woman to live in a permanent union in which the man could enjoy something of what now comes through fatherhood; but if law and custom were adapted to the view that children belong to the mother alone, women would feel that anything approximating to marriage as we know it now was an infraction of their independence, and involved a needless loss of that complete ownership over their children which they would otherwise enjoy. We must therefore expect that men would not often succeed in persuading women to concede rights legally guaranteed to them.

Something was said in the last chapter as to the effect of such a system upon male psychology. It would, I believe, immensely diminish the seriousness of men’s relations to women, making them more and more a matter of mere pleasure, not an intimate union of heart and mind and body. It would tend towards a ​certain triviality in all personal relations, so that a man’s serious emotions would be concerned with his career, his country, or some quite impersonal subject. All this, however, is expressed somewhat too generally, for men differ profoundly one from another, and what to one might be a grave deprivation might to another be entirely satisfactory. My belief is, though I put it forward with some hesitation, that the elimination of paternity as a recognized social relation would tend to make men’s emotional life trivial and thin, causing in the end a slowly growing boredom and despair, in which procreation would gradually die out, leaving the human race to be replenished by stocks that had preserved the older convention. The boredom and triviality would, I think, be unavoidable. The diminution of population could, of course, be guarded against by paying women a sufficient sum for taking up the profession of motherhood. This will presumably be done before long, if militarism remains as strong as it is at present. But this line of thought belongs with the consideration of the population question, which will be dealt with in a later chapter. I shall not therefore at present pursue it further.