the growth of the little girl, to push her on to the next step in the development of her femininity, to move her a little farther along the path to her ultimate role of wife and mother.
Let me explain this a bit further. For the first few years, by the very nature of family life, as we have seen, all the little girl's feelings are focused on her mother. She is the center, the fountain of life itself; the little one looks to her for food, security on all levels, and "love." This love soon becomes tinged with a very strong erotic feeling connected with the little one's growing sensuality, which, as we have seen, is centered on her clitoris.
Now, it is necessary for humans to love and to have erotic feelings centered on others. But clearly, if this early love situation did not change at some point, the little girl would grow up to have women as her erotic centers of interest. Nature intends no such end result. She intends these erotic feelings to become ultimately very much man-centered. Thus she makes the role of the father in the child's development all-important. He becomes the first bridge from the infantile erotic and dependent relationship with the mother to mature relationships with members of the opposite sex. There are, of course, several other bridges that the growing girl will have to traverse on her journey to maturity, but this first one is of central importance. Ultimately, of course, she will have to give up her father, too, as the center of erotic interest, but he will remain in her unconscious life as the model of all that she wants from the male in her life.
We see, then, at the end of this early phase of development the first big step in the preparation of the little girl for her ultimate destiny as wife and mother. But since we know that she is nowhere near ready for such functions we might wonder how nature ends this early period and enters the second important period of growth.
