- cussed this view in my article[1] "Die Bedeutung des Vaters für
das Schicksal des Einzelnen." (The importance of the father for the fate of the individual.)
Here also we were guided by the patient's tendency to revert to the past, in accordance with the direction of his introverted libido. Now indeed it was no longer the external, accidental event which caused the pathogenic effect, but a psychological effect which seemed to arise out of the individual's difficulties in adapting himself to the conditions of his familiar surroundings. It was especially the disharmony between the parents on the one hand and between the child and the parents on the other which seemed favorable for creating currents in the child little compatible with his individual course of life. In the article just alluded to I have described some instances, taken from a wealth of material, which show these characteristics very distinctly. The influence of the parents does not come to an end, alas, with their neurotic descendants' blame of the family circumstances, or their false education, as the basis of their illness, but it extends even to certain actual events in the life and actions of the patient, where such a determining influence could not have been expected. The lively imitativeness which we find in savages as well as in children can produce in certain rather sensitive children a peculiar inner and unconscious identification with the parents; that is to say, such a similar mental attitude that effects in real life are sometimes produced which, even in detail, resemble the personal experiences of the parents. For the empirical material here, I must refer you to the literature. I should like to remind you that one of my pupils, Dr. Emma Fürst, produced valuable experimental proofs for the solution of this problem, to which I referred in my lecture at Clark University.[2] In applying association experiments to whole families, Dr. Fürst established the great resemblance of reaction-type among all the members of one family.
These experiments show that there very often exists an unconscious parallelism of association between parents and children, to be explained as an intense imitation or identification.
