THE NEED OF TENDERNESS OF THE CHILD

Abstract

Research on neurotic children and adults has allowed, in recent years, some very fruitful clarifications concerning psychic life. It was indispensable, first of all, to find an answer to the question that seemed to take priority, namely, whether there is a qualitative difference between the psychic life of the healthy and the neurotic. We must now recognize that the psychic manifestations of one and the other are founded on the same basis. It has also become possible to compare the results produced by Individual Psychology on "neurotic" people with "normal" psychic life. Now, in an identical way, the original importance of instinctual life in the construction and composition of the psyche, as well as the enormous role played by the unconscious in thought and behavior, the relationship between the organic and the psychic, the apparent continuity and inheritance of dispositions and character traits, are manifested, the complete interpretability of the dream life and its importance, the enormous space occupied by the sex drive and its transformations in personal relationships and in the culture of the child, but above all the realities of social feeling and the will to power as factors that predominantly determine an individual's destiny