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threatened by sheer reality – is rendered secure by finding refuge in the child. Parental love, so touching yet essentially so childlike, is nothing other than the resurgent narcissism of the parents, which in its transformation into object-love unmistakably reveals its original nature.

III
    There are certain questions that I should like to leave to one side for the time being since they represent an important area of study that has still not been fully dealt with: questions as to what disruptions the primal narcissism in children is prey to, what reactions it displays in resisting them, and what paths it is forced along in the process. The most significant part of all this can be identified as ‘castration complex’ (penis-fear in the boy, penis-envy in the girl), and can be dealt with in conjunction with the effects of sexual intimidation during infancy. Psychoanalytical research, which normally serves as the means for us to track the various fates of the libidinal drives when they have become isolated from the ego drives and then find themselves in conflict with them, allows us in this present context to draw inferences as to the nature of an earlier stage and psychic situation in which both sets of drives manifest themselves in harmonious interaction and indissoluble combination with each other as narcissistic interests. It was on the basis of this nexus that Alfred Adler arrived at his ‘masculine protest’, which he elevates to the status of being almost the sole driving force behind the formation of personality and neuroses alike, whilst grounding it not in a narcissistic, i.e. still libidinal impulse, but in a social value-judgement. The standpoint of psychoanalytical research has been to acknowledge from the outset both the existence and the importance of the ‘masculine protest’, but to argue, in opposition to Adler, that it is narcissistic in nature, and has its origins in the castration complex. It pertains to character-formation, to the genesis of which it contributes along with many other factors, and as such is wholly irrelevant to the elucidation of problems concerningneuroses, the only noteworthy aspect of which for Adler is the way they serve the ego-interest. I find it quite impossible to suppose that the genesis of neurosis rests solely on the slender basis of the castration complex, no matter how powerfully the latter may manifest itself amongst the resistances displayed by men to treatment of their neuroses. I might add, too, that cases of neurosis are known to me in which the ‘masculine protest’ or, in our terms, the castration complex, plays no pathogenic role, or indeed is entirely absent.
    Observation of the normal adult shows his erstwhile megalomania to be much reduced, whilst the psychic characteristics from which we inferred his infantile narcissism are scarcely distinguishable. What then has become of his ego-libido? Are we to suppose that it was entirely absorbed by object-cathexes? Such a possibility clearly contradicts the entire thrust of our argument. But we can find pointers to a quite different answer to this question in the psychology of repression.
    We have learned that libidinal drive-impulses are subject to the fate of pathogenic repression when they come into conflict with the individual's cultural and ethical notions. What we understand by this is
not
that the individual has a merely intellectual awareness that these notions exist, but rather that he fully accepts them as his own yardstick and fully submits to the demands that they entail. As we have said, repression emanates from the ego; or, to put it more precisely, from the self-respect of the ego. The same impressions, experiences, impulses, desires that one human being will readily entertain, or at least consciously process, will be rejected by another with utter indignation, or be stifled before they even enter consciousness. However, the difference between the two, which reflects the conditions in which