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Individual development towards, or away from, personal freedom begins in the child's early experiences in the home, and can always be traced back to the family situation, to the attitude of his parents and to his own infantile picture of them (an absolute one) as either good or bad. This picture of extremes is reflected in himself and is only modified gradually. His earliest reactions to reality stimuli are based on the need to find somewhere the absolute good and to drive out or destroy the absolute bad. Personal freedom and fulfilment can be obtained, and social adaptation made, in proportion to the individual's ability to find satisfactory substitutes for these earliest drives. Some unsatisfactory ways of dealing with the problem are projection of hostility and of the destructive impulses on to the environment and especially on to persons in authority, the attempt to create an ideal state by loosing the powers of death and destruction, the compulsive search for ever-new and wholly good objects for love and admiration, and the forging of chains of perfection for the self.
The child sometimes tries to deal with the conflict by loving and clinging to one parent and hating and turning out the other, thus condemning himself to a one-sided development.
The central problem of the co-existence of love and hate towards the parents arises as early as the second half of the first year of life, but requires all the years of development for its solution.
Personal freedom means having learnt to acknowledge the claims and the human frailty of both parents, and allowed them their love for each other. This freedom cannot be achieved by the child unaided. He is dependent for it on his parents in his earliest years, and not the wisest of later educators can bring him to it if he has not received the earlier help. To consider the kind of early conditions most likely to lead to it is a matter of the first importance. Neither the moulding of the child by 'habit', nor blind indulg