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In clinical and everyday experience one so often finds that the negative aspects of parents rather than their positive ones become the primary focus for identification. The psychoanalytic literature has amply demonstrated how undesirable, feared, resented, and despised aspects of the parental figures serve the processes of identification; and the consequences of this for ego-splitting, self-hatred, hostility, etc., have been dealt with by Bychowski (1956a), (1956b), (1956c), (1958), Anna Freud (1936), Freud (1924), (1925), (1927), (1940), Klein (1932), and others.
We are thus presented with the question of why there is relatively little identification with the desirable aspects of such parents as well as of parents having much more benign relations with their offspring? What is it that thwarts the processes for growth inherent in identification with the positive in one's elders?
Let us look at the following example taken from analytic practice. A young professional man in his thirties and in his second analysis reports how he feared his father's rages and felt contemptuous toward him for them. We discover that although he rejects such behaviour consciously, unconsciously his awareness of his own "potential" for explosiveness represents a secret source of strength to him.
Needless to say, oedipal features are involved in this unconscious identification. He saw his father the way mother said he was: primitive, brutal, impulsive and unthinking. She made the son partner to her frightened, childlike girlishness, obscuring in this fashion her use of this to rationalize her withholding from father. We might say that she seduced her son by offering him the opportunity to be her knight, and that this endangered him in an oedipal sense.
The desperate need to secure her love had its antecedents in the earliest phases of his relationship to her. Without exploring this further at this point, let us just state that to give up his needs for hers became the theme for obtaining