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Benedek offers a contribution to genetic theory through the thesis that personality development continues beyond adolescence and through parenthood, under the influence of reproductive physiology and the reciprocal interactions between parent and child. Each critical period of the child's development revives in both parents developmental conflicts specific to that period in the past of each. This revival can result either in a reworking of the old conflicts into a new synthesis and further maturation in the parent, or conversely in a blind repetition of the old problems complicated by the new contributions of the reacting child. The direction of the outcome is determined by the relative strength of the confidence, or conversely of the ambivalence, (toward self, object, and the future), that has been accumulated through the totality of the parent's past transactions with his parents, plus those gained in the immediate child-parent interaction. The preoedipal child renews the omnipotent strivings of the parents and offers them outlets for new aspiration and achievement; the Oedipal child evokes part-instinctual drives that reactivate Oedipal problems and castration fears. To the first superego phase of the parent—that which he evolved from childhood to parenthood—is added a second phase encompassing the object-representations of the child and the self-representations originating in the mature experiences of parenthood. A successful relationship with the child includes a working over of the parent's Oedipal experiences, by which means his superego loses much of its strictness and allows for a deeper capacity of experience. Oppositely, in an unsuccessful experience with a child, the internal representation of the child incorporated in the psychic system of the parent may intensify the strictness of the parental superego. Seen from this viewpoint, it is the communication of the superego values and castration fears of the parent to the child that accounts for the