A child of fourteen to eighteen months may be observed to show an 'I am sorry' reaction after attempting to hurt the mother and seeing her register pain. This reaction is a forerunner of the benign superego. It requires a firmly established differentiation of self and object. It involves identification with the mother as consoler, an identification that supplies one of the sources of libidinal energy available to the later superego. At age five the reaction is more complex and may more appropriately be termed identification with the comforter because of an added component of giving strength. Here the reaction, expressed for instance in tenderness toward a younger sibling the mother has scolded, is a displacement and acting out of the child's own wish to be comforted by the mother. It is also an expression of his guilt feelings which have become intensified through his capacity for empathy with the sibling he himself has mistreated at another time.