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Man is a political animal, said Aristotle. Freud has made meaningful the notion that man is a family-developed animal.
He has made us see that in the reactions of the young child to that first society he encounters, the family, are to be found some of the deepest roots of emotional attitudes important to the ministers of law, lawyers and judges. In family life Freud discovered the beginnings of respect for authority and revolt against authority, love of order and delight in lawlessness. Those who would understand social control, and the possibilities and inherent limitations of government, cannot afford to ignore the implications of those Freudian ideas.
At least as early as 500 B.C. it was noted that the infancy of the human animal is strikingly prolonged. In the Nineteenth Century the values of that prolongation of human infancy were popularized by John Fiske. In this century, Freud has shown that such prolongation of infancy has its disvalues, as well. Most of us, he has explained, remain emotionally infantile to an astounding degree, however adult our intellectual processes.
Many of our aims continue childish. Wherefore, frequently we are victims of wishful thinking. We often ignore the evidences of our senses if those evidences are unpleasant. We childishly convince ourselves that the kind of a world we want is the kind of world that exists. Faced with difficult problems, we invent unworkable solutions and delude ourselves with the belief that those solutions actually are effective, although the slightest checking up would disclose that they are not.
That kind of wishful intellection is operative in conventional conceptions of law. We dislike to think that much of our law is made each day by fallible human beings called judges. We like to