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We all felt our flesh creep when as children we heard of the bad stepmother who wanted to destroy fair Little Snow-white, and we also know the reason for her hatred: it was jealousy because the magic mirror told her that Snow-white was more beautiful than she. In the case of Cinderella it was not the rivalry between stepchild and stepmother but between her own daughters and the stepdaughter which caused the conflict. The fairy-tale often presents to us very important human problems in a simplified form, so we may guess what seeds of discontent may be hidden in the situation of the stepchild arousing disturbances in the world of emotional drives.
However numerously the examples of stepfamily conditions may be scattered in history and fiction, it was not before the development of modern psychological methods that we were able to understand the mechanisms and dynamic play of the powers concerned in these problems. We have too few studies on this subject, especially from the view of psychoanalysis.
Before entering into particulars of theoretical explanation let us examine the problem by way of some instructive examples.
We bring the case of a pampered child.1
Carl was the youngest of five brothers and sisters, and therefore was pampered by his mother, whom he loved affectionately. He always got more gifts than the others and, as he suffered from rickets, was attended more carefully. When he was a little boy, his mother died. Nevertheless he adapted himself to the new situation until, five years later, the father married again, a woman with three children of her own. After a short time rivalry began between his own and the stepchildren, but it was especially the youngest boy who became unsociable, provoked differences, played pranks and committed petty thefts. This grew even worse when, after two more years, the father, too, died. The terms he lived on with his stepmother and the whole stepfamily deteriorated so positively that he was given to foster parents where, however,