The Unconscious Mind Anxiety

There comes a time, usually between the ages of four and seven, when the imitative child wants jealously and intensely to "pos­sess" the parent of the opposite sex. Little boys naively say, "When Daddy is at the of­fice, I'll be Daddy"; and the little girls ear­nestly assert, "When I grow up, I'm going to marry father." This stage of development, which certainly occurs in Western culture with its ideal of romantic monogamous mar­riage, is called oedipal love, after the Greek legend of King Oedipus, who was fated to kill his father and marry his mother.

In later childhood, as the boy and girl be­come aware that their oedipal longings are impossible of fulfillment, emotional attach­ments shift outside the home and become centered in "loyalty" to a gang or a "crush" on a friend. The new libidinal attachment is usually to a person of the same sex- This is sometimes designated as homosexual love. In late childhood, a period of sexual latency, this is a perfectly natural and normal emotional attachment and is not to be confused with adult homosexuality.

When the tides of puberty begin to rise, love attachments return to the opposite sex. But this usually begins as a kind of idealistic love for some distant, unattainable personal­ity—as unattainable in reality as was father or mother, but secretly and subtly cast in the parent images. The idealistic yearnings of hosts of teenagers for the same popular and symbolic figure of the sport or entertainment world is a repeatedly observed phenomenon.

The next and final stage in the develop­ment of the capacity to love is heterosexual love flesh and blood love for a person of the opposite sex. This is the high point and ful­fillment of the normal course of love development. But it does not wipe out all previous love attachments, some self-love, for example, always remains. Nor does it exclude the si­multaneous presence in the psyche of power­ful "negative emotions." It is possible to be exceedingly angry at those we love.

Anger and Fear "Negative Emotions"

The negative emotions such as anger, fear, hate, jealousy, and revenge are in a sense protective reaction patterns, slumbering re­flexes evoked by threats of suspicions of dan­ger. They were evolved in the long history of the human race to help assure survival of the individual and the race. They mobilize psy­chic energy and physical resources for that end. But when too frequently or constantly evoked, particularly by imagined danger, and when unchecked in their operation, they can have a destructive effect on personality.

Anger, or aggression, in its many guises is the normal but primitive response to frustra­tion. It is basically the desire to remove by attacking, killing, or destroying anything that threatens the survival of the individual in body or spirit. All too often anger is de­structively turned against oneself.

When you are thwarted or frustrated by yourself, others, or circumstances, you cannot help feeling angry. But there is a vast differ­ence between feeling angry, appearing angry, and acting angry. You can learn to do some­thing constructive with your mobilized en­ergy. You should neither swallow it (repress it) nor turn it against yourself. For anger re­pressed will return in some other emotional disguise.