[Sidenote: The attitude of step-parents towards their step-children]
These feelings of hostility on the part of children to their step-parents are of course bound to call up some degree of reciprocal feeling on the part of the step-parents themselves. The feelings thus aroused, however, are often reinforced by more direct causes of hostility, such as are liable to affect in any case the attitude of parent towards child (_Cp._ Ch. XVI). Here, however, the absence of the real bond of parenthood, with its accompanying incentives to tender feeling, may easily cause the hostile tendencies to meet with less resistance than usual so that genuinely cruel or neglectful behaviour is more likely to occur.
[Sidenote: The displacement of love on to step-parents]
Although it is the displacement of hate which manifests itself most openly and strongly in the relations of step-children to step-parents, the displacement of love from the original dead parent to the new parent may also play an important (though nearly always more or less unconscious) part in these relations[114]. The taboo on incest works less powerfully in regard to the feelings towards the new parent than it did in regard to those towards the old. The new parent is, as a rule, no relative by blood, nor is the surviving real parent felt to have the same exclusive rights over his or her new partner as over the old; therefore the step-parent, when of the opposite sex to that of the child, is often made the object of a displacement of those feelings of tenderness and love which were formerly directed to the real parent of this sex; this state of affairs leading of course in the majority of cases to a corresponding re-awakening of jealousy or bitterness towards the surviving original parent. This love of step-child to step-parent (and particularly that of step-son to step-mother) and the contest between both of these and the remaining parent, is one which has indeed been used for ages as a mild form of displacement of the tendencies and affects originally aroused when both the child's parents were alive, and one which has found very frequent expression in myth, legend and literature[115].
All that we have here said as regards the feelings of children to their step-parents holds good to an even greater extent than usual in the case of the re-marriage of parents after a divorce or on their acquiring a fresh sexual partner after separation from their lawful husband or wife. Here indeed the feelings and emotions aroused are apt to be still further intensified by the fact that the children have been, in the nature of the case, more or less compelled to take sides in the previous struggle or disagreement that has taken place between the parents. A child's feelings of love and hate towards his parents are usually intensely stirred by all manifestations on their part of conjugal unhappiness or infidelity and when the barriers which prevent the full expression of these feelings towards the child's real parents are removed by the substitution of a step-parent, this new parent will often receive the full force of the love or hate which had hitherto been pent up.