[Sidenote: Psycho-analysis applied to the study of the family]
As is now well known, the psycho-analytic method originated as a method for the study and treatment of hysteria and other functional nervous disorders, which were found to depend upon the influence of unconscious mental factors. The discovery of the importance of the feelings and tendencies connected with family life, especially as affecting these unconscious factors, dates from this time of the earliest use and application of Psycho-Analysis. As in the case of so many other problems upon which the method has cast light, Freud himself was the first to show something of the intimate nature of the influence exerted by the family relationships. Certain aspects of the subject were already revealed in the Papers on Hysteria, published conjointly with Breuer in 1895--a work which indicated for the first time something of the importance and nature of the subsequently developed psycho-analytic method.
[Sidenote: The child's love to its parents]
Here and in the other early works of Freud there gradually emerge the fundamental conceptions which distinguish the psycho-analytic school[4]. Among these conceptions is that regarding the very important part played in the moral and emotional development of the child by the psychological factors which connect the child with its parent, and more especially by the child's feelings of love towards its parent. This love is shown to be of exceptional importance for a variety of reasons. In the first place it constitutes as a rule the earliest manifestation of altruistic sentiment exhibited by the child, the first direction outwards upon an object of the external world of impulses and emotions which have hitherto been enlisted solely in the service of the child's own immediate needs and gratifications. As such it constitutes in the second place the germ out of which all later affections spring, and by which the course and nature of these later affections are to a large extent moulded and determined. Further (and this is perhaps the most significant, as it is certainly the most startling of Freud's discoveries in this field) there is shown to be no clear cut difference between the nature of this early filio-parental affection and that of the later loves of adolescent and adult life. The sexual aspect, which imparts the characteristic and peculiar quality to the most powerful affections of maturity, is found to be present also, in a rudimentary form, in the loves of childhood and of infancy and to exert an important influence upon the earliest of all attachments--that of the child towards its parents. These strong emotional forces concerned in the love of children to parents--and particularly the sexual or quasi-sexual elements of these forces--were found, moreover, not only to be of the greatest importance for the normal emotional development of the individual, but also to play a leading part among the factors determining the causation and nature of the neuroses.