Unable to give them genuine love, they pretend to idolise them and are apparently unable to deny any of their wishes. This, in last analysis, is simply a total indifference to the little ones' welfare. That type of mother spoils her children and makes them unfit to face life and its emergencies.
Her extravagant adulation, her outbursts of artificial tenderness, however, do not always deceive the children themselves who feel automatically, thru nervous and muscular imitation, the tensions of their mother's body. The little son of the woman who was obsessed by the fear of drowning him (and who compensated for her murderous cravings by showering the wildest caresses upon him), could not be prevailed upon to ever go near the water until her obsessions, of which, he, of course, had no conscious knowledge, had been removed by psychoanalytic treatment.
Neurotic mother love trains children for a neurotic life.
This is the poetical way in which many newspaper editors have been introducing to their readers accounts of two recent incidents which, at the time of writing (this chapter), keep headline writers busy. One of the news items is the idyll of an heiress, still in her teens, who has made up her mind to marry a man of fifty or thereabout. The other is the heartbreak of a seventy year old husband, deserted by his twenty year old wife.
The mating of winter and spring is a daily occurrence, both seasons being divided up about equally between the two sexes. The two unnatural matches which I mentioned above, however, stand in a class by themselves.
Many a young idler, gifted with good looks, has managed to play on the erotic feelings of some woman in her dotage and to annex a goodly portion of her wealth. Many an attractive girl, seeking the line of least effort, has been known to prefer a union with a silly old man to the daily struggle for existence.
=Disinterested Brides.= In the two cases under discussion, on the other hand, no suspicion of sordidness could be cast on the bride-that-was or on the bride-to-be.
Both are wealthy, one of them immensely so. The bridegroom to be is, if not a poor man, at least in very modest circumstances.
A genuine love match in both cases. But the genuineness of love did not prevent a catastrophe in one case and will probably bring about a catastrophe in the other case as well.