She hoped sentimentally that the forthcoming child would look like her platonic lover but the little girl reproduced with striking faithfulness her father's features.
Unwilling to accept her dislike of her husband, the romantic mother had transferred it to the child who served as a scapegoat in various ways.
=Frigid Wives.= We often observe a great craving for motherhood in frigid wives.
Let us not rehash on this occasion the poetical and silly statement that the frigid woman is one whose love has been spiritualised and can only find an outlet thru her children.
The frigid woman is a cripple or a neurotic. Either she was born with poorly developed genitals or she was made abnormal by the unconscious fear of yielding to man's domination, or by a morbid sense of sin due to asceticism, or by painful or humiliating sex experiences before or after marriage.
Her craving for motherhood is not infrequently the hypocritical expression of her desire for intercourse, which her puritan training would otherwise make lewd and sinful. It is, at times, a desire for the superiority which age and bodily size will give her over infants, helpless and inarticulate.
This is why, in a good many cases, a perfect mother makes a detestable wife. Unable to dominate her husband she craves children whom she can dominate with a minimum of bodily strength and mental effort, and she devotes all her time and care to them.
When the children grow up and develop independent personalities, the neurotic mother often loses her interest in them. How many times have we heard women (and men) remark that children should remain "babies," that young children are far more lovable than adolescents, etc.
=Mother and Father Love= differ in several respects.
Fathers look upon their children, especially their sons, as a visible proof of their virile power. In their sons they see their own image, the more attractive to them as they are more egotistical.
The weak, infirm or unsuccessful son, however, receives little love at the hands of his father. He is not a credit to his progenitor.
No mother, on the other hand, seems to neglect a cripple or idiotic child. Be it male or female, it is a human being which she can dominate easily. The more neurotic she is, the more she will idolise the ill-favored child.