Almost everything which has been said about the mother fixation applies to the father fixation in girls. But we must bear in mind that owing to the tremendous biological importance of the mother, a mother fixation is likely to have a deeper influence on a boy than a father fixation on a girl.
=Our Preferences.= Thus it is that the "preferences" we show when grown up, for a certain human type, are determined by the appearance and behavior of the males and females which were closest to us in the formative years of our life.
In the majority of cases it is the mother type or the father type which proves most attractive to boys and girls respectively, the type being represented or symbolised by certain physical or mental fetishes.
In many cases, the mother or father type have been modified or replaced by other masculine or feminine types which took the place of the mother or father during that important period of our life.
The woman who suckled us or fed us and attended to our various physical needs, nurse or nurse maid, may become the bearer of our fetishes.
In Europe where the wet nurse and the nurse girl are infinitely more common than in this country, the ancillary type of love, love for servants and menials, is observed with much greater frequency than here.
The Southern man does not show the same repugnance as the Northern man to consort sexually with colored women of the servant class. The colored mammy's fetishes are found competing successfully in many cases with those of the white mother.
=Craig's Birds.= Those who believe that heredity, instinct, the call of the blood, etc., have much to do with the choice of a mate, should read reports of experiments performed by William Craig on pigeons. Ring doves and passenger pigeons never mate. When the eggs of a passenger pigeon, however, have been hatched by a ring dove, the young male passenger pigeons will, at mating time, ignore entirely the females of their species, "their flesh and blood," and mate with female ring doves (the mother image) exclusively.
The fetishes which to them meant food and safety in the nest mean to them beauty and eroticism when they reach adulthood.
The family romance has been presented by the Freudians as complicated by actual incestuous entanglements. Adler on the other hand has shown that the incestuous situation is rather an "as if" introduced by the neurotic as a part of his absurd life plan.