Most people are quite happy with concepts of mother-baby love and have no difficulty accepting such notions. However, love clearly does not stand still – it changes and matures. In the
mother-baby relationship love is both given and received by both parties, to their mutual satisfaction. This clearly has to happen biologically or mothers would not feel sufficiently motivated to put up with the real and provable problems of rearing a totally dependent little baby or young child. Babies are, at first, totally self-centred – all they want is to have their needs satisfied. This changes, though, over the first few weeks and months, so that the mother and baby become a mutually rewarding love unit.
In the Oedipal phase of young childhood, this love is vested in the opposite-sex parent, at least to some extent, until eventually in early adolescence the opposite-sex parent is de-loved as teenagers invest their loving feelings in themselves. There is abundant clinical experience to show that if the teenager does not negotiate this stage successfully he or she can never truly love another person of the opposite sex and this can lead to the disturbed man-woman relationships we have described elsewhere (such as the mistress-madonna syndrome).
In late adolescence teenagers seek an emotional object to love and in our society combine this with a sex-object. So it is that love and genital sex start to grow together. Now the masturbating, self-centred kind of love gives way to a more mature type of love. Around this time many adolescents experience a generalised kind of love.
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