The psycho-analytic study of the family

This work applies psychoanalytic theory to family life, surveying how primitive emotions and unconscious impulses shape parent–child and sibling relationships and create conflicts that influence later love and marriage. It reviews Freudian and Jungian views on the family's role in individual development, traces patterns of dependence, displacement, and sublimation, and considers abnormalities and varieties of emotional growth. Additional chapters address ideas about birth and prenatal life, initiation rites, and the formation of parent substitutes, offering a synthetic, mostly expository overview of psychoanalytic perspectives on familial bonds.