Eventually, the mature person has come to the point where he is his own mother and his own father. He has, as it were, a motherly and a fatherly conscience.
Motherly conscience says: “There is no misdeed, no crime which could deprive you of my love, of my wish for your life and happiness.” Fatherly conscience says: “You did wrong, you cannot avoid accepting certain consequences of your wrongdoing, and most of all you must change your ways if I am to like you.”
The mature person has become free from the outside mother and father figures, and has built them up inside.
In contrast to Freud’s concept of the super-ego, however, he has built them inside not by incorporating mother and father, but by building a motherly conscience on his own capacity for love, and a fatherly conscience on his reason and judgment.
Fur-thermore, the mature person loves with both the motherly and the fatherly conscience, in spite of the fact that they seem to contradict each other.
If he would only retain his fatherly conscience, he would become harsh and inhuman. If he would only retain his motherly conscience, he would be apt to lose judgment and to hinder himself and others in their development.
In this development from mother-centered to father-centered attachment, and their eventual synthesis, lies the basis for mental health and the achievement of maturity.In the failure of this development lies the basic cause for neurosis.
——–
Care, responsibility, respect and knowledge are mutually interdependent.They are a syndrome of attitudes which are to be found in the mature person; that is, in the person who develops his own powers productively, who only wants to have that which he has worked for, who has given up nar-cissistic dreams of omniscience and omnipotence, who has acquired humility based on the inner strength which only genuine productive activity can give.
