Psychoanalysis Rule No. 1 (maybe): The Child is Father to the Man. The Child is Father to the Man.

 

Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (1959):

The primal act of the human ego is a negative one-- not to accept reality, specifically the separation of the child's body from the mother's body. 

Sigmund Freud: One might even believe that this first love relation of the child is doomed to extinction for the very reason that it is the first, for these early object-cathexes are always ambivalent to a very high degree; along side of the child's intense love there is always a strong aggressive tendency present, and the more passionately the child loves an object, the more sensitive it will be to disappointments and frustrations. In the end, the love is bound to capitulate to the accumulated hostility. 

Objective dependence on parental care creates in the child a passive, dependent need to be loved, which is just the opposite of their dream of narcissistic omnipotence. Thus the institution of the family shapes human desire in two contradictory directions [need to be loved and narcissistic omnipotence], and it is the dialectic generated by this contradiction which produces what Freud calls the conflict of ambivalence.

The aim of psychoanalysis-- still unfulfilled, and still only half-conscious-- is to return our souls [sublimations] to our bodies, to return ourselves to ourselves, and thus to overcome the human state of self-alienation. 

*No doubt, Freud was a male chauvinist and often comically exaggerates win-lose binary sexual conflicts but come on psychoanalysis is the Moby Dick of modernist intellectual systems. A colossus inspiring great work in the arts, literature, philosophy and history, even some great work he might not have agreed with. Brown believes in the unity of opposites; I'm still not sure Freud really does.