But at the present day this ambivalent conflict no longer results in the development of ethics and soul theories, but in neuroses which also gives us a profound insight into the normal psychic life.
Our unconscious is just as inaccessible to the conception of our own death, just as much inclined to kill the stranger, and just as divided, or ambivalent towards the persons we love as was primitive man.
It occurs wherever, besides the predominant tenderness, there exists a contrary but unconscious stream of hostility, that is to say, wherever the typical case of an ambivalent affective attitude is realized.
Of as little validity is the second objection, that everything derived from the ambivalent relation to the father, namely taboos, and rules of sacrifice, is characterized by the highest seriousness and by complete reality.
If we survey the relation of survivors to the dead through the course of the ages, it is very evident that the ambivalent feeling has extraordinarily abated.
The ambivalent strain was probably too great to be adjusted by any arrangement, or else the psychological conditions are entirely unfavourable to any kind of settlement of these contradictory feelings.
The desire to violate it continues in the unconscious; persons who obey the taboo have an ambivalent feeling toward what is affected by the taboo.
Only neurotics still blur the mourning for the loss of their dear ones with attacks of compulsive reproaches which psychoanalysis reveals as the old ambivalent emotional feeling.
How this change was brought about, and to what extent constitutional changes and real improvement of familiar relations share in causing the abatement of the ambivalent feeling, need not be discussed here.
This ceremonial unmistakably reveals its double meaning and its origin from ambivalent tendencies if only we are willing to assume that the effects it produces are those which it intended from the very beginning.
His ambivalent finger remained pendent over a button that would keep the nearest door open if pressed.
It was only in her phlegmatic folding of his clothes, packing his bags, calling a taxi for him, and seeing him go away in it, that she put consistent direction into the distraught boyOs ambivalent and floundering movements.
In the ebb or ambivalent reaction of this passion he and the tutor got on better.
Transgression of the taboo may arouse the other aspect of the ambivalent attitude, (for instance anger instead of sorrow) and it thus becomes a source of danger to the guilty individual and so by contagion and imitation to the community.
However, a certain ambivalent tendency seems to be present, for while the word death and the mention of the dead is prohibited, yet they feel deep grief and sorrow for dead relatives.
The ambivalent personalities are always brought to a place where they yearn for two opposing kinds of action or they fear to choose one affinity of action as against the other.
If eventually a conflict breaks out between the two, it often settled by the child making a change of object and displacing one of the ambivalent emotions on to a substitute.
Identification, in fact, is ambivalent from the very first; it can turn into an expression of tenderness as easily as into a wish for someone's removal.
In young children, for instance, ambivalent emotional attitudes towards those who are nearest to them exist side by side for a long time, without either of them interfering with the expression of the other and contrary one.
On this ambivalent character of anti-semitism, cf.
Clearly he wanted to move to a different seat so in that sense of knowing his own dominant yearning and witnessing it unopposed by contrary yearnings he was not ambivalent at all and yet, he asked himself, how could he just go?
He was ambivalent whether or not the Laotian meant to say, "Dee" [good] in response.
Hesitant in a life clogged in these conflicts that engendered ambivalent waffling and wallowing in futile rumination, he let her pass away.
