First, there is the idea of a mother. We’ve already suggested that babies have some innate potential idea of a mother, such that as they grow up, they can see sameness and difference between their particular, individual mother and the idea of a mother. We know that this ability to abstract the idea of “Mother” from a particular mother persists into adult life. It allows us to compare the mothers we see to an ideal, so that as adults we try to imitate the ideal, sometimes deliberately avoiding the actual mother models we have observed. The idea of a mother also seeps into emotional,
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