In the first type the love is the result of a projection of the lover's self on to some other person--the narcissistic love originally directed to the Self being thus displaced on to the person of the loved one--through some process of identification or some strong associative link. Love of this type is frequently manifested in ties of a homosexual nature, where the lover finds in one of his own sex a nearer copy of himself than would otherwise be possible. It is also manifested in some of the fervent affections of parents for their children, where the parents regard those whom they have produced as in a manner an extension of themselves (_cp._ below Ch. XIV). And finally it is manifested in some connections of a normal heterosexual kind; a man for example finds and admires in his wife those feminine qualities which are present in himself but to which, so long as they are in himself, he is unable (owing to repression of the feminine side of his nature) to afford full recognition or appreciation; or a woman finds attractive in a man those qualities of boyishness and masculinity which she herself possessed in some degree before the time of puberty but which she has since sacrificed to make way for a more pronounced development of her "womanly" characteristics.
In love of the second type the affection is more genuinely and primarily "object-love." The lover is here attracted towards his object because he finds in it something that is essential to the fulfilment of his own bodily or mental needs. It is this love which, as we have seen, is under normal circumstances first aroused in connection with the parents (and especially the mother), by whom the first primitive requirements of the infant are fulfilled. It is this love too which, in its displaced form, we have seen to be so frequently directed on to brothers, sisters or other near relatives, and which, by a further process of displacement, in the course of normal development eventually flows on to persons unconnected with the lover by any bond of relationship. The repression, as a result of which this latter displacement has occurred, as a rule, brings it about that the associative links that connect the newer with the older love are not perceptible to the lover himself; the bond is an unconscious one. Nevertheless, this bond is often sufficiently clear to any keen observer, whose eyes have once been opened to the fact of its existence. In other cases however it may be of a more obscure nature, so as to require a deeper study of the personality of the lover and of his psychological history (such as can often only be obtained by employment of the psycho-analytic method) before the nature of the association becomes apparent.