[Sidenote: The importance of displacement in the love life]
The brief review which we have undertaken in this chapter of the displacement of the love impulse from persons of the immediate family environment to objects selected from a wider circle, is sufficient to show that the whole nature and course of the love life of an individual is to a very large extent dependent on the way in which this displacement is achieved[139]. There is little doubt but that the further advance of psychological science will reveal more intimately the working of those mechanisms with which we have here been dealing, and of whose nature and importance we are now beginning to gain some rough preliminary understanding. In view of the desirability of a satisfactory direction of the love impulse, as well from the point of view of national and racial well-being as from that of individual happiness and family prosperity, it is to be expected that the further enlightenment which we may hope for on this subject, will be, both practically and theoretically, as important as any which the science of Psychology will bring us.
[Footnote 116: "Zur Einführung des Narzißmus." _Jahrbuch für Psychoanalyse_, VI, 1. I.]
[Footnote 117: See especially Otto Rank, "Die Lohengrinsage," Schriften zur angewandten Seelenkunde.]
[Footnote 118: An influence of this kind may also manifest itself by causing the successive falling in love with several persons of the same name, as for instance, in the case of Schiller (Charlotte von Wolzogen, Charlotte von Kalb, Charlotte von Lengefeld) or in that of Shelley (Harriet Grove, Harriet Westbrook and the later affection for Harriet de Boinville). The incestuous origin of such a name influence may be shown even more clearly in cases where the names of persons successively loved are those of different members of the lover's own family; as in the case of Mörike; (Clara and Louisa, after the name of his two sisters). _Cp._ Rank, "Das Inzestmotiv in Dichtung und Sage," pp. 91, 543. In a case known to me, a young woman fell in love successively with three men possessing the same Christian name, one of whom had the same surname as herself. In a fourth love affair the surname of the man was the same as the Christian name of her brother, to whom she was much attached, and contrary to her usual custom she always called this fourth lover by his surname instead of by his Christian name.]