Towns[147] may also become the recipients of parentally, and especially maternally, directed feeling; those who love and admire a town often referring to it in terms which would be more directly appropriate to a woman; a woman behind whom the mother image can usually be discovered. The emotions aroused by the besieging, attacking or capturing of towns in warfare are also in part derived from the same source.
The same feeling too is often directed to houses, ships, churches (and especially to the institution of the Church; _cp._ the phrase "Mother Church"); also to trees, woods, mountains, lakes, rivers, the sea and other natural objects.
[Sidenote: The attitude of the individual to the state:]
Probably the most important displacement of this kind from the sociological point of view is that in which parental attributes are transferred to the community, state, or country. The mental ties that bind the individual to the community are of course complex in nature, comprising emotional and intellectual factors belonging to a variety of psychic levels. Among the most fundamental and deep seated of these factors are, as Ernest Jones[148] has pointed out, those that take their origin in feelings that regard the self, the mother and the father respectively.
The self-regarding tendencies are enlisted in the service of patriotism;--on the conscious, intellectual level, through a recognition of the community of interest between the individual and the state; on the more primitive, emotional and unconscious level, through a process of identification of the individual with the state, as a result of which the former participates in the successes and failures of the latter in much the same way as if they affected him directly and principally in his own person. In these latter respects the feelings of the individual towards the state are similar in many ways to those that are involved in a corresponding identification of the self with the family, the school or any other group with whose prosperity and honour the well-being and self-respect of the individual is bound up.
The displacement of the mother-regarding feelings on to state is, it would seem, chiefly connected with the ideas of being nourished, trained and protected, on the one hand, and of actively protecting, on the other. Thus we tend to regard our native land as a great mother who brings into being, nourishes, protects and cherishes her sons and daughters and inspires them with respect and love for herself and her traditions, customs, beliefs and institutions; in return for which her children are prepared to work and fight for her--and above all, to protect her from her enemies; a good deal of the horror and disgust which is inspired by the idea of an invasion of one's native land by a hostile army being due to the unconscious tendency to regard such an invasion as a desecration and violation of the mother.