ication to his sons and warmth and love to his daughters. A child's parents are his first agents of socialization. They provide him the answers to his first questions, which will shape his entire life. They are to establish how loved, how useful, how independent or how low and worthless he will be. The mother, on the other hand, is more than an object of dependence to the child. She is his object of love and adoration. She represents nurturing and the universe itself. It is she whom he first perceives when he is born. Later in infancy or childhood, she becomes the object of love, which he idealizes and internalizes as part of his conscience. Proper development requires the gradual detachment from her. He begins to see her more realistically with her shortcomings and disadvantages. Although her ideal image gets stored into his psyche, he needs a more realistic view of her in defining his own individual and gender identity in launching himself into the world. He will need to abandon her at least partly in order to pursue and build his own per
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