But it is in the years preceding his extensive experience of the world beyond the home that the fundamental elements of character, the conformity of the individual to the universal restrictions of society—the taboos on murder, cruelty, theft, incest, and pregenital sexuality, for example—are established. And it is also in large part the identifications formed in those years that determine the specifically individual features of adult character, the specific ways in which he reacts to primitive stimuli, the degrees of moral stringency, self-sacrifice, idealism, and repression which determine, in large part, the relationships of adult life. In one individual the authority of the super-ego is excessive, and the adult then is a rigid, inflexible type, an impractical idealist or a psychoneurotic. In another, identifications may be inadequate, and the adult will defy social customs with guiltless impunity. Just how these individualistic traits of an adult's character are related to the love and discipline of the family circle of his infancy, only a very thorough analysis will disclose. For it is not only with those traits which are most apparent in other members of his family circle that the child "identifies"; this unconscious process is determined to a great extent by the portions of the parent's own super-ego which are themselves unconscious, and even by phantasies of the parents which are real to the child and emotionally experienced, but actually not characteristic of those he is phantasying about. Conspicuous traits of many personalities–for example, excessive unselfishness, over-solicitude, etc.—are often fulfillments in adult life, not of the child's wish to be like a parent, but of his wish to be like the person the child phantasied the parent should be.
– Ives Hendrick in The Facts and Theories of Psychoanalysis, 3rd ed. (1958)