Last week, I launched, under my column, a first call for stories about your parenthood. Once again, you have offered me these little pearls of humanity, these glances that are both lucid and gentle on your regrets, your learning, your path.
The clinic, on both sides of the chair, my own life as a mother and mother-in-law have taught me that it can sometimes take years, painful repetitions of the same relationship scenarios, one more slip on the next generation, before we agree to see ourselves as we are, unvarnished, without complacency. The philosopher Paul Ricoeur spoke of narrative identity to define this essentially human need to maintain a form of coherence in the story that a person makes of himself. Conflicts, events that surprise us, hurt us, illnesses, losses, otherness constantly force us to pick up the thread of our identity narrative to integrate less flattering aspects that are constantly revealed to us. Obviously, the narrative we make of ourselves always involves others who, like “co-authors of our life”, also tell us who we are.
It is there, perhaps, the great contemporary parental suffering, in this absolute need to be perceived by our children in a way that would not force us to integrate more difficult elements into our narrative identity, particularly if these same elements were the ones we hated… at our parents’.
This desire to do better than the generation that preceded us is not, as we know, the prerogative of our time alone. Whether it is represented by the good old Oedipian or Orestian mythology, there is indeed, in the history of humanity, this archetype of a vast relay race between generations, in which the youngest wishes to bear witness farther than where the oldest had taken him.
Our time is characterized by a discourse which, as a counterweight to all the violence too long legitimized in our social and family institutions, calls for a good dose of benevolence, values the quality of presence, listening and empathy, while executing the relationships of power. In parenthood, this is embodied in a desire to remain centered on adjusting to the needs of children, to condemn parental egocentrism, but, above all, not to reproduce what we have potentially experienced as children: abandonment, violence, humiliation, etc.
All of this makes sense and cannot be thwarted by a nostalgic discourse that would demand that we return to that blessed time when we could, with complete impunity, do anything with our children. Fortunately, that era is over, and the contempt addressed to contemporary parents often stems from any envy felt because of a residue of an abused childhood that still exists in us.
However, what worries me in the valued parenting of our time is the violence that it perpetuates, sometimes in spite of itself, towards the child, who has become a parent. Let me explain. The abused, neglected or inconsiderate child of the 1970s, 1980s or 1990s, now a parent, reinstalls, in a sometimes subtle form, other times very frank, the same suffering relational dynamic suffered in childhood. In the name of the bond, formerly with his parents, today with his child, he can continue to neglect his own needs, do violence to a whole part of him necessary for his vitality and ignore his own desires with the unexpected aim of being finally seen, recognized, as being sufficient to expectations. By thus submitting to this other now projected onto his child, he perhaps carries this whispered hope within himself “please tell me that I am sufficient, that I am good, that you see me as friendly “.
A form of perpetual self-neglect unfortunately becomes the continuous thread of the narrative identity of many contemporary parents. How many parents, former battered, neglected children, forgotten the key in the neck with a frozen meal to be heated in a Panasonic microwave, are now caught up in parental dynamics where the very idea that their children would reproach them for not being up to it automatically plunges them back into their infantile drama?
While the clinic of the child, traditionally, aimed at a greater adjustment of the parent to the needs of the “child-subject”, I sometimes have the impression of experiencing a sort of reversal of the clinical task, at least in a first time.
There is more and more often in front of me a teenager who does not know what to do with the other, suffering from never having learned to deal with an intersubjectivity which is not organized towards the satisfaction of only one of the two people. involved in the link.
As the child is imprisoned in an injunction to no longer exist outside this irreproachable bubble that is the parent-child relationship, his symptoms sometimes become his only means of defeating the parent’s great need to feel competent. What saddens me even more is when this symptom leads to a pathologization that will freeze everything in a permanently diagnosed identity, which will no longer allow us to question the theater that was brewing under appearances. Imagine separated parents, competing for the palm of the best parent, and everything is sometimes found tenfold, leading to procedural frenzies that end up emptying the child of any ability to be in authentic connection with the other.
Despite its apparent revolutions, contemporary parenting is perhaps not so different from that which preceded it. It’s still filled with hurt children, lurking in parents trying their best.
Clinical psychologist, Nathalie Plaat is an author and teacher at the University of Sherbrooke.