Nearly forty years ago, Françoise Dolto, the famous child psychoanalyst, published The cause of children. She recalled the founding principles of her theorizing, after all these years devoted to listening to childhood. For her, first of all, the child is a subject, from birth, and even from conception. Then he is a being of language, long before he himself is able to speak and, finally, he needs truth. Truth about what? “As far as he is concerned,” she would say.
But what about the child? Often what we do not want to reveal to him, precisely; our ambivalence towards it, our regrets, our secrets and small betrayals, our own traumatic stories or even the big holes in meaning that we cannot fill with our own resources. Remember that, according to psychoanalysis, we are often unconscious of all these elements, and that the symptoms, ours and those of our children, have something to do with what seeks to be revealed to consciousness and put into language.
If Dolto has already been widely accused – notably by my grandmother, and it makes me smile to think back – of having paved the way for what would become the phenomenon of “children-kings”, I still think that it is simplistic to conclude to this adequacy. In fact, it is not because we consider the child as a subject that we are automatically condemned to become, we, subjects of his court.
However, there are phenomena which appear sufficiently dense in the clinic for after twenty years of receiving parents and children in all sorts of conditions, I am tempted to say that we have perhaps got stuck, yes, in a which ultimately serves no one, except perhaps those who would benefit from establishing something like “normative parental know-how” as expertise.
I am often touched by the suffering experienced by all these parents who seek to live their role, in a contemporary context where what we call “double bind messages” is raining. The plurality of contradictory information, combined with the productive frenzy of the time and the narcissism of all spheres of intimacy, is enough to exhaust parents anxious to do “what is best for their child” .
This is also the subject of the latest advertisement from a well-known magazine which, with humor, reminds “inflatable parents” that being parents is not a competition. If the advertising process is successful, it remains slightly ironic that the bearer of this message may also be part, surely in spite of himself, of the multiple cogs that have contributed to the rise of this phenomenon of parental performance.
Looking outside oneself for tips and advice from thousands of different experts to educate our child seems to have become the common way to go through the parenting experience. However, if I have nothing against the dissemination of information from reliable sources, based on scientific data, I am sensitive to the growing impoverishment of the quality of life of certain parents, exhausted from feeling inadequate, anxious to fail, to harm the good development of their children by being only themselves, ultimately.
It is true that, from pregnancy, the informative discourse takes on such an extent that it perhaps comes to evacuate something like more instinctive, irrational intimate resources, transmitted intergenerationally, which are also worth their weight in the parental adventure. .
Raising a child is first of all about appearing, being revealed to oneself, discovering oneself. Many parents now fear discovering that they do not correspond to what seems established as an invitation to “disappear”, in the service of what is referred to as “the needs of the child”.
The disparity between what is expected and what is experienced is sometimes such that, from birth, an interaction takes place between the child and the parent that is sorely lacking in a basic datum, and Dolto would agree there above: authenticity. As being a parent consists in developing an additional persona, the reflexes of self-representation sometimes set in, increasing the distance from an intimate truth, not said, but felt by the child.
This is also where all the beauty of the parent-child clinic lies, when we manage to reopen this space allowing us to tell ourselves the real things, to rediscover the right to be ourselves; children and parents, imperfect, fallible, but inhabited by a love that is not always expressed by the application of techniques learned in guides.
“Do children really have the right to ruin our lives? an exhausted parent in the clinic had once asked me. Beyond the joke launched, which had moreover made us burst into frank laughter, as happens more often than one would think, there was nevertheless this real question: what is the place that we leave to this role in our lives? Is it really a role, or rather a new opportunity to be more and better ourselves? I don’t have the answers, of course, but I’m struck by the number of parents to whom I end up prescribing something like a “healthy self-centeredness”, a right to also have limits, “self-desires” that exclude the response to the needs of children, sometimes adults, already.
Another mother told me “if I could start my life as a mother all over again, I would”, in this fantasy of “doing everything better”, this time around. It seems to me that it is then much more a question of carrying and assuming our history, of daring to name it too, by forgiving ourselves for having been just what we are, only, and, more than anything, in giving our offspring the luxury of resenting us, too.
And if, instead of starting from scratch, it was only beneficial to tell us the truth, between parents and children, to dare to “de-coincide” to use the expression of the philosopher François Jullien, with what we have interpreted as the “parental norm”.
Clinical psychologist, Nathalie Plaat is an author and teacher at the University of Sherbrooke.