The psycho-analytic study of the family

by J. C. Flugel

The fact that the love available for offspring and for spouse The consequent jealousy between parent and child respectively stand thus to some extent in reciprocal relation to one other, renders inevitable a certain amount of competition for this love, whenever the demands from both sides are strong and persistent. We have already seen how from this source jealousy may arise in the child towards the parent of his or her own sex. A similarly conditioned jealousy will often arise also in the parent, though in this case the hostile feelings will frequently be confined to the Unconscious and will be discoverable only indirectly through their manifestations or through a process of analysis. This jealousy may nevertheless be productive of much harm in family life; and, when present in high intensity, may lead to permanent estrangement and bitterness between parents and children just as surely as may corresponding feelings on the part of the child.

Just as in the case of children the hostile emotions towards Conflicting interests of parents and children the parents that arise from jealousy are liable to be powerfully reinforced by those due to more general interference with the child's desires, so too in the case of the parents, any ill-feelings that they may bear towards their children as a result of jealousy are likely to be complicated by other causes of hostility. If it be to some extent inevitable that children should come to regard their parents as obstacles to the full attainment of their own desires and as unwelcome causes of interference with their most cherished activities, parents have at least equal reason to complain similarly of their children. The responsibility, The sacrifices involved in parenthood the effort, the anxiety, involved in rearing children, diminish very considerably the time and energy available for more directly personal occupations and enjoyments. To some extent the individual inevitably sacrifices himself in becoming a parent, in accordance with the general biological law which Spencer has designated the antagonism between individuation and genesis; and this sacrifice of personal comforts, pleasures, satisfactions and ambitions does not as a rule take place without some degree of resentment being felt against those whose existence necessitates the sacrifice. Even where—owing to robust health, abundant energy, ample means, state relief or other circumstances—children demand but little sacrifice of the major aims and occupations of life, the very considerable difference between the points of view of children and those of adults and the largely incompatible nature of the conditions and activities that appeal to their respective minds tend to make the constant presence of children, especially within the confines of a small home, inevitably to some extent a cause of annoyance to the parents. As Bernard Shaw[202] so well points out, children are indeed to some extent necessarily and unavoidably a nuisance to grown-up persons; with their illregulated and impulsive energy and their disregard of the habits and conventions to which their seniors have become accustomed, they constitute an ever present menace to the comfort and tranquillity of adult life—a menace from which even the most devoted parent must sometimes wish that he could free himself.

The mother, owing to the greater demands which children Their influence on the mother make upon her time and health and energy is perhaps that one of the parents to experience most keenly such hostile feelings, though the existence of a strong counter-impulse towards maternal love will often insure repression of these feelings into the unconscious; so that it usually requires a process of analysis to reveal the often strong resentment that a mother may entertain towards the child who so seriously interferes with her more directly individual needs and aspirations[203].

The interference of children with the activities and desires On the father of the father is usually less direct and the ill-will which fathers bear towards their children is therefore more apt to be aroused in consequence of jealousy than is the corresponding feeling of the mother. Nevertheless, in the case of the father too, there almost always sooner or later arises some degree of interference with his pleasure, his comfort, his work or his ambitions; so that he feels that his children constitute a burden which seriously hampers his individual progress or enjoyment.

The hostile feelings of parents towards their children which Identification of the child with its grandparent take their origin from one or more of these sources are often powerfully stimulated and reinforced by an unconscious process in virtue of which the child is identified with the parent's own parent (the child's grandparent). This tendency to identify child with grandparent is one which would seem to be deeply implanted in the human mind[204]. Thus in several parts of the world grandparents are supposed to become re-incarnated in their grandchildren—a belief which is probably responsible for the widespread practice (observed among others by the ancient Greeks) of naming a child after its grandparent, especially in the case of eldest sons who frequently receive the name of their paternal grandfather[205].

For the grounds of this belief and the tendencies which Causes of this similarity of parent-child to previous child-parent relationship have given rise to it, it is probable that we must look to the similarities between the relations of parent to child and those which had existed a generation earlier between child and parent. As we have just seen, the feelings that are liable to be evoked by these relationships are in certain respects not dissimilar, and it would appear as though the situation in which an individual is placed when he becomes a parent serves to call up in him some of the partially forgotten and partially outgrown emotions and tendencies which he had experienced in his own childhood and to direct them now upon his child in the same way as he had formerly directed them upon his parent. Thus the new position in which a father finds himself in competition with his son for the affection of his wife revives in the Unconscious a memory of the former situation in which as a child he competed with his father for the love of his mother.

The identification of child with grandparent would seem to be helped also by the intimate connection with a curious but not infrequent product of imagination which has been called by Ernest Jones "the phantasy of the reversal of The "phantasy of the reversal of generations" generations[206]." According to this phantasy—to which attention had also been called by psychologists other than those of the psycho-analytic school, notably by Sully[207]—it is supposed that, as children grow bigger and finally attain to adult stature, their parents, as they increase in age, undergo a corresponding diminution; so that eventually a complete reversal of size as regards the two generations is attained, those who were once parents being now reduced to a position very similar to that of children, while the original children, through their increase in size and power, are themselves able to behave in a quasi-parental manner to their parents. The ultimate psychological foundations of this quaint belief are as yet not clearly understood, though it is fairly certain that the notions of personal immortality and of metempsychosis, together with the great emotional significance in the child's mind of the ideas connected with bodily size, play an important part in this connection. Whatever be the origin of this phantasy, the persistence of some remnants of it in the Unconscious is admirably adapted to serve as a means whereby an individual may identify his children with his parents and then direct upon the former the hostile emotions aroused in connection with the latter. The fact that such an individual is now possessed of superior strength and power, whereas formerly he had been relatively weak and helpless, makes it tempting for him to use this opportunity for taking revenge for the real or supposed injuries he had suffered in his childhood[208]. In this way children are liable to become sometimes the innocent victims of bullying or nagging which, according to the principles of justice, are due to their grandparents rather than to themselves. When combined with a violent parent hatred, such identification of children with their grandparents may take on tragic proportions and lead to the direst consequences; and it is probable that in the majority if not in all of those sad cases, where a parent conceives a permanent and unreasoning antipathy to one or more of his children, the foundations of the dislike are to be found in such a combination of unconscious or semi-conscious factors.

This process of identification is not however operative only with regard to hatred. It may exert also a powerful influence upon the direction of love and is often of special importance where parents definitely select a favourite from among their children, this favourite child being then invested with the love that was formerly directed to the favourite parent[209]. For this reason too parents may often be desirous that their children should adopt the profession, mode of life, beliefs or habits of their (the childrens') grandparents[210].

In all cases where a parent resents the coming into being The effect of parent-child love on the attitude of parents to each other or the presence of children, and especially in those where the resentment is based largely upon jealousy, some degree of displeasure is apt to be directed upon the other parent, who is regarded as responsible for the existence of the unwelcome intruder or as transferring to him an undue proportion of attention and affection. In this respect the situation recalls in the parents mind the earlier one in which, in his own childhood, he resented the love of his parents for each other, and in consequence of which the love which he himself bore to one of his parents became converted into, or was mixed with, hatred and contempt (cp. p. 110). Thus a father may experience towards his wife something of those feelings of outraged jealousy which he had formerly harboured towards his mother—a resuscitation and transference of feelings of this kind being rendered all the easier by the fact that his wife is very probably already to some extent unconsciously identified with his mother, so that the whole original situation is lived through again with the substitution of wife for mother and of child (especially of course in the case of a boy) for father.