From the « annunciation to the husband » (You are going to be a father, I’m expecting your baby), through birth, to the first weeks of the baby’s life, the father who is also the mother’s companion is too often forgotten, in terms of what he is experiencing, his functions and the specific psychical upheaval the work of fatherhood entails. This research portrays the three principle phases of becoming a father and the different registers that modulate the paternal partition.
Archives de catégorie : ENG – Parentalité – 2006 T.24 n°1
Philippe Jeammet : reflections on parenthood
Human beings have a natural ability for raising children, otherwise humankind would cease to exist. But it is true that recent social evolution makes this role more complex, if not more difficult. The permissiveness of western society has partly removed a certain consensus about the disciplinary rules that once intervened as a third party between the desires of the parents and those of the children. This loss, while in many ways beneficial, has the disadvantage of giving rise to an incestual type of closeness between the partners and fostering a narcissistic investment between them, blurring the limits. What differentiates the child from the adolescent then is what escapes the parents’ desire, that is everything having to do with opposition, dissatisfaction, provocation and, potentially, destructiveness. « This is me », the youngster can say, because it puts the adult in a position of failure and impotence, allowing the youngster to escape from the anxiety of abandonment, because he causes worry, and from the anxiety of fusion and intrusion that shared pleasure can give rise to.
However, this invitation to the parents to « understand » their emotional relations with their children must not paralyze them in their action and their spontaneity, and reinforce the situation wherein the children are expected to dictate their upbringing to their parents, whose place they would then take, in a way. It appears more favorable to free their confidence in their own capacity for being parents, while dissuading them from wanting to control everything and from blaming themselves as soon as any problem arises. On the other hand, any lasting difficulty that arises which prevents the youngster from feeding on what he needs to develop, thus reinforcing a pathogenic dependence on the adult and the necessity of opposing in order to differentiate himself, to the detriment of the development of his abilities, cries out for both a firm limit set by the parents on destructive behavior and an opening towards a third party as a way out of this sterile confrontation.
Myriam Boubli, Brigitte Efrat-Boubli : parenthood : a process fostering psychic growth beyond the confusion of tongues
The notion of « parenthood » is seen here as a mostly unconscious process, beginning in archaic and primordial foundations and ending in the establishment of social bonding. While avoiding the risk of a parasitic bonding system, « parenthood » allows for the development of interrelations between partners, the Oedipal triangulation and the construction of a sexual identity. In addition, at its most organized level, through sublimation, this process fosters socialization and creativity.
François Richard : parenthood, a debatable notion
This article tries to show that the notion of parenthood emerges in the context of an historical evolution where the social bond tends to reproduce itself, beyond traditional kinship systems. This should be brought seriously into the discussion, insofar as the psychoanalytical concept of drive conflict and the centrality of interpreting the transference are in danger of being forgotten. The first part describes the current modes of « culture and its discontents ». Afterwards, we will study some avatars of borderline subjectivation who rationalize themselves within a discourse on parenthood. In conclusion, parenthood and kinship are put into a dialectical relationship by being put into anthropological perspective.
Monique Bydlowski : motherhood and fatherhood
The concept of parenthood is debatable, because it does not take into account the difference between the specifically maternal and specifically paternal parental crises that the two parents go through at the moment of childbirth. The content of these two crises is described in broad outline.
Philippe Gutton : parenthood
The concept of parenthood is distinguished from that of kinship as studied by doctors and anthropologists. It defines an original psychical work that the author posits as a creative process. The experience of parenthood is developed as the primary narcissism from an archaic, enigmatic un-creatable, in order to engage in Oedipal conflict ; a creation in which filiation and affiliation are in play. Individual work is incited and limited by the experience of the biological parents and by the child himself, engaged in his original self-creation. The mission of third-party parentalization is to free itself from fantasmatic and acted conflict, in order to raise, in day-to-day conduct and speech, the question of the unconscious of each member of the family and the family group.