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Every emotion is characterized by ambivalence: love cannot exist without hate, pleasure without displeasure, acceptance without rejection, and so on. This may seem surprising, perhaps even inconceivable to some, but such is the reality of human emotional life and the relationships that stem from it. This emotional universe takes its roots, as we now know, in the first impressions felt by infants, in their bonds with their first objects of love, and then their evolution throughout their development, culminating during the Oedipal period.
One of the first questions parents can try to take the time to answer is: “What motivates us to want a child?” The answers are often numerous and a bit too conscious. In reality, they inevitably relate to the conscious and unconscious experiences of their own childhood and parental relationships. Freud notes, “Parental love, which is so moving and at bottom so childish, is nothing but the parents’ narcissism born again.” This is the main obstacle they must face: how to love their child, who is different from themselves, while respecting their own vital impulse? This idea often appears incongruous in Eastern thought and elicits a lot of resistance.
F. Dolto writes that true love cannot be attained in fusion, in resemblance to oneself, but in accepting the child as separate from oneself, in their difference from oneself. Not in the desire for reproductive generational transmission, but in accepting the break from this transmission, not in the expectation of adherence to parental desire, but in aiding the child’s discovery of their own desire. From birth to the end of adolescence, true parental love will be characterized by reciprocal learning of separation and permission given to the child to acquire autonomy of thought, feeling, action, and self-experience as a “full-fledged subject” (Dolto).
Just as they have imposed limits on their own impulses, they will be committed to teaching their child the acceptance of certain prohibitions at each stage of their development, so that they can evolve toward the psychological maturity necessary for their insertion into a human community that respects the otherness of each person and their submission to the law.
To love one’s child cannot aim to compensate for one’s childhood narcissistic wounds, nor to want to play the friend, but to recognize humbly, throughout one’s life, as an apprentice-parent. Because, as Dolto always tells us, it is the child who makes the parent. In the sense that the latter must recognize their ignorance in order to learn what parenting is, precisely through the discovery of their own lack of knowledge, the disturbances of their emotions, the contrary impulses that arise, the frustrations and disappointments that arise in the always surprising relationships with the child. In order to offer them security and confidence in attachment, as well as the strength and desire for detachment. S. Ferenczi cites the following adage: “Being a parent is easy, becoming one is much harder.”
“Some people say that all you need is love,” but B. Bettelheim retorts: “Love is not enough.” To truly love one’s child is to intimately admit, not just theoretically, that each stage of their development requires the parent to renounce their narcissistic satisfaction, their desire for control. Each stage aims to continue the separation from the mother first, and from the father afterwards. To love one’s child is to foster, in adolescence, the construction of an identity that will be structured in adulthood as a new birth, a reconstruction of oneself facilitated by the parents’ love-renunciation. Each child, in their process of becoming, will grant themselves the inherent right to exist as an individual and as the architect of their own existence.
Otherwise, the child turned adult will share with the poet all the resentment contained in these lines:
“And the Mother, closing the book of duty,
Went away satisfied and very proud, without seeing,
In the blue eyes and under the forehead full of eminences,
The soul of her child surrendered to repugnances.”
A. Rimbaud
