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Cry and response
Published in Anthony Korner, Communicative Exchange, Psychotherapy and the Resonant Self, 2020
Most psychotherapists continue to recognize Freud’s “discovery” of Oedipal rivalry as an important basis of unconscious mental life (Tomkins, 1995). The attribution of the rivalry to sexual drive is more doubtful. The theory has been considered deficient in a relational sense: “Freud’s interpretation of the nature of social relationships was crippled by his dependence on the drive theory” (ibid.). Drives, in general, are not dependent upon either affect or language for their fulfilment and hence can operate, as it were, outside the zone of self and meaning. In the case of sexual drive there is undoubtedly, and commonly, a complex affective investment in sexual behaviours and fantasies, although this is elaborated in highly individualized ways that relate to particular selves. Tomkins felt that the emphasis on drive obscured “the family romance” which involves the child’s general wish to be like both father and mother, and, in the immature state, “to possess both of them” (ibid.). He also argues social relationships require a quality of tenderness if they are to endure (ibid.). The strongest emotions are linked to intimate relationships where the earliest investment is in the need for relatedness rather than sexuality indicating the “strong biological roots” of attachment theory (Bowlby, 1988). This biological basis for tender relatedness is further highlighted by the identification of a nurturing or “care” system within mammalian neurobiology (Panksepp & Biven, 2012).
From invention to innovation
Published in Meads Geoff, Pat Gordon, Diane Plamping, Future Options for General Practice, 2018
While in the run up to the general election, there may be less debate on the desirability of a primary care led NHS, the debate on its precise shape will intensify. That debate will be less than useful if we persist in couching it in terms of what the doctor and the patient want and need, or even what GPs and patients want and need. Neither GPs nor patients are homogeneous: research suggests that what patients want and how they evaluate existing GP services differs with age, sex, socioeconomic class and ethnic group. It probably also differs depending on whether they feel ill or well, and on whether they have an acute or chronic condition. So much of the debate on the ineradicable core of general practice is a kind of professional family romance. It bears little relationship to practice in areas of high population turnover, to patients who consult infrequently, and to those who are not known personally by either GP or practice staff.
Memory and the Myth of Innocence
Published in Anna Thiemann, Rewriting the American Soul, 2017
In addition to the skill of elective ignorance, Enid has developed “powers of selective forgetfulness,”85 which enable her to twist her family history at her convenience. Her first priority is to conceal her Eastern European Jewish ancestry. The best she can do under the given circumstances to fend off her daughter’s inquisitive questions about their family genealogy is to claim that her ancestors were Catholics from the former imperial capital of Austria.86 Enid’s fabricated family saga is reminiscent of Freud’s account of Jewish history in Moses and Monotheism (like the Israelites, who claim that their forefather was Hebrew rather than Egyptian, she invents a myth or protective fiction to cover up her supposedly shameful past). Furthermore, it evokes Freud’s concept of “Family Romances” (1909), which he defines as a creative defense mechanism. To escape the unpleasantness of one’s biological parents, the psychoanalyst argues, people tend to invent idealized family genealogies in which they become the descendants of an extraordinarily rich or famous dynasty.87 Freud’s observation that the development of such fantasies is fueled by envy of other people’s families is reflected in Enid’s obsession with her neighbors. Chuck and Bea Meisner are not only rich, successful, and happily married, but also the proud parents of an “unfairly gorgeous daughter,” the wife of an “Austrian sports doctor, a von Somebody who’d garnered Olympic bronze in the giant slalom.”88 Franzen’s ironic revelation that Chuck actually fantasizes about being married to Enid underlines Freud’s notion that family romances are omnipresent delusions. What is new and special about Enid’s family romance is that it involves not only a reinvention of her ancestry but also an idealization of her husband and children, which underlines her dangerous inability to analyze the problems of the past, present, and foreseeable future.
The Necessary Elements: The Interactive Matrix of Abusive Relationships
Published in Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 2021
Related to the gratification that Jenny experienced in being treated as an equal, rather than as a little girl, she lived out a family romance fantasy in these relationships. Idealizing Bill and Mrs. G, she viewed them as more fascinating, alluring, and admirable than her own parents. The seeds of the family romance fantasy were sown in the slights she felt in the absence of attention from her parents and her estrangement from them. In scenes of her chaotic family life, Jenny longs for attention. Her mother is seen tending to the demands of five children, while her father, usually working, was too occupied to notice her as she gazed into his office. Referring to her parents, she said, “I was one of five. They barely noticed if I wasn’t there.” In his short paper The Family Romance, Freud observes that the child who develops a family romance fantasy tends to feel slighted at “not receiving the whole of his parents’ love and most of all, on which he feels regrets of having to share it with brothers and sisters” (Freud, 1909, p. 237). These children take recourse in daydreams that serve at once as the fulfillment of wishes and as a correction of their actual lives. They are enlisted in the service of liberating the child from the parents of whom he or she now has a low opinion and of replacing them by others who as a rule are perceived as being of higher social standing. These fantasies typically also serve erotic interests, as they often encompass the child’s imagining him- or herself in “situations of secret infidelity and into secret love-affairs” (Freud, 1909, p. 239) with oedipal objects.
To Tell the Truth, (Re)Tell One’s Tale: On Pedophilia, Taboo Desire, and Seduction Trauma-- Introduction to The Tale and Leaving Neverland: A Panel on Two Films on Childhood Sexual Abuse
Published in Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 2021
In the essays that follow, each author, to some degree, addresses the complex interweaving of fantasy and reality, fiction and truth, and the vital necessity for the survivor to tell, and revise, her/his tale, narrowing the gap between truth and fable, while also securing it. Considering both interpersonal and intrapsychic factors, Ken Feiner elaborates how the mix of the child’s proclivity to conjure a family romance, along with particular need for attention and to be chosen, contributes to the protagonist’s receptivity to the advances of an adult. Komal Choksi uses The Tale both to illustrate the workings of identification with the aggressor, particularly in the context of childhood sexual abuse, and to show how the Orphic (maternal/guardian) figure, constituted by the film’s portrayal of an unnamed, dark-skinned woman, counters that identification through a transformation at the level of the unconscious. Using the protagonist’s encounter with the Real (sexual abuse) as depicted in The Tale, Marilyn Charles considers the plight of feminine agency and desire in the absence of “law,” highlighting the way that cultural pressures contribute to guilt associated with refusing the desire of the other and/or claiming one’s own. Jill Gentile addresses the complexities of omnipotence and agency, conscious and not, in light of temporality and the après-coup translation of the past in the present, including the #MeToo context and its renewed grappling with female agency in which The Tale’s debut arrived.
Welcome to the Family: A Queer Affection for Psychoanalysis
Published in Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 2019
Klein’s interpretation is as likely to unsettle people today as it unsettled Richard. It disturbed me when I first came across it until I made Mrs. Klein into an imaginary interlocutor of my 10-year-old self and I began to consider the possibility of whether I might have wanted to put my genital into Mrs. Klein’s. Is it possible that I have a repressed wish to penetrate vaginas with my penis—a desire of which I could become conscious? And if not, wouldn’t it be useful to cultivate such a desire, if possible, in the interest of becoming a better analyst with the erotic motivation that impels a deep curiosity about the private morphology of all my clients? Or is Klein’s hetero axiom about genital teleology just too queer a stretch for me to apprehend? If this is the case, then my only option might be to mourn what could not be and what may never be—the losses that are peculiar to the queer experience of feeling excluded from the idealized versions of the family (and the “normal” Freudian family romance) that proliferate in our society (Butler, 1995; Crespi, 1995).