To little surprise, family pathology presents one of the most frequent ways neuroses develop. After all, from the first to the last breath of life we are connected in conscious and unconscious ways to our family. First, let’s take a step back and consider how the young child’s consciousness develops. ‘During the first years of life there is hardly any consciousness, though the existence of psychic processes manifests itself at a very early stage. These processes, however, are not grouped round an organized ego; they have no centre and therefore no continuity, lacking which a conscious personality is impossible. Consequently, the child has in our sense no memory, despite the plasticity and susceptibility of its psychic organ. Only when the child begins to say "I" is there any perceptible continuity of consciousness. But in between there are frequent periods of unconsciousness. One can actually see the conscious mind coming into existence through the gradual unification of fragments’ [1]. While this process continues into puberty and oftentimes even into adulthood, during early childhood it proceeds at far greater speed.
Now, what is important to consider is that in these early formative years the child is largely dependent on the parents in virtually all aspects of life. Physical protection, food provision, hygiene and of course emotional care. This link is so strong that the child lives in a state of ‘participation mystique’, of unconscious identity, with the parents. So much so, that the child often has an uncanny intuitive insight into the psychic situation of the parents (as well as other people). The tale of ‘the emperor without clothes’ points to the superior clairvoyance children can show in seeing the obvious and apparent while the adult mind, muddled with habituated cognitive biases, overlooks the plain. As a result of this shrewdness of children, little can be concealed from them, least of all the conflicts of the parents. ‘The child is so much a part of the psychological atmosphere of the parents that secret and un solved problems between them can influence its health profoundly. The participation mystique, or primitive identity, causes the child to feel the conflicts of the parents and to suffer from them as if they were its own.’ But here comes the catch. Conflicts that are carried out in the open and consciously admitted to hardly ever have such an insufferable effect on the children. Rather it is the issues that are kept hidden and continually shoved under the carpet that are the problem. ‘The repressed problems and the suffering thus fraudulently avoided secrete an insidious poison which seeps into the soul of the child through the thickest walls of silence and through the whited sepulchres of deceit, complacency, and evasion. The child is helplessly exposed to the psychic influence of the parents and is bound to copy their self-deception, their insincerity, hypocrisy, cowardice, self-righteousness, and selfish regard for their own comfort, just as wax takes up the imprint of the seal’ [2].
As a rule, the child subsequently goes one of two ways. Either they rebel with unspoken (or occasionally open) protest or submit themselves to a ‘paralysing and compulsive imitation’. In both cases, the attitude is injurious because the child cannot act, feel and live as they want. In the former case the child rebels by using the parents weapons, thereby copying them unconsciously. In the latter case, the child’s individuality is replaced by the conscious imitation of the parents. Either way they ‘will be forced into fulfilling all the things the parents have repressed and kept unconscious’ [2].
As the reader might imagine, this way neuroses are passed from one generation to the next. Not without reason does it say in Deuteronomy 5:9 that God ‘the iniquity of the fathers will be visited on the children to the third and fourth generation’ [3]. Not only the Old Testament but numerous myths refer to this fundamental psychic fact. The Greek myth of the curse of Atreus is one such story. Thereby, Tantalus kills his son to test the omniscience of the Gods. As punishment for this crime, the following five generations of the House of Atreus are compelled in a vicious cycle of murder and revenge.
Jung adds an important caveat from his empirical experience: Rather than the deeds of the parents, it is most frequently their ‘unlived life’ that has the strongest effect on the child. By this, it is meant ‘that part of their lives which might have been lived had not certain somewhat threadbare excuses prevented the parents from doing so.’ It is that section of life they have always neglected, likely with the help of a pious falsehood. These so-called ‘sins of omission’ are what sow the most virulent germs.
Jung recounts a case history a 13 year old girl of exceptional intelligence who behaved antisocial, rebellious and occasionally inattentive in school. Because of her intelligence she was placed in a class of pupils several years older than her. As a result, she was forced to live a prematurely-developed life. In terms of the situation at home, the father was primarily consumed by his business and consequently ‘seemed more like a shadowy ideal than an actual reality’. As for the mother she ‘was a woman of brilliant intellect, with an intense will to power, who had early decided that her daughter must be a prodigy.’ ‘The child had to be a success to satisfy her mother's desires and expectations and flatter her vanity. A mother like this does not, as a rule, see the individual character of her child. The children of such mothers are practically nothing more than dolls, to be dressed up and adorned. They are nothing but mute figures on the chessboard of their parents' egoism, and the maddening thing is that all this is done under the cloak of selfless devotion to the dear child, whose happiness is the sole aim of the mother's life. But in actual fact the child is not given a grain of real love’ [2]. And so, this dynamic resulted in the mother forcing every intellectual faculty in the child while suppressing all emotional growth. It comes as no surprise then that the girl suffered from a tremendous pressure of pent-up emotions, which finally found an outlet in homosexual fantasies of her teachers. Ultimately, with the help of dream-analysis, the girl was able to realize the unnatural life she was forced to lead and acknowledge her need for normal companionship. This understanding as well as a change of surroundings finally brought a considerable improvement.
In this context, Jung highlights ‘Nothing is more stunting than the efforts of a mother to embody herself in her child, without ever considering that a child is not a mere appendage, but a new and individual creature’ [2]. Because children are only ‘nominally’ descended from their parents, one frequently needs to go back several hundred years to see the family likeness of a child. To a mother, this frighteningly foreign individuality of the child can often prove so intimidating that they would rather suppress it, albeit usually unconsciously.
Besides the crushing effect of having an obsessive parent, a range of other family pathologies can thwart the child’s soul. Another, for instance, is when marital difficulties are stubbornly denied and swept under the carpet, leaving the child in a chronic state of confusion. Jung reports from a 9-year-old girl who suffered from persisting hypothermia due to which she couldn’t attend school. Symptoms of this condition included loss of appetite and increasing lethargy. After the general practitioner could not find any clear cause of the condition, the parents turned to a child psychologist. Finally, it was revealed that the parent’s relationship had gone sour and that the mother wanted a divorce, though shying away from it due to the upheaval it would leave in its wake. All this the parents diligently hid from the child under the pretense of shielding the child. Naturally, the child knew of these nonetheless and had all sorts of dreams that alluded to the parental situation. The child also confessed to the psychologist that whenever the father went on business trips she was scared he would not return, though concealing these feelings from her parents ‘because it would make them feel bad’. Eventually, the parents realized that they only made their child ill by leaving the conflict unresolved in mid-air. This gave them the necessary courage to finally separate. Although a divided home is a poor arrangement for any child, the relief of being liberated from her vague worries and forebodings was so great that she returned to health and could enjoy school and play once more [2].
The third and last example concerns four children whose neuroses were all traced back to a certain secret the mother had harboured. After a long psychological excavation, Jung learned that the mother, a talented and lively young woman, had been educated along narrow and very one-sided lines. Despite her creative inclination, the woman lived the persona of a married housewife with utmost strictness. No exceptions were allowed. Nevertheless, she fell in love with a friend of her husbands who reciprocated these feelings. Her rules forbade this love and hence she vehemently repressed this desire for over twenty years! Increasingly, she suffered periodically from bouts of melancholia. [2] The lives of her four children clearly show how such an oppressive attitude can spread like a contagion through generations: The two daughters both swung to the other side. The first fell in love and became engaged with an ‘eminently suitable man’, but couldn’t help it and had an affair with one of her father’s office employees. The second got married to a guy below her mental level and after a year entered into a drawn-out love affair with one of her husband's friends. On the other hand, the first son suffered from chronic indecision. After becoming engaged he started doubting the decision and suffered from such severe anxiety states that he had to be admitted to an asylum for a few months. The engagement naturally was broken off. Lastly, the second son became a woman-hater who was determined to stay single all his life. Jung concludes that while the daughters imitated their mother’s unconscious attitude of infidelity, the sons copied their mother’s conscious attitude by repressing love. None of them were free to live their own lives but were compelled by fate to rectify their mother’s repression [2]. For good reason Jung warns ‘what is not brought to consciousness comes to us as fate’ [4].
And yet, this is not an indictment for parents to become ‘perfect’, to become textbook parents that rehearse some definite method. Jung emphasizes this would be a serious misunderstanding. In fact, it would amount to a ‘positive catastrophe’ because the child is then forced into moral inferiority in relation to the overly ‘impressive’ parents. Rather, genuine effort and confession of one’s struggles already go a long way. Jung condenses it ever-so-eloquently: ‘The only thing that can save the child from un natural injury is the efforts of the parents not to shirk the psychic difficulties of life by deceitful maneuvers or by remaining artificially unconscious, but rather to accept them as tasks, to be as honest with themselves as possible, and to shed a beam of light into the darkest corners of their souls’ [2].
In the story of Atreus’s curse, Orestes finally put himself on trial before the Greek gods. Apollo, in which Orestes had sought refuge, defended him while the Furies persecuted him. In a deciding moment, Athena acquitted Orestes and lifted the curse as an act of justice and forgiveness. It seems, to break intergenerational pathology requires nothing short of divine mercy.
References
1. Jung, C. G. (1954). The development of personality. The collected works of C. G. Jung (R. F. C. Hull, Trans., Vol. 17). Princeton University Press. [Chapter 3: Child development and education]
2. Jung, C. G. (1954). The development of personality. The collected works of C. G. Jung (R. F. C. Hull, Trans., Vol. 17). Princeton University Press. [Chapter 4: Analytical psychology and education]
3. Holy Bible. (1982). New King James Version. Thomas Nelson. (Original work published ca. 500 BCE). [Deuteronomy 5:9]
4. Jung, C. G. (1954). The archetypes and the collective unconscious. The collected works of C. G. Jung (R. F. C. Hull, Trans., Vol. 17). Princeton University Press. [Chapter 2: Archetypes of the collective unconscious]
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