Ambivalence: The coexistence of opposing attitudes or feelings, such as love and hate, toward a person, object, or idea.
The separation of sexual activity from reproduction has created the ideal circumstances in which to expose and express our essential ambivalence toward our children. Ambivalence, if it were to become conscious, would be highly disturbing to most people (cognitive dissonance); to avoid awareness of unacceptable feelings an individual typically will repress the more negative emotions and over emphasize the positive. In the most severe cases, the ambivalently held feeling is completely disavowed and projected and attributed to another person; this is the mechanism that fuels paranoia: Since I am a good person, I can not tolerate feeling hatred toward you, therefore I disown the hatred and make it yours; finally, since you hate me, I am then fully justified in attacking you.
(I will only address this to the GWOT if pressed on the point; suffice it to say that 9/11 hardly seemed like it was a projection of our own rage at others; it seemed pretty clearly to be a direct expression of their hatred for us, even if some rationalize it as our fault.)
Another common mechanism for dealing with ambivalence is splitting. This occurs, for example, in many children who were abused. In those cases, the mother, who has as one of her jobs the protection of her children, is idealized in order to preserve her as a love object, and the father, the abuser, is the devalued object. All the love is then preserved for the mother and all the hatred for the father. A fuller appreciation of how both parents share complicity in the abusive situation is often never attained. While this is an oversimplification of a complex situation, it is a common place dynamic in many adults who have a history of abuse.
In development the child has to form a syntheses of all the various object representations that ultimately form the parental image in the child's mind. In other words, there are multiple images of the mother (or father) as loving, nurturing, gratifying; there are also multiple images of the mother as frustrating and rejecting the child. All children have these multiple images of the parents since gratification and frustration are inevitable features of the parent-child relationship. (It is not hard to see how genuine abuse and neglect can complicate the psychological job for the child, who has the confusing task of obtaining love and care from the same person or persons who give them such pain.) No parent can ever be perfectly in tune with their infant and young child, and even if that mythical parent could be perfectly empathic, it would be impossible, and destructive, to allow the child to have everything they want. In any event, the positive, or idealized, and negative, or devalued, images of the parent must be fused into a single, unified person in order for the child to be able to form realistically gratifying relationships. The person who has more than the usual difficulty fusing these images, or fails to have "good enough" parenting, is prone to the psychological mechanism referred to earlier as splitting. These people tend to see others as either "all good" idealized objects, or as "all bad" devalued objects. This is often a factor in the narcissistic character who tends to see himself in a grandiose light as a defense against a deeper, devalued self-representation.
I have written quite a bit about Narcissism (Narcissism, Malignant Narcissism, and Paranoia: Part I, II, III, and IV) and Dr. Sanity wrote a recent series on Narcissism and Society (Parts I, II, and III) which is quite helpful in understanding the subject.
One implication of fusing (synthesis) versus splitting is that our image of our parents, and by extension, our image of ourselves which forms in relation to the internalized parental images, is a mixture of positive and negative emotional states. This has profound implications for our relationships with our children. Ambivalence, splitting, and narcissism, have all been well studied in adults, especially in terms of a person's relationships with love objects and parents; however, the ways in which these mechanisms are expressed towards our children has rarely been directly commented upon. Suggesting that parents might have conflictual feelings towards their children is painful for all involved and usually denied in polite society, despite the abundant evidence to be found in the pages of any local newspaper and on our nightly newscasts. Children are the vessels which contain all of our hopes and dreams. Parental narcissism (both healthy narcissism and pathological narcissism) is deeply invested in our children. At the same time, on a a more unconscious level, they contain devalued images as well. Typically, parents have difficulty tolerating those traits in their children which they can not bear to recognize or like in themselves.
While we give lip service to our dedication to children, and our politicians constantly compete to be seen as more supportive of children, the reality is darker and more complex.
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