Be it the austere father with whom and against whom the oedipal drama is to be completed or the empathic mother remedying infancy and early childhood deficits of nurture, the parental fallacy continues to be one of the most persistent and striking elements in psychoanalytic practice; persistent in its quasi-universality and striking in the uncritical support it has managed to accrue.
Indeed, and with the notable exception of some of those working in the Lacanian and relational fields, the endorsement of the parental model as a marker of sound clinical practice has substituted the dynamic unconscious and its primary process as the principle through which the analytic profession has come to identify and unify itself. In spite of their differences with the ego-psychological paradigm upon which that arbiter of professional standards was founded, revisionists and so-called dissidents have been able to hold on to their presence within the International Psychoanalytical Association not so much by an allegiance to first principles regarding the psyche but by their endorsement of a mechanism whereby the parental stance is grafted onto both the institutional and the clinical.
Institutionally, this grafting has had the double effect of A) producing a hierarchy—the IPA—that is now fully grown into its status as hermaphroditic parent: father defending and policing the genealogical lines of access and exclusion, and mother providing for the offspring’s political and clinical sustenance; and B) the growth of societies and institutes outside the fold that, not coincidentally, have often operated with a number of tropes and models other than the parental.
Clinically, the insistence on a parental schema, as well as its attendant hierarchies of knowledge and experience, has served to reinforce a divide between doctor and patient in matters of diagnosis, treatment, and health, a divide that, sadly, much of psychoanalysis continues to carry over from its nineteenth century roots.
In a parallel mode, this insistence has helped consolidate an understanding of psychopathology as a stagnation or a regression in the individual’s temporal journey from primary, childish, or primitive defenses and coping strategies to more mature modes of organisation of self and/or relations to others. For many, this has become axiomatic. Under the banner of genital love, ego autonomy, the depressive position, or an integrated self, health is posited as a culminating synthesis and with it are articulated not only the aims but also the modes and stages of analytic inquiry.
Whether it is framed in terms of conflict or deficit, or a combination thereof, the cause of the stagnation is located in a disruption in the individual’s earliest relations with his or her primary caregivers. In this context, analysis has to submit to the model of a process by which a repetition of the original development is pursued, though with a healthier resolution. As the stage upon which such a repetition unfolds, the transference is expected to absorb as many features of the pathology as it can bear and, in so doing, to allow for that pathology’s re-emergence and possible treatment in an environment that is both safe and robust!
