A dialogue across five generations

Every life is marked by its relation to time, which oscillates between a feeling of rupture and a feeling of continuity. This relation to time is also woven by our inscription within our filiations and by what we have transmitted of them. Every life is also marked by oscillations between certainties and doubts and by the relation to death from the very beginning, owing to the physiological prematurity of the infant. It is also marked by the inevitable mismatches and misunderstandings with others, which, when exacerbated, provoke rupture, separation and suffering. Despite illusory and necessary certainties, we advance through life like a tightrope walker, between permanence and rupture, continuity and change, invention and routine, progress and regression, illusions and losses. We have the feeling of a permanence of our sense of identity, but different periods of our life, different events, make it waver and remind us that our identity is made up of fragments in perpetual evolution.

It is no doubt in becoming the parent of adult children and in undergoing the experience of grandparenthood that the way we look upon our personal and family history, upon our relation to our forebears, their lives, their choices, is remodeled, modified — which in turn causes our sense of identity to evolve. This moment of passage places us at the crossroads of five generations and engenders within us a dialogue between past and future, ancestors, descendants and ourselves, one that sometimes modifies the way we look upon our history, our life choices, the way we look upon our forebears and our descendants.

Much is said about the “adolescent crisis,” a moment of crisis shared by parents and children, each in his own way. There is little reflection on what is put back into play by children’s passage into adulthood and the experience of grandparenthood. Parenthood is a psychic process that develops throughout life. The experience of parenthood is also called into question when children become adults, and above all in grandparenthood — two major tests of truth, often difficult but very rich.

The experience of parenthood inevitably refers back to a particular, very archaic experience, in which the question arises, for the parents, of the extreme dependence of the one to whom they have given life. This inevitably induces what Piera Aulagnier calls primary violence and excess.¹

It is in the bodily intimacy with the child, and in a relation overdetermined also by the physiological prematurity of the infant, that the maternal and parenthood are created. “Primary maternal preoccupation,” which Winnicott deems necessary for the mother’s adaptation to the child and for her receptivity to its needs, expresses a state in which the mother is transiently “mentally ill.” Winnicott writes, in the article entitled “Primary Maternal Preoccupation”: “This organized state could be compared to a withdrawn state, to a state of dissociation, to a flight, or even to a disturbance occurring at a deeper level, such as a schizoid episode.”² André Green, in La Folie privée (Private Madness),³ describes a normal and transient “maternal madness.” This experience inevitably leaves traces in every parent-child relationship. Even if the child’s motor and cognitive development, the passage through the various ages of its life, attenuate it, limit it, repress it, it remains one of the unconscious bedrocks of that relationship. It can resurface when the child, still a child or grown an adult, presents a serious illness that induces a temporary or lasting dependence. This is what the experience of psychotherapies shows, for example with patients suffering acquired brain injury.⁴

This original relationship with the child, fundamentally asymmetrical, also raises the question of the limitless gift that inevitably inscribes itself within every parent-child relationship. As Eiguer explains in an article entitled “The Gift and the Debt, or the Misunderstanding of Generosity,”⁵ parental solicitude in the first moments of life — indispensable to the survival of the infans, and which also opens onto its fantasy life — creates a gift that is inevitably alienating, guilt-inducing, a heavy debt to bear. We know in psychopathology all the avatars of the gift and of the inevitable debt between parents and children.

Philippe Gutton, in the journal Adolescence on Parenthood, writes: “Where archaic parenthood was, it must be suspended in order to come into being.”⁶ It is perhaps at the moment of children’s passage into adulthood, in the experience of grandparenthood, that archaic parenthood can be suspended in order to come into being.

With children’s passage into adulthood comes, once again, the loss of one’s parental superiority. But above all, the child who has himself become a parent undergoes in reverse what he knew as a baby. This can modify the relation to his parents, the way he looks upon them, the identifications with them. It can allow a break not a factitious one with parental omnipotence, as is often the case in adolescence, but a more complex and less caricatural break, at least in the best of cases (an enormous number of factors intervene, of course, in this process, and can hinder it, limit it, create impasses).

At the same time, the process of the gift and the debt is reworked. The child who has become a parent becomes himself an agent of the gift in relation to his own children, which can modify the relation he may have to the one he received from his own parents.

S. Lebovici often said that it was also the child who “made the parents” and who allowed the processes of parentalization to come into being.⁷ The reciprocal recognition between parent and child and the inscription within a filiation are not self-evident, as the construction in each of us of a fantasized “family romance” testifies. Every parent-child relationship is also woven through a process of reciprocal “adoption” in which the question of the like and the foreign, in oneself and in the other, intervenes. This process is continually called into question in various forms, as the clinic of the cure or of psychoanalytic psychotherapies shows. This questioning is keener at certain moments and, no doubt, at the child’s passage into adulthood. Parents may indeed be troubled, disarmed, in disarray and incomprehension before the life choices and ways of being that reveal themselves at the child’s passage into adulthood (but perhaps they had until then been deaf and blind). These choices and ways of being, which seem lasting (and not merely transient as in adolescence), sometimes appear contradictory to the values and identity that the parents sought consciously to transmit, or else they seem incomprehensible, opaque, mysterious.

The trouble, the disarray, the feeling of a parent-child dialogue that can no longer, or cannot, get under way, of a profound mutual incomprehension, raises several questions with acuity. Who is this child to me, what relationship do I have with him? Who am I to him? What, then, have I transmitted? These questions set back into motion not only the nature of the bond with the child, but also the parent’s inscription within his own filiation. They engender multiple waverings and identity questionings. How, as an adolescent and a young adult, did I construct my identity-based and cultural references? What were, beyond the conscious reasons, their deep reasons? Am I too dependent on these references, even if I have evolved and have been able to take an interest in novelty and in the developments of the century? As long as my parents and sometimes my grandparents were still alive, they moored me to the chain of time and generations. Did I not, under these conditions, unburden myself of the preoccupation and the responsibility of transmitting myself, to my children, what seemed to me worth transmitting; was I enough of an agent in the mooring to the chain of time and generations? Do the banal divergences of life choices and values with my own parents have excessive consequences on my children’s generation? And if so, why? Is it due to a family history marked by a succession of ruptures and traumas? The questioning can be infinite…

In “Communicating and Not Communicating,”⁸ Winnicott writes that at the heart of every person there is an element of non-communication “that is sacred and the safeguarding of which is most precious.” This element has to do with the core of the personality, which corresponds for him to the “true self.” It is very important to respect it, and when this is not the case, it induces the organization of primitive defenses with isolation (to be distinguished from the necessity for each person to be able to be alone and to preserve the intimate within himself), and it favors the creation of a “false self.” A share of the intimate and of mystery is inherent in every relation to the other. The parent-child relationship is no exception, unless the fundamental violence of the original is prolonged into a relation of control and excessive intrusion aimed at annulling that necessary mystery and intimacy. However, in certain moments of the relation to the child — and here I am speaking solely of the relation to the adult child — the opacity and mystery the child reflects back can be excessive. There may then arise violently, in the parent, the question of the like and the foreign. This shaking of parental omnipotence can make the illusory self-evidence of parenthood waver. To evolve requires a complex, painful psychic work, often at an impasse, as the bursting-apart, the distancing, the rupture of family bonds, the parent-child or child-parent violence that is the daily lot of our clinic testify. But this psychic work is also bearer of change and of a new maturity when it can take place. It allows a new releasing of the grip of archaic parenthood and allows parenthood to come into being — to take up Gutton’s expression again.

The choices of children become adults also call into question what was transmitted to them as well as to their parents.

The process of transmission is complex. This complexity is heightened by the mutations and events that ran through the 20th century. The trajectories of families in today’s France are diverse, owing to the individual events that can punctuate each person’s life (births, separations, illnesses, bereavements, and so on), to the historical events that marked the 20th century, and to the socio-economic mutations of more than fifty years: blended families, unemployment, the risk of social marginalization, internal migration (city-countryside, from one city to another), modification of socio-economic status from one generation to the next, immigration from other countries, the passage for some through wars, genocides, dictatorships. These various elements are bearers of traumas and of unelaborated impasses within the family history that resurface in the following generations in diverse and sometimes unexpected forms.

Several moments and modalities of transmission can be distinguished: passive reception; and the time when transmission is actively sought and represents a genuine act. The latter modifies the relation to one’s forebears, allows one to appropriate the family history, to transform a narrative about that history — which risks being merely intellectual and abstract — into a living knowledge invested with affects, transmissible and shareable in turn with others. The act of transmission, unlike passively received transmission, allows one to think and to integrate, with one’s own words and affects, the transmission received from one’s parents and grandparents. The act of transmission, when it exists, is always partial, bearer of impasses and difficulties for several reasons. It engenders, of course, around a fictional dialogue with one’s forebears, a reconstruction of the family history. In every approach to the family history and in every modality of its transmission, certain events are probably established, others closer to a family legend, still others bearing witness to the reconstruction of the history across the generations on the basis of a very partial knowledge of the events, especially when they have a strong emotional impact. Like every act of recollection, the recall of family events partakes of a reconstruction. Across the generations, a history reconstructs itself, reinterpreting the action of forebears and one’s own actions, the events lived through, going so far in certain cases as to erase or modify them. These elements are unavoidable. Inevitably, every transmission of the family history, every act of transmission, is also fictional, even if it rests on established events.

Every interrogation about the family history and its transmission also stumbles inevitably on the question of the “umbilicus” of that history and of its origin. Freud said, concerning the interpretation of dreams, that pushed to the extreme it reached its “umbilicus,” which he compared to a mycelium: a fabulous, infinite arborescence which, from question to question, soon makes one forget the original question.⁹ One must know how to live with this umbilicus too, with an inevitable share of opacity, otherwise the quest for the family history, the interrogations about it and about what has been transmitted, can come closely to resemble Balzac’s Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu (The Unknown Masterpiece).¹⁰ The painter, by dint of striving toward perfection with the feeling that each brushstroke brings him closer to the masterpiece, turns the painting into an illegible chaos.

We are all caught up in several types of transmission that we have difficulty making coexist: a transmission in the positive, a “scrambled” transmission, a surplus transmission. Conscious, positive transmission covers that of values, of identities, of the conscious narrative about the family history and its myths. Scrambled transmission covers the unsaid, what may be unacceptable because excessive, incomprehensible, distant or unrepresentable owing to the multiplicity of traumas and ruptures that have studded the family history. Surplus transmission is unconscious transmission, occurring without our knowledge, verbal and non-verbal, in which there intervenes what has been repressed in relation to parents and grandparents, even to more distant forebears — the unconscious fantasies underlying the choices that were made, the values and identities that were transmitted.

All these aspects of transmission deploy themselves in the choices of children become adults, in the astonishment they can provoke in their parents, in the questioning and the inner dialogue between generations that they induce.

What is reflected back by children, which sometimes appears so mysterious or troubling, is perhaps also the caricature of a part of the parents that has been repressed or denied — of their ambivalences, of the unconscious relations maintained with the forebears beyond conscious submission and continuity, or, on the contrary, beyond revolt and the rejection of their choices. It is perhaps also the caricature of their grandparents (the parents’ parents), even of their forebears, bound up with imaginary representations, myths, scraps of history, an attempt to find an origin and an identity despite a family history marked by traumas, ruptures, by the unrepresentable — an attempt to ensure that a major trauma (such as the Shoah, for example) does not become the origin of the family history.¹¹

The choices of children become adults thus invite each person to visit or revisit an opaque part of himself and of his family history, with the feeling of the familiar and the foreign, the near and the distant. Is it possible to seize this occasion? The path is difficult and strewn with pitfalls, with the permanent risk of fixed positions, the risk of rigidifying them, the risk of deafness and blindness, but sometimes also the possibility of partially evolving the way one looks upon oneself and one’s life, upon one’s forebears, upon what has been transmitted from the forebears and to the descendants.

Beyond the parent-child relationship, the stakes of a possible evolution, even a limited one, in the way one looks upon parenthood, are also what may be transmitted to the grandchildren. Fixed positions (those of the parents, those of the children) can provoke in them incomprehension and suffering and have consequences on the construction of their sense of identity and on their necessary inscription within each of their lineages. Grandparents can help grandchildren to step out of the parent-child relationship alone and to inscribe themselves within a family history and a generational continuity that began before their parents’ birth. They can help them to inscribe themselves, in a non-constraining and non-alienating way, within a family history that they will reappropriate and cause to evolve. But on condition of not placing them in the position of privileged interlocutors or heirs, in the place of their parents who would have disappointed, in their position as children or as parents. It is desirable that grandparents be able to reflect on what they transmit to their grandchildren (not an idealized, truncated, censored history centered on dramas, and so on); on the way they transmit it (neither rambling, nor cramming, nor obstinate silence, and so on) — at the risk of placing them in the position of avengers of their defeats and failures, at the risk of remaining shut up in the past, sometimes admired, idealized, or misunderstood, uninteresting.

To become grandparents is to move forward one square in the generational game, and grandparents are very often, from then on, in the front line facing death. The proximity of their parents’ death, or its having already occurred — perhaps still the fact of being in mourning for them — can tear us between the preoccupation with our parents and that turned toward our children and grandchildren. It is also in this complex period that the remobilization of psychic processes can make us take the measure, once again and differently, of the inevitably missed appointments of every parent-child relationship. Hence, sometimes, renewed modalities of identification with one’s own parents, and sometimes a more complex view of their trajectories, their attitudes, their clumsinesses, their rigidities, their deafnesses (and of those of the children that these grandparents once were).

The passage of children into adulthood and into grandparenthood as a fertile moment of dialogue across five generations — this is what clinical practice bears witness to.

Notes