Family romance
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The family romance is a psychological complex identified by Sigmund Freud in an essay he wrote in 1909 entitled "The Family Romances." In it he describes various phases a child experiences as he or she must confront the fact that the parents are not wholly emotionally available. The child has asexual feelings of jealousy within the family, and as a defense the young child or adolescent fantasizes that they are really the children of parents of higher social standing than their actual parents. The fantasy avenges the child's hurt by positing a better family. Later, the child's jealousies will become more overtly sexual as he or she passes through various stages of Oedipal development. More broadly, the term can be used to cover the whole range of instinctual ties between siblings, and parents and children.[1]
Freud's thesis
Later psychoanalysts have added that the child may turn to imaginary parents of a lower (= uninhibited) social standing;[2] and have seen the essence of the romance in the splitting and doubling of the parents[3] – a dichotomization which hinders the effective working through of the parent complex.[4]
Literary examples
- The institutionalised heroine of I Never Promised You a Rose Garden shares a room with a memory-impaired girl who gives herself multiple sets of musical celebrity parents: "My father – he's Paderewski, and my mother is Sophie Tucker".[5]
- The 'Gothic Family Romance' is the converse projection of the hostile or threatening aspects of the parents on to monsters and threats from outside the family in Gothic fiction.[6]
See also
References
- ↑ M. Sweet, Inventing the Victorians (London 2001) p. 155
- ↑ Otto Fenichel, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (London 1946) p. 96
- ↑ M. Solomon, Beethoven Essays (London 1988) p. 88
- ↑ J-M Quinodoz, Reading Freud (London 2006) p. 168
- ↑ Hannah Green, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (Pan 1967) p. 220
- ↑ M. Backus, The Gothic Family Romance (1999) p. 18-19