COMMENTS
449
parental expectations) is stood on its head, and the parent copies the
child."
The core of the problem we meet today in the general culture and
in many neurotic people, both those who come for analytic treatment
and those who do not, is the changed role of the father, the unresolved
Oedipal complex, and the decline of the superego as a guiding force. It
is likely that one of the factors in this development is the weakening of
religion. God the Father has gradually lost his power. Even the young
people who try desperately to return to religion look for Christ the Son,
not for God the Father. Former generations of fathers derived their own
strength from God the Father and felt conviction in the standards they
enforced in the education of their offspring. And it was easier for the
child to bear the demands of a father who himself had to submit to a
higher being.
Permissive parents do not realize what a difficult task a child has
to
accomplish in learning
to
live in a family and in society, and they
give the child very little help. A child is able to adjust to stable rules,
like a driver to traffic rules, but not if the parents themselves do not
really believe in them or if the rules are constantly changing. Parents
influenced and confused by the fashions of the times have abdicated
their roles and given up their indispensable function of guiding
children. These misunderstood children are treated by many parents as
if they were a suppressed minority who had to be liberated. Guidance is
considered undemocratic. As a result, the children then form peer
groups to help them bear their confusion.
In his time Freud met a strong resistance in common sense, and he
tried to convince his colleagues and readers that common sense does
not suffice
to
understand the human psyche. But no one at that time
could have foreseen how common sense could be lost entirely and
natural parental responses distorted. To illustrate this point: A bright
young woman invites her four-year-old boy into the bedroom to
witness her sexual performance with different lovers-the child needs
honesty and not secrets. Another couple tell their friends proudly how
their firstborn five-year-old boy accompanied the father
to
observe the
mother at the delivery of their second child-to be really enlightened
about the facts of life. One might be tempted to interpret the behavior
of the mother who invites her child to observe her sex life as an
exhibitionistic perversion; more likely she truly thinks she is doing
what is best for her child. Such parents do not see that children
confronted so provocatively with the adult sexual life are stimulated
and frightened, feeling all the more their own smallness, weakness, and
impotence. The very core of the problem of childhood-that children
