Is parental love unconditional or narcissistic?
Is parental love unconditional and unselfish or is it a form of narcissism?
It is believed that the most pure type of love is the love of the parent towards the child. We tend to think that a person by becoming a parent renounces his-her self for the sake of his-her child. Even Freud in his essay on narcissism declared that one of the ways that a narcissistic woman could achieve anaclitic object love is by giving birth to a child (Freud 1914: 88-90). Is that the case or could we see the child as the heir of the parents self and the person who will fulfill the parent’s unfulfilled wishes, which in that case the love towards the child could be characterized as narcissistic?
The child is many times seen by the parent as the one who will set right all the mistakes that he did in his life. We see in our child the new and improved edition of ourselves and we have the expectation that the child will achieve what we couldn’t achieve. The ego of the parent needs to be immortal and the only way that could be accomplished is through the child in which the parent’s ego takes refuge. The parent’s abandoned narcissism is revived and reproduced by the birth of a child (Freud 1914: 90-1). Many times parents try to control their children’s lives and influence their choices so that the children will fulfill the parent’s wishes that they themselves were unable to fulfill.
The child could sometimes take the place of the parent’s ideal ego as the child symbolizes the continuity and immortality of the parent. The parental (family) genes will live eternally, through the children, the children’s children and so on; and what could be more ideal than immortality and eternal life? This feeling of triumphing over death relates to a sense of omnipotence which is a basic narcissistic trait. When the ideal ego is formed the self love is withdrawn from the actual ego and directed towards the ideal (Freud 1914: 94). Once a love object, in this case a child, consumes the ego and the ego devotes itself to the object the object can take the place of the person’s ego ideal (Freud 1921: 113). By connecting the two Freudian statements if the child does become the parent’s ego ideal the self love from the parent’s ego ideal is directed towards the child. We could also suggest that according to that the parental love towards the child is actually a self-love (a narcissistic love), since the child took the place of the parent’s ego ideal.
In men fatherhood can be the fulfillment of a narcissistic wish. The man as a boy has the wish to satisfy his mother and at a point he can do that as he gives his mother the satisfaction of becoming a mother. In that way he can satisfy his mother as a mother but not as a woman so his wish remains in a part unfulfilled. As an adult the boy is able to overcome the trauma of not being able to totally satisfy his mother by being able to be the only one who can fully satisfy his partner. The man satisfies his partner as a woman and also as a mother when he assists her to fulfill her maternal wish. Not only the birth of a child by a permanent relationship itself, can give the possibility to each member of the couple to come closer to a narcissistic completeness, as each member can fully satisfy the other member of the couple (Manninen 1993: 35-7). A healthy baby that is being taken care of by his parents becomes an ideal and reassures the parents that they have created a success (Manninen 1993: 37-8). Vesa Manninen (1993) states that: “the basic triangle of life – father, mother, baby, is the narcissistic fulfillment for everyone” (Manninen 1993: 38).
Others have stated that parental love does not remain narcissistic although it may have started on a narcissistic path. The child is frequently seen as an extension of the parent and the love might towards is might be narcissistic in that way. Many times though a parent’s love can evolve and become the most unselfish, altruistic and unconditional type of love. Parents might reach the point of acknowledging and the object’s (child’s) independence while putting aside as secondary their own narcissistic needs that are projected on the child (Eisnitz 1969: 16). From that we can see that the key for a parent to reach anaclitic type of object love is being able to separate the child from himself and treating it as a separate human being able to mature, make its’ own decisions and living its’ own life.
The idea of a child being loved by the parent in a narcissistic way is contradictory even in Freudian theory itself. As we already said Freud claimed that a child could be the reason that a woman achieves complete object love and on the other hand he stated that parental love could be the displacement of the parent’s narcissism from the self (ego and ego ideal) onto the child (Freud 1914:88-91). The attempt of this paper was to answer the question “is parental love narcissistic or unselfish”. It’s a very broad question and it can not be easily answered. By taking into consideration the psychoanalytic theory we can not give a general answer to something like that. The way a parent loves his children and the unconscious motives and wishes behind that love, has to do with the way that parent was broad up, with his relationship with his parents, with which type of love did he “choose” to love his children. After all people do not fall into categories of narcissistic object love and anaclitic object love, both kinds are open to a person and he-she shows some preference to the one or the other in his-her life (Freud 1914: 88).