The Two Sets of Parents

 In his pioneering effort in the psychoanalytic study of myth, the famous Myth of the Birth of the Hero, Otto Rank takes his point of departure from the fact that societies all over the world have told versions of the same story about their chosen founding figures and culture-heroes. The birth-story of Moses provides a particularly well-known and archetypical example, but there are countless others. The archetype still recurs in modern pop culture as well. Think of the origin story of Superman, which is essentially the Moses legend with a space opera twist. 

In its basic form, the story goes like this: an originally high-born hero faces some sort of persecution from birth, designed to prevent him from coming into the world (frequently, in the myth, there has been some prophecy that he will grow up to destroy and/or supplant his father). He is therefore hidden or left exposed, only to be rescued by humble parents, who raise him in ignorance of his true origin. Through a course of events in adulthood, he eventually discovers his true parentage and takes his rightful place at the head of the nation's destiny. 

Most of the elements are there in Superman: high-born parents from a distant planet; the exposure from birth; the placing the child in a box and setting him adrift on the water in order to save his life (or, in this case, setting him adrift in the starry heavens); the rescue by kind but humble parents; the growth to maturity in ignorance of his true origins, even as various signs pile up that there is a mighty future and unique destiny in store for him; the eventual discovery of his real identity and the task that it calls him to perform. The only things missing are the prophecy and the reunification. 

Rank points out that all of these stories could take the same form because they descend from a common ancestor; but if so—he points out—this wouldn't then provide an explanation for that first ur-myth of the hero from which they all descend. In order to explain the genuine root causes of the archetype, therefore, we must look to the psyche. And here, Rank draws heavily on his mentor Freud—most especially on Freud's classic essay on "Family Romances." These so-called romances are a reference to a certain daydream common in childhood: the one that says my true parents must be hidden; these two people must be imposters. 

Henry Roth's modernist classic, Call It Sleep, illustrates the "Family Romance" concept well—perhaps a little too programmatically so, if anything. The child protagonist of the novel has a classically Freudian fixation on his mother. He does not want her ever to leave his sight. In one scene, when she protests that he is a little tyrant, and that she needs to leave him at least for a moment if she is going to put food on the table, he still insists that she stay, reflecting that it is better to have her angry and paying attention to him than calm but elsewhere. 

And in keeping with the Oedipal triangle, the character fears and resents his father. Here, Roth walks through the psychoanalytic progression with something approaching dogmatism. The child is jealous of the father, particularly for his access to the mother. In the book's later scenes, when the child thinks he has triumphed in securing the mother's affections and humiliating the father by winning a moral victory over him, he sees a set of horns on the wall behind the father—symbolizing the latter's symbolic cuckolding. And yet, there is pity here mixed with his triumph. 

As you can see, it is all very much by the psychoanalytic textbook. 

And in this classically Freudian scenario, the child in the novel also begins to develop a theory at one point about his true origins. By eavesdropping on his immigrant mother's conversations with people she knows from the old country, he overhears a reference to his mother's flirtation (or, perhaps, more substantial relationship) with a church "organist" in their village. In the child's mind, this familiar word becomes transformed into something more mysterious-sounding: an "organeest." The suspicion germinates: is the "organeest" his true father, and the humble man he knows at home an imposter? 

This is the classic "Family Romance." The child entertains the taboo hope that his parents might be revealed as fakes. He or she might learn that their true parents are people of far more exalted station or destiny: royalty, millionaires, European aristocrats, etc. In Rank's telling, the fantasy often develops into an erotic form. Once the child has a rudimentary understanding of sex, he starts to admit to himself that his mother must be genuine, but realizes there is a greater chance that the father could be deceived. The child could be the unwitting offspring of another, much greater man. 

According to Rank, this is often accompanied by fantasies of the mother having some illicit love affair before he was born with some high-born gentleman, which explains his true origin. Roth illustrates the point well: it is the fantasy of the "organeest"; the legend he constructs of his mother's infidelity in order to satisfy his daydream of a different, more exalted father. 

And this, says Rank, is the psychological origin of all the hero origin myths—they are all a collective wish-fulfillment of the childhood fantasy of discovering that one's true parents are noble in origin, and that one's destiny is greater than one's humble surroundings would seem to imply. 

Does any of this ring true to us today? 

The primary difficulty with it, as with all of Freudian psychoanalysis, is its insistence on including the erotic element. Most people simply do not feel—or have no recollection of feeling in childhood—the kind of sexual jealousy and erotic longing toward their parents that the theory ascribes as a human universal. Of course, the Freudians can retort that this is just because we have all repressed the taboo feeling too effectively. But this, then, is the quintessence of an unfalsifiable and hence unscientific theory. If we can't tell whether we feel these things or not, how are we supposed to confirm or refute Freud's account? 

Perhaps this element in the psychoanalytic framework owes more to the biographical quirks of the theory's founders than it does to any trans-cultural element in human nature. After all, some of the leading figures of the psychoanalytic discipline, including Freud and Reich, did indeed privately confess to experiencing sexual interest in their mothers. 

One theory on Wikipedia holds that this may have been due to the wet-nursing practices of the Middle-European upper-middle classes at the time. Many of these families kept children apart from their parents during the early stages of development, and this may have prevented the Westermarck effect—the usual process of imprinting from an early age that prevents children from developing sexual attraction to members of their immediate families—from having its usual consequences. In the absence of the Westermarck effect, sexual attraction between family members can be strong, because of the general tendency of people to be attracted to those to whom they are most genetically similar. 

This would explain Freud's and Reich's obsession—and why it seems so incomprehensible to many readers who are exposed to it today. Far from having discovered a human universal, then—Freud and his epigoni may have simply been reflecting a sociological idiosyncrasy of the Viennese haute-bourgeoisie. 

But suppose we take out the sexual element—what then is left of Rank's theory? A lot, it turns out (or so at least I would argue). Rank's theory of myth does not depend entirely on this most questionable and perennially-controversial element of the Freudian framework. It could still turn out to be true in substance, based solely on some common elements of the human experience in childhood. 

Even if children cannot be credited with the kinds of unconscious urges that the psychoanalysts attribute to them, it is surely undeniable that they experience a kind of ongoing tug-of-war for the attention of their parents. These adults often find themselves torn and conflicted about their obligations. On the one hand, they experience an overflowing love for their children; on the other—they face conflicting demands on their time that call them away. They must respond to many of these demands, if only to continue to feed and clothe their offspring, or to attend to the needs of other offspring. 

But the children are not aware of the necessity of these other obligations. They often perceive the adult's attempts to get away and attend to other needs as an implicit will to abandon them.

Rank writes in this regard of the child's universal experience of "neglect." Every child, no matter how well loved in truth, nurses feelings of neglect. This is because every parent, no matter how devoted, must eventually disappoint the child's all-consuming need for attention and affection. The parent must pull themselves away for a time—if only, as in Roth's novel, to put food on the table.

Beyond this, the adult still needs to express their own separate individuality at times. They want to preserve their own personality, and not have it be submerged entirely in the identity of being a parent and caregiver. The child, though, often has other ideas. He or she doesn't see the necessity of the parent's individuality, and indeed would be perfectly happy to erase it. 

I am reminded of a poem by the modernist poet Hugh MacDiarmid. He reflects on the time he spent caring for his child while sick. While he undoubtedly "love[s]" his "little son," he writes, "yet when he was ill/ I could not confine myself to his bedside./ I was impatient [...] And longed for my wide range of interest again[.]" 

This, surely, is the plight of every parent. They long to be there for their children and to protect them from harm, yet they also resent on some level the demands on their time and energy that this imposes. And the child picks up on this emotion, and perceives it as a desire on the parent's part to get away and abandon them—it comes across to the child, in Rank's word (in the Robbins and Jellife translation), as a form of "neglect." 

As the child's social awareness and ability to pick up on emotional cues develops as they grow older, they become ever more aware of the conflict raging inside their parents between conflicting demands on their time—and different inclinations in their heart—and they nurse an ever stronger version of this suspicion of neglect. They experience it as a form of betrayal—and what's more, as a change that has occurred in their parents, rather than in themselves. What is actually a product of their own growing ability to perceive their parents' emotions seems to them like an alteration for the worse in the latter. 

The parents "care less" than they used to, according to the child. And this leads to a divorce in the child's mind between the idealized "original" parents, who were all-giving and universally available, and the disappointing, betraying, neglectful parents of today. 

And so, as Rank writes, the daydream of the "Family Romance"—as it has been channeled collectively into the oft-recurring "myth of the birth of the hero"—is not actually a disloyal one. The child does not truly wish to supplant the real parents. Rather, the highborn parents of the fantasy are merely versions in disguise of the child's real parents—idealized versions of the people the child vaguely remembers them as being. The fantasy is therefore an attempt to vindicate the child's parents from the charge of betrayal, not to accuse them of it—it simply does so by making out the current parents to be mere imposters of the former. 

This kernel of Rank's theory all seems to me to still ring true, and it doesn't require any belief in Freud's Oedipal hobbyhorse in order to hang together. Family life is indeed one of a microcosmic struggle, and one can arrive at this conclusion without any recourse to the improbable sexual theories of the psychoanalysts, which so often defy common experience. 

I for one just came back from a weekend with my sister, brother-in-law, and my young niece and nephew; and it seems perfectly plain to me, from that experience, that the condition of the adult caregiver is indeed one of being perpetually torn between conflicting desires. On the one hand, one wishes to devote all one's time to the kids. One misses them immediately in their absence. Yet, as soon as one is with them, one fears being consumed. One dreads that one's time—and with it, one's self, one's individuality—is disappearing into a bottomless gully of need. One longs, with MacDiarmid, to escape to one's "wide range of interest again." 

The child's struggle is simply the same in reverse. They must strive to reconcile the knowledge that the adults in their lives love and care for them, with the perception that those same adults are constantly letting them down, failing them at the needed hour, and may not be there every time they are called. And so the tug-of-war commences. 

And the hero-myth, the story of the exposed infant, rescued from the bulrushes and nursed to greatness, is indeed surely an ancient collective reflection of this same perennial struggle. The parents in the child's mind are indeed of two natures—the loving parent, and the betraying parent. So stories simplify the matter by splitting these two sets of parents into literally two different couples. 

And such a narrative move will always have for us a profound psychic resonance, for it is the story of all our childhoods.