The Happy Home Myth: The Female Experience

The need for a happy home myth typically arises in childhood. The child (male or female), likely to feel this need and so likely to become, in adulthood, a paradise builder, typically grows up in a chaotic home environment, in which he feels both unsafe and unacknowledged. In his formative relational experience this child is quintessentially instrumentalized (von Broembsen, 1988a). Frequently she or he experiences her- or himself as invisible, certainly as unimportant. What value attaches to the child's presence in the family is strictly tied to the functions he performs toward the psychological or physical maintenance of his selfobjects. The child's own needs and feelings go unattended to, subordinated to the critical task of maintaining the vital bond to his precarious selfobjects.

In this barren emotional climate, the child's need for a safe and nurturing holding environment (Winnicott, 1958) gives rise to a compensatory fantasy, a future, ideal, happy home, which becomes an antidote to the child's actual deprivation. Typically, this fantasy centers on a conscious or unconscious promise the child makes to himself: one day, when he is grown up, he will make for himself and for his loved ones a perfect happy home.

If the person in question has sufficient practical skills, this fantasy can become enacted in his marital family. Unfortunately, he can concretize this fantasy only by coopting his spouse, and later their children, to its enactment. With their willing or unwitting collusion, the paradise builder effectively repeats, be it in a different key, the instrumentalization of others in the service of his own needs—specifically the need to keep that childhood promise to himself, to create and maintain a perfect home for oneself and one's family, and so give oneself the chance of an improved second round of formative selfobject experience in an environment tailormade to fit the paradise builder's unmet childhood needs.

Given this unconscious agenda, all dissonant expe