The Parenting Process: A Psychoanalytic Perspective

Parenthood is undertaken by a majority of human adults. It is a natural, biologically compelling, profound psychological event. It begins with conception and never ends. What continues is an internalized set of feelings and thoughts, collective physical and historical images and sensations, the memories of the pain and joy of attachment. Parenthood changes us in ways mostly unconscious. It affects our identity, our existential sense of ourselves over time and throughout the course of the life cycle.

Unlike most events in life, parenthood is irrevocable. Much like birth, aging, and death, we cannot “take it back”; we cannot change our mind. Its irrevocability is biological to the core and fundamentally essential to the survival of our species.

As analysts, we are all constantly immersed in the stuff of parenting, much as we may think otherwise, and notwithstanding powerful differences between parenthood and psychoanalysis. We make ourselves available as “selfobjects,” to be taken in, digested, and expelled. We are used as reflecting, mirroring agents, affirming and confirming our patients' identities and self systems. We are ingested, identified with, split into good and bad parts, and rebelled against. We are emotional containers and catalysts, struggling to be “there” reliably, fully, steadfastly, a constant emotional center to leave from and return to.

As analysts, we try to facilitate the emergence of a separate self. At times, we allow for a kind of benign symbiosis, so as to facilitate subsequent emergent separation and the eventual lifelong process of individuation. We empathize with and care about a broad range of affects arising as they do from a broad range of developmental needs and deficits. Dynamically speaking, if this isn't the stuff of parenting, then what is?

Our experience of parenthood feeds and informs us as patients, as therapists, as people. It enriches and depletes us. It guides our