The Image of The Parents in Bed

MY THEME is psychological; that is, it is characterised by doubt, uncertainty and possibility. Images and experiences of parental intercourse and the parental marriage hover between and connect inner and outer, personal and archetypal, destructive and creative. Images are the operant element in phantasy; it is they who permit talk of subjective reality. Because the primal scene has to do with origins and the mystery of a beginning it exerts a fascination; because it has to do with outcome and a tangible result it has a compulsive attraction. We know this from our own analyses, from our work with patients and from the history of the early days of the psychoanalytic movement.

Why ‘in bed’? Concepts (such as the primal scene) need and create contexts, thereby becoming images. Jung points out ‘the term “image” is intended to express not only the form of the activity taking place, but the typical situation in which the activity is released’ (JUNG 5, p. 78). The image of the parents in bed is, quite literally, a matter of chicken and egg. The individual is created out of primal scene activity but the scene, qua scene, does not itself exist except as part of a combining of endowment with experience. As a colleague has said, it is hard to get the image of the parents in bed together. It is a creation and a symbol for life as it develops. Bringing things together is a précis of creativity.

The question of the rôle of parental images in the development of personality is still an interesting one. Issues such as the balance between reality and phantasy in the formation of internal imagery, the degree of importance of sexuality and the purposive uses to which inner conceptions and pre-conceptions may be put are as relevant now as they ever were. In this paper I am concerned with imagery developing over a period of time, changing or not changing as the case may be. Imagery is seen as deriving from the synthesis of phantasy and fact, subjective with objective elements.

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