Parent-child relationship does not need to be compared to friendship – 7/3/2023 – Vera Iaconelli

Piera Aulagnier was a psychoanalyst who beautifully named the role of caregivers with babies using the concept of “interpretation violence”. The word violence is not there for nothing and reveals the paradox of the situation. This is not a bad thing that must be eradicated, but the contradiction that arises from someone having to do the child’s voice, while the child has not yet mastered his own speech. That is why Aulagnier called caregivers in the early days “spokespersons”, since they are the ones who will say if the baby “is cold”, “hungry”, “needs to be held”, “became jealous” and other guesses, which work by trial and error. Far from imagining that fathers and mothers should know what the baby really wants, what is expected of them is that they are attentive and involved enough in trying to assist the child. Even if it’s consoling her for not being able to figure out what she wants.

Nothing prevents, however, that the request for a lap, mistakenly interpreted as hunger, ends up being appeased during breastfeeding, giving the false impression that the baby’s demand was known exactly. That’s how it works, and God forbid we take this task away from the parents, disavowing them once again in their role of serving as a shield between the child and the world. It is up to the caregivers to intervene in the beginning.

It turns out that the children grow up and the very difficult exercise of listening, interpreting their needs and intervening with them has to give way to an increasingly abstinent relationship. This is where violence can acquire its negative connotation, when it denies the clear signs of the child’s expression, ignoring them. There is a brutal difference between telling a child that he cannot curse, screaming and hitting and saying that he is not angry.

Interpretation is never completely extinguished, as the acquisition of words is not enough for the child to learn to name his desires and needs. The path of naming what we live is endless. In fact, helping each other to put life into words is a perennial task of human relationships, clearly present in good friendships.

Over time, the street becomes a two-way street, with the children revealing what they think about us. Forget the misleading propaganda of a horizontal relationship, of equals, between parents and children who would become friends. Parent-child relationships can be rewarding enough without us having to compare them to friendships. The prerogatives are different, and there is no demerit in that.

The search for closeness and intimacy is a hallmark of the current generation of parents. But preserving the relationship in the years when separation and autonomy are essential —adolescence and adult life—is not so easy. You have to let yourself become obsolete, let yourself fall. If you want to hear them, the basis of any close relationship, you have to be silent.

Hence, all our experience, which seems to us so fundamental to be shared, will fall into total disrepute if it is not demanded. And even when we are asked for our opinion, it is worth being on guard, so as not to fall into the trap of advice that only serves to do the opposite.

Leaving the “violence of interpretation”, necessary for a baby to become human, for the abstinent comment is an exercise in respect for those who are starting to live their own lives. It has a touch of heartbreak and reveals the size of the bet on everything that has been done so far: what was said and, mainly, what was demonstrated in action.

We cannot be so arrogant as to imagine that adult life would be impossible just in their turn, making us indispensable forever. Omnipotent fantasy of those who don’t know when to pass the baton, putting the team to lose.

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