“ My 15 year old
son Alex is beginning to study for his GCSEs. His range of subjects includes
history - my own specialist subject - as a Head of Department in an academic
school. I really enjoyed this at the beginning but now I find myself getting
irritated as he professes great surprise that I should be aware of the basic
things he is studying and clearly considers himself the real expert. My wife
says I should be flattered he is trying to be like me but I find it very
difficult”.
Mr W.G.
Through love and attachment we identify as
small children with the skills and behaviour of the adults who bring us up.
This is largely an unconscious invisible form of identification. Indeed, child
psychotherapist Anne Alvarez, author of “Live Company” (Routledge) considers
that this force needs to be invisible. “However, hidden behind the invisibility
I find that the child’s capacity to freely identify is linked to the parent’s
permission for the child to be like them”.
Where something in the child or the parent
impedes this process something different becomes visible and we can distinguish
between identification and “copying”. Small children are very aware of this
difference. 7-year-old Sara knew quite well that when her classmate Ben tried
to draw a house the way she did it was because he appreciated the fact that she
was a better artist. “Here. You haven’t done the chimney properly” she said,
pushing her drawing nearer to him. However, when another pupil, Tom, drew a
house like hers she angrily said “Stop copying!”. She knew emotionally that the
intention behind his action - the very same action as Ben’s - was different.
Sometimes the same action can contain both
features. It is therefore possible that both the W.G’s are correct. A few days
ago I observed 15-year-old Maria, who had a severe learning disability, copy
the shopping list her mother had handed to her. “The shops will be closed if
you don’t go out now”, said her mother, trying not to sound irritated. The girl
carried on until she had completed copying the list, threw her mother’s list in
the dustbin and proudly walked out with her own list & the shopping bag.
The mother burst into tears. Maria did indeed want to be able to be like her
mother but had disowned her mother’s knowledge. There was a poignant extra
twist in that because of her learning disability she knew she would never be
able to write as well as her mother. Therefore she could angrily try to make
her mother’s writing meaningless by throwing it away at the same time as trying
to proudly own it as her own invention. Whilst Alex can write complex essays he
and Maria are struggling with similar issues. In mid adolescence how do you
evolve your own voice?
Psychotherapist
Anne Alvarez comments “14 & 15 year olds are notoriously ungrateful - are
only just discovering their own interests and the parent should feel flattered
and shut up for the time being and try not be too hurt. Every parent of an
adolescent feels hurt that they are not acknowledged but Mr W.G would feel more
hurt if the child hated history and let us hope that in his 20s the young man
will see the links between his thinking and his father’s. On the more
pathological level there are narcissistic kids and people who never feel
gratitude or own the source of their inspiration and a balanced state is to own
what is yours and your variation and where you got it from in the first place”.
Roger Kennedy, training analyst and
consultant psychotherapist to the Family Unit at the Cassell Hospital agrees.
“It is flattering that a son wants to be like his father at an age where he is
also struggling for his own identity. I would also be wondering if he was
trying to work out his own opinion or my opinion. A further point I would make
is that intellectual identification could also be easier than a physical or
sexual one. In teens it can be safer to identify with ideas rather than worry
about bodies or boys and girls”.
So far we have concentrated on hypotheses
concerning Alex. However, it is not possible to tell from the letter whether
the problem is more linked to Alex or to Mr W.G. Are there factors in his
background that would make him feel threatened by a growing son? BAP Adult
psychotherapist & child psychotherapist Mrs Wendy Feldman comments “It is
always painful to have to realise that a child is growing up and becoming a man
and entering into direct rivalry with the master of the house and mastering
certain tasks-like his task of getting an O level in history. Mr W.G. seems to
lack the necessary pride in his son that could mitigate his feeling of being
ousted. His wife says he should feel proud but he just feels robbed of
something and perhaps he should look a little bit inward as to what he has been
robbed of as well the fact that his son might outstrip him as an adult.”
These issues do not disappear in young
adulthood - they are just played out with different people - including
teachers. Novelist Irving Weinmann who teaches creative writing at City
Literary Institute and University is used to “galloping guruism”. This is how
he names the process whereby “Students tell you that something you said was
useful and you find it coming back at you in a raw way. You want to
say-look-this comes from me and it is alright but it is also a distortion of me
which is not so alright so here is what you do. And then you talk about how to
acknowledge ideas that are not direct quotes and that is a far more common kind
of plagiarism. If you are teaching well and have a good relationship you can
work that out with them”.
In later adulthood many work problems come
from such “ownership” difficulties. Even where an academic paper tries to serve
as a patent envy can make such knowledge invisible. Estela Welldon, Consultant
Psychiatrist & Psychotherapist at the Portman Clinic who has been a pioneer
in the field of female perversion is used to seeing a process in which her
ideas are copied without acknowledgement. “Pioneering work can be flattered as
a disguise for hidden envy that is only discovered when plagiarism takes place.
I find that everyone wants to create a baby, an original idea, but the bringing
up of the baby is much more difficult.”
Parents, like the W.Gs have the task of bringing up the baby and staying with it through all the life changes that follow. Mr and Mrs W.G. need to consider together their differing perspectives. What has caused Mr W.G’s changed views? Is Mrs W.G. helpfully aiding her husband or siding with her son in an attack on Mr W.G. Is Alex happily oblivious to these processes or struggling with feelings of vulnerability? We can all remember the fable of the mouse on the elephant’s back who said “Boy- didn’t we shake that bridge!” There is a time when the elephant needs to allow the mouse that illusion and a time for gently pointing out that it is not the whole story although it might be in the future.