In his book The Soul’s Code, James Hillman proposes that each person’s life is shaped not only by genetics and environment, but by his or her “daimon,” a Greek term for a guardian spirit that guides one’s destiny. In his view, the child comes from elsewhere and “grows down” into the world.
— Ed.
If any fantasy holds our contemporary civilization in an unyielding grip, it is that we are our parents’ children and that the primary instrument of our fate is the behavior of your mother and father. As their chromosomes are ours, so are their mess-ups and attitudes. Their joint unconscious psyche — the rages they suppress, the longings they cannot fulfill, the images they dream at night — basically form our souls, and we can never, ever work through and be free of this determinism. The individual’s soul continues to be imagined as a biological offspring of the family tree. We grow psychologically out of their minds as our flesh grows biologically out of their bodies.
If sharp definitions of parenting and parents have begun to melt owing to the infiltrations of law, demographics, and biochemistry, the idea of parenting and parents is more hardened than ever in the minds of moral reformers and psychotherapists. The shibboleth “family values,” expressed by catch phrases like “bad mothering” and “absent fathering,” trickles down into “family-systems therapy,” which has become the single most important set of ideas determining the theory of societal dysfunction and the practice of mental health.
Yet all along a little elf whispers another tale: “You are different; you’re not like anyone in the family; you don’t really belong.” There is an unbeliever in the heart. It calls the family a fantasy, a fallacy.
Even the biological model has puzzling gaps. Contraception is easier to account for and practice than conception itself. What goes on in that massive, virginly intact, single, round ovum that allows only this particular minuscule sperm among millions to enter? Or is the question more correctly addressed to the sperm? Is one of you more wily, more pushy, and more sympathetically congenial? Or is it just the randomness of “luck” — and what is luck, really? We know about DNA and the results of joinings, but we are left with the mystery that Darwin spent a life with, the mystery of selection.
The acorn theory suggests a primitive solution. It says: Your daimon selected both the egg and the sperm, as it selected their carriers, called “parents.” Their union results from your necessity — and not the other way around. Does this not help to understand the impossible unions, those antipathies and misalliances, the quick conceptions and sudden desertions occurring between the parents of so many of us, and especially in the biographies of the eminent? The couple came together, not for their personal unity, but to beget the unique person, endowed with a specific acorn, who turns out to be you.
Take for instance the tale of Thomas Wolfe, that gigantic, verbose, romantic Smoky Mountains novelist, born October 3, 1900. The parents of Wolfe, says his biographer Andrew Turnbull, were joined in “an epic misalliance. Two people more temperamentally unsuited could scarcely be imagined.” The father was “lavish, sensual, expansive”; the mother, “flinty, parsimonious, repressed.”
How did they ever get together? Some sixteen years before Thomas Wolfe’s arrival on earth, his mother, Julia Westall, age twenty-four, country schoolteacher, came into the shop of once-divorced, once-widowed W. O. Wolfe, a marble cutter who made tombstones. She came a-calling to sell books (her moonlighting way of picking up the extra penny).
Having glanced at the book she was selling, he put his name down for it. Then he asked if she ever read novels.
“Oh, I read most everything,” she answered. “Not the Bible as much as I should, though.”
W. O. said he owned some fine love stories, and that afternoon . . . he sent her Augusta Jane Evans’s St. Elmo. A few days later when Julia was starting out to sell another book . . . W. O. pressed her to stay for lunch, after which he took her into the parlor and showed her his stereopticon slides of the Civil War. . . . He took her hand, said he had been watching her for quite a while as she passed his shop, and proposed.
Julia . . . protested that they barely knew each other. W. O. was so adamant, however, that she finally said she would open the book she was selling at random and abide by the middle paragraph of the right-hand page. “Just a bit of foolishness on my part,” she remembered long afterwards, and hit on a description of a wedding with the words “till death do us part.” “Oh, that’s it!” cried W. O. “That’s the very thing! We’re going to let it stand!” The wedding took place in January, a scant three months after his headlong proposal.
Many explanations for this sudden misalliance: opposites attract; youth and age; simple utility (she needed an economic foothold; he needed a housekeeper); sadomasochistic compulsion; reenactment of parental dramas; societal pressures on the single . . . Are you convinced?
Why not at least entertain that they met “through the book”? She approached him proposing a book; he countered, sending her a book; it was decided by opening a book; and they brought forth, as fruit of their bookish union, Thomas Wolfe, writer of books. When he was two, it was a parental “parlor trick to have [him] ‘read aloud’ for guests.” Julia believed she had invisibly brought about his literary ability, for during her pregnancy, she had “spent the afternoons reading in bed.”
As for Wolfe’s six living brothers and sisters, they had other acorns, which chose those parents for other proclivities. Again, it is mainly in the exceptional that the acorn shows itself most clearly.
So Thomas Wolfe was called to that household in Asheville, North Carolina, and his parents were called to each other to make that household so that he could do what had to be done. How else could he have done what he did had he not “known” his parents before they knew him? An angel’s finger opened the page conceiving them to be his parents before they conceived him, their child.
Julia Wolfe believed in her determining influence on her son Tom. And I wouldn’t ever contest the impression a mother’s character, whatever it be, makes upon her natural-born child. She is so indubitably there that it needs no argument, no affirmative evidence. So a whole step in this discussion can be bypassed. As the mathematician G. H. Hardy said, “A serious man ought not to waste time stating a majority opinion.” Let us then put Mother behind us, as she is always behind us anyway, a great silent idol center stage, against which the biographies in this book take place.
As for the power in this idol and our idolatrous worship of it, let me repeat an oft-told tale, here reprinted from Peter and Alexander Neubauer’s Nature’s Thumbprint:
Identical twin men, now age thirty, were separated at birth and raised in different countries by their respective adoptive parents. Both kept their lives neat — neat to the point of pathology. Their clothes were preened, appointments met precisely on time, hands scrubbed regularly to a raw red color. When the first was asked why he felt the need to be so clean, his answer was plain.
“My mother. When I was growing up she always kept the house perfectly ordered. She insisted on every little thing returned to its proper place, the clocks — we had dozens of clocks — each set to the same noonday chime. She insisted on this, you see. I learned from her. What else could I do?”
The man’s identical twin, just as much a perfectionist with soap and water, explained his own behavior this way: “The reason is quite simple: I’m reacting to my mother, who was an absolute slob.”
How shall we arrange the three components of this tale — the facts of perfectionism, the theory of reactive causality, and the myth of Mother? Proponents of innate geneticism might claim that this tale is superb anecdotal evidence for the dominating role of heredity. Advocates of the importance of early environment might still claim that, indeed, the two men reacted to their mothers, but in two different ways — one in accord, the other in opposition — and that their mothers indeed were the crucial influence in forming their obsessiveness.
For me, this tale illustrates myth substituting for theory and accounting for facts. For let’s not overlook that what the identical twins have in common besides their perfectionism is their identical theory of that perfectionism: their mutual assertion that “Mother” is behind it all. The myth of Mother in our culture carries the higher dignity and force of theory, and we are a nation of Mother-lovers in the support we give her by adhering to the theory.
If we can so readily accept the mother myth, then why not another myth, a different myth, the Platonic one this book proposes? It cannot be the resistance to myth that makes us balk at the acorn theory, since we so gullibly swallow the myth of Mother. The reason we resist the myth of the daimon, I believe, is that it comes clean. It is not disguised as empirical fact. It states itself openly as a myth. Furthermore, it challenges us to recognize our individuality as a birthright without the fallback pillow of Mother as comforting ground and archetypal support.
As nuclear one-on-one motherhood wanes, the myth hangs in there, clutching at the archetypal breast. We still believe in Mom even as we watch everything change: day-care centers, spread-out families, daddies doing diapers, homeless kids caring for younger siblings, teenage mothers of two or three kids, forty-five-year-old mothers of their first. It’s all changing: demographics, economics, legal definitions of parenthood, conceptions, adoptions, drugs, diagnoses, guidance books.
Nonetheless, the myth of the mother as the dominant in everyone’s life remains constant. For behind each birth-giver and care-provider sits the universal Great Mother, upholding the universe of that belief system I am calling the parental fallacy, which keeps us bonded to her. She appears shaped by the style of your personal mother, and she is as bad as she is good. Smothering, nourishing, punishing, devouring, ever-giving, obsessive, hysterical, morose, loyal, easygoing — whatever her character, she too has a daimon, but her fate is not yours.
Yet biography loves mothers. It loves to tell of marvelous or malevolent mothers as the agents of destiny behind men and women of eminence. Cole Porter, carrying his mother’s name, Kate Cole Porter, also carried “her own lifelong dream — to become a professional musician.” She saw to it that the little boy of eight performed and at ten traveled thirty miles by train for his music lessons. Frank Lloyd Wright’s mother knew exactly that her son was to be an architect and, say the biographers, influenced him in that direction by hanging pictures of buildings in her baby’s room. It was to cheer his depressed mother that James Barrie began the ad hoc storytelling that led to his writing inventions like Peter Pan.
Pablo Casals, one of eleven children in a poor family in a Catalan village, was taken by his mother to Barcelona some forty miles away to go on with his music; “and until Pablo was twenty-two the home was fragmented, burdened, impoverished by the weight of the mother’s consuming drive to see the talent of her son actualized and recognized.”
One day the mother of Edward Teller, the physicist hawk of nuclear arms, was walking in a Budapest park, heavy with her unborn child. Her companion asked why her pace had slowed and why she was studying the landscape. Teller’s mother replied, “I have a feeling this time it will be a son, and I’m sure he will be famous, so I’m looking for the best site to build his monument.” Our usual psychology says Teller was pushed to fame by his mother. But why not imagine that Ilona Teller intuitively picked up on the daimon inhabiting her womb?
Krishnamurti, the philosopher-teacher, lost his mother when he was still a boy, but he “frequently saw her after she died. I remember once following my mother’s form as it went upstairs. . . . I saw the vague form of her dress and part of her face. This happened almost always when I went out of the house.”
Krishnamurti’s sighting of his mother’s form demonstrates clearly the blending of the memorial mother, her actual being, and the spirit of the mother, her daimon, which often merges with or participates with the daimon of the child, even as it grows into majority and eminence. It is the rare mother who can see the seed, encourage its emergence, and yet not mess with its individual direction.
Van Cliburn, the master pianist, was taught music by his mother. In Howard Reich’s biography of Cliburn, she makes clear the distinction between mentoring the spirit and mothering the child:
With the realization of Van’s unusual gifts, our relationship while at work became that of teacher and pupil rather than mother and child. . . . From the outset I cautioned young Van against “showing off” . . . reminding him that his ability was a divine gift for which he should be deeply grateful, without taking undue credit for himself.
Cliburn confirms this: “From age three, she gave me a piano lesson every day of my life. Every single day. We’d sit down to the piano and she’d say, ‘Now just forget I’m your mother. I’m your piano teacher, and we must be very serious.’ ”
The greatness of the mother’s power is indisputable, especially when it can recognize and defend — and, as in cases like Cliburn’s, serve to instruct — her child’s daimon.
The daimon, however, predates the mother, maybe even predetermines the mother — or at least so says the acorn theory. For little Van was already a musician by the age of two; he had picked up by ear, simply by listening to lessons going on in another room, a “complex little number” that required “crossing left hand over the right” with “tricky rests and syncopations.” And so the acorn theory says also that his daimon chose just the right mother, one who knew what to do with a Wunderkind. Would young Cliburn from Kilgore, Texas, have gone to Moscow, knocking the judges dead and winning the International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition, had he been born, say, to your mother, or raised in your house?
But is eminence caused by the mother? Do mothers create their children as they carry them, bringing their spirits to birth as they bring their bodies to term? If we do not differentiate her daimon from her child’s, then Mother must also be declared a monster maker, whose daimon or demon lives out its life in her physical child. Hitler, Mao, and Nasser of Egypt were deeply attached to their mothers. Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana was lifted out of village life and given a Western education because of the persuasion of his mother. Whether a charismatic leader is actually seen into and helped by a mother, or whether a leader needs to believe in the mother myth, which he honors by tribute to a personal mother, cannot be ascertained. But somehow the mother myth likes big dictators.
Woodrow Wilson, Harry Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, Richard M. Nixon — they, too, were favored by or favored their mothers. Remember Nixon, confused and broken, leaving the White House in disgrace, paying maudlin tribute to his mother in that last speech.
My mother, once meeting Sara Delano Roosevelt, Franklin D.’s mother, was asked how many children she had. My mother answered, “Four,” to which the senior Mrs. Roosevelt replied, “I had only one, but he did very well.” And Sara Delano Roosevelt saw to it that he did, perhaps noticing his genius very early, following it or pushing it every difficult step of the way as long as she lived.
What about those mothers who had no understanding of their children’s calling and misperceived their natures? And what about the eminent people who fought with Mother, hating her mind, her habits, and her values? Differences of this sort seem to make no dent in the parental fallacy. The myth still holds whether Mother gave positive unconditional support or lived her life in selfish narcissistic indifference. Biographies twist contrary facts toward the same end, which shows that biographers, including ourselves in our own accounts of why we are as we are, remain as enthralled by the parental fallacy as were those twins who stated that Mother was the reason for their raw red hands.
George Lukács, a Hungarian Marxist writer and influential critic, was at odds with his mother from the start. In the last year of his life (1971), he “still remembered her . . . unkindly.” All along he had refused to extend her even “formal courtesy.” Lukács wrote: “At home; absolute alienation. Above all mother; almost no communication.” Because she was conventional, shallow, and mainly interested in social life, Lukács’s biography connects his Marxist sympathy for the oppressed and his antibourgeois rebelliousness with this antagonism to his mother. The acorn theory, of course, regards his mother as necessary for his genius: He needed an enemy within the walls who represented the values his daimon innately abhorred. “Very early I was ruled by feelings of strong opposition.”
This kind of radical opposition to the conventional mother appears in the biographies of the composer Igor Stravinsky, for instance, and the photographer Diane Arbus.
Stravinsky’s mother chided her son for not “recognizing his betters, like Scriabin,” and she did not hear Le Sacre du Printemps, one of the path-breaking works of the century, until its twenty-fifth-anniversary performance, a year before she died. Even then she told friends she did not expect to like it, that he did not write “her kind of music.”
Gertrude, the mother of Diane Arbus, was concerned about her children; “like any good mother, she wanted them only to do the ‘right thing,’ ‘the correct thing,’ and to have all the advantages.” Arbus was an original outsider, a portrayer of freaks, who eventually killed herself; Stravinsky lived a long, extraordinarily productive life, composing not “[his mother’s] kind of music.”
Stravinsky and Arbus strayed far from their mothers’ narrow path. But we may not claim it was that path which forced them so far out. We may not assume that a conventional mother produces a freaky child, any more than that a freaky child produces a conventional mother — or that a wild and woolly mother produces a normal child. As researchers report, all sorts of mothers have all sorts of offspring. The two generations cannot be tied together by a neat knot.
Mothers and children may worship at very different altars and serve very different gods, even if they are placed all day long in the same family. No matter how close physically, they may have immensely different fates. Roy Cohn, one of those sleazy, clever power pushers who slide to the forefront throughout history, received protective, conventional parenting. “My parents were forever trying to provide me with a ‘normal’ childhood.” Summer camp; Park Avenue apartment; the Horace Mann school; Columbia Law. An only child, Cohn lived, traveled, and kept company with his mother, Muddy, until she died when he was forty. Throughout, she looked out for him; a careful, watchful, accommodating mother who called her son “the child.” The “normal” child she sought became a notoriously shady mess.
The elevation of the parents . . . to the neglect of all other realities — societal, environmental, economic — shows that adulation of an archetype can obliterate common sense.
Hannah Arendt’s mother, too, was caring and watchful, keeping a diary of observations of and reflections upon Hannah’s behavior from birth well into the teen years. She restrained Hannah from sitting up too soon and from freely moving her legs, swaddling her, as was the custom, in a Wickelteppich, or wrapping rug. She fostered her daughter’s education in every respect. Two closely attentive mothers attempting to give their children the best; yet Cohn turned out ruthless, vain, and amoral, while Arendt became one of the leading moral philosophers of this age, friend of Karl Jaspers, lover of Martin Heidegger; she remained a “sunshine child” with a “genius for friendship” and a principled commitment to “neighborly love,” an idea that lies at the heart of her enduring thought.
Then there is the neglectful mother. “My mother used to put a pillow on the floor and give me one toy and just leave me there,” said Barbara McClintock. Later, her overburdened mother sent her daughter out of state to live with relatives. Edna St. Vincent Millay’s mother, a nurse, yanked her daughter out of eighth grade after a dispute with the principal. Edna had been doing excellently in school and enjoyed her friends, but now she was left alone at home all day and often at night while her mother worked. Tina Turner said: “I had no love from my mother or my father from the beginning. . . . Alienation, rejection — I didn’t know those words. I just knew I couldn’t communicate with my mother. . . . And that was the beginning for me. I didn’t have anybody, no foundation in life, so I had . . . to discover my mission in life.”
Though neglected by their mothers, these children were not left alone by their daimons, which proved to be their foundations. For it was solitude that McClintock and Millay needed for their callings, and neglect that Turner required to discover hers. These acorns evidently picked mothers of the neglecting kind to provide the right environment for these young girls.
Whether their subject receives support from the mother (Casals, Wright, Roosevelt), or has differences with the mother (Lukács, Arbus, Stravinsky), or is neglected by the mother (McClintock, Millay, Turner), biographers tend to enlarge Mother with mythical greatness, confusing the power of her archetypal image with the force of the individual acorn.
The parental fallacy depends largely on this fantasy of one-way vertical causality, from larger to smaller, from older to younger, from experienced to inexperienced. Yet, just as actual motherhood is waning in the face of social changes that alter its conventions, so the theory of Mother’s importance is being undermined by evidence against vertical causality within families.
Another twice-told tale. This one reports the behavior of a family of rhesus monkeys on an unpopulated Japanese island, where researchers left fresh sweet potatoes on the beach.
Imo spat out the sand clinging to her sweet potato, put it into the sea, and rubbed it vigorously with her free hand. She ate the cleaned potato, enjoying its salty taste. Nearby, Nimby watched — and thrust her potato into the sea. She didn’t get all the sand off, but it still tasted better than ever before. The two young playmates’ example taught others; soon their age-mates, both male and female, had caught on to the potato-washing routine. Imo’s mother also learned, and soon was teaching potato washing to Imo’s younger siblings. Imo’s father, though he enjoyed a reputation for toughness and leadership, was too stubborn to try the new trick.
The researcher David Rowe wants us to see that innovation and the transmission of ideas take place in various ways: horizontally within the family (sibling to sibling); vertically, but reciprocally, child to mother and mother to child; outside the family, as young monkeys learn from one another. Some — old males — seem not to learn at all, or at least not about washing potatoes.
But one crucial question is not asked: How did Imo get the idea? How come she washed that first potato? What prompted that bit of behavior? Her daimon, of course — which inspired the whole event to begin with, and also the oft-told report. Imo’s genius continues to teach you and me by means of this story. Yes, animals, too, have angels. As far back as we can imagine cultural history, it was widely believed that animals were the first teachers. Our earliest language, our dances, our rituals, our knowledge of what to eat and what not to eat, passed into our behavior through theirs.
Suspicion of vertical causality, particularly suspicion of the mother as primary factor in determining fate, comes from another direction as well. Diane Eyer calls mother-infant bonding (which gives her book its title) “a scientific fiction” (her subtitle).
Bonding is, in fact, as much an extension of ideology as it is a scientific discovery. More specifically, it is part of an ideology in which mothers are seen as the prime architects of their children’s lives and are blamed for whatever problems befall them, not only in childhood but throughout their adult lives.
Later in her book, Eyer says: “I would like to urge the impossible — that we discard the word [bonding] entirely . . . [which] would force us to notice that children are not merely putty in our hands. They are born with vastly different personalities and capabilities.” Eyer’s “scientific fiction” is my “parental fallacy”; her perception of children’s “vastly different personalities” is my vision of uniquely distinct acorns. Far more than parents shape our lives:
Children are profoundly affected by an array of people who interact with them, by the foods they eat, by the music they hear, by the television they watch, by the hope they see in the adult world. . . . People can connect with each other intellectually, emotionally, through daily caretaking, through games, through music and art, through formal learning and from long distances. There are many, many dimensions to the nurturance of our children.
For all our heroic individualism, America still clings to a mother-based developmental psychology that states we are fundamentally results of parenting and, as such, fundamentally victims of what happened in the past.
Eyer’s net of nurturance could be cast wider, to include the spiritual and religious phenomena arising autonomously in children and reported in detail by Robert Coles. Also to be included are the machineries and interiors that children live within, the streets and their sounds, the explanations and values taught them, and the invisibles displayed by nature. All this not only provides children with stimulation and input. All this also expresses the meaning of the world, to which each of them must respond. That some respond in unexpected ways, or refuse to respond at all, cannot logically be attributed to insecurities and disturbances in their tie with parents. For any one of us, child or adult, the question eclipsing all others is: How does what comes with you to the world find a place in the world? How does my meaning fit with the meanings to which I am asked to conform? What helps growing down?
The parental fallacy does not help anyone grow down. It pulls us away from the acorn and back to Mom and Dad, who may already be dead and gone, though we remain stuck with their effects. I am then a mere effect myself, a result of their causes. For all our heroic individualism, America still clings to a mother-based developmental psychology that states we are fundamentally results of parenting and, as such, fundamentally victims of what happened in the past and left indelible stains. Psychologically, as a nation, we seem ever to be trying to put the past behind us, trying to recover from past abuses. Perhaps recovery begins only when we have put the mother myth behind us. For we are less the victims of parenting than of the ideology of parenting; less the victims of Mother’s fateful power than of the theory that gives her that fateful power.
John Bowlby’s immensely influential Child Care and the Growth of Love states that theory. An archetypal voice of the Great Mother sounds through it, with dire warnings of evil and death if the theory be unheeded, the mother’s power dishonored.
The evidence is now such that it leaves no room for doubt regarding the general proposition — that the prolonged deprivation of a young child of maternal care may have grave and far-reaching effects on his [sic] character and so on the whole of his future life. It is a proposition exactly similar in form to those regarding the evil after-effects of German measles before birth or deprivation of vitamin D in infancy.
It is not your mother who holds dominion over your adult life, but the ideology that proclaims that each of us has been determined in the first hours after birth, or during birth itself, the ideology that proclaims a series of tiny causes and accumulating effects lead to how you are today and how you will affect your own children. You are the direct cause of damage to their lives, damage resulting not merely in their frustration and failure, but in crimes and madness. This ideology traps women in the parental fallacy and children in mother-blame. Eyer’s caustic criticism deconstructs this ideology. But her deconstruction is not destructive. Like mine, it aims to dissolve the fallacy that has made bonding a bondage. “The fallacy,” says David Rowe in his book The Limits of Family Influence,
is in believing that what forms human nature is a fourteen-year period of rearing, rather than a heavier weight of cultural history and ultimately human evolutionary roots. In broader terms, cultural traditions can be passed in many ways other than exposure to idealized nuclear families. The adolescents who signed up enthusiastically for Nazi youth groups before World War II did not have souls bent and torn by poor rearing in early childhood; indeed, their families were stolidly middle-class and emotionally supportive. If a nation’s youth can be changed by a few years of great cultural change, why emphasize childhood?
The elevation of the parents, of the mother in particular, to the neglect of all other realities — societal, environmental, economic — shows that adulation of an archetype can obliterate common sense. Eyer notes that worldwide authorities on mothering (Bowlby and T. Berry Brazelton) attribute the hollow-eyed lassitude and sadness of young children in Cambodia and in post–World War II Europe to the loss of their mothers and to other disturbances in the mother-child relationship, taking no note of the overwhelming horrors in the world encompassing these mothers and children. Had these children been “well-bonded,” with “good-enough mothers,” secure in their “attachments,” the devastation, genocide, and despair would have been incidental to their deplorable condition! Again the archetypal myth of the completely surrounding mother, insulating from all influences, prevails over the actual world of collective pain. The mother myth encloses as well the minds of the scientific observers. Mother-based theories comfort and suffocate, both.
A very different sort of observer, Mary Watkins points out that the major psychological theorists — D. W. Winnicott, Melanie Klein, René Spitz, John Bowlby, Anna Freud — who lay such stress upon the mother-child relation as the determinant of life ever after worked out their ideas while bombs were falling and buildings burning in England, or just before and just after World War II. It is not unusual to retreat to the mother when in danger, but must psychoanalytic “science,” too, hide behind her skirts?
A “happy” child was never and nowhere the aim of parenting. . . . But the parental fallacy has trapped the parents also into providing happiness, along with shoes, schoolbooks, and van-packed vacations.
Eyer’s remark that children are “profoundly affected . . . by the hope they see in the adult world” may be the key to the dismay and disorder of children. What hope do they see in the adult world? Pinning hope on a child and its future is easier than finding a larger hope for the adult world itself. Archaic peoples and tribal communities offered their children constancy, an unlimited time span of continuities. Cyclical changes and nomadic migrations did not shake the foundations. Myths made life livable, and hope was not even a category of archaic existence. Hope enters history, and our psychology, as trust in continuity fades.
Our main myth is apocalyptic, as the Revelation of St. John, the last book of our Bible, says, and our children today live among and act out images of catastrophe. Of course suicide among children shows a startling rise. How troubling it must be for a child to tie its star to a collapsing structure of depletion, extinction, and loss that cannot be repaired by bonding people together in satisfying human relationships. It’s all beyond people, says this myth. The only hope, according to the authorized version of the catastrophe, is in a divine redemption and a second chance. In face of the cosmic science fiction of Armageddon, psychology’s scientific fiction narrows the cause of devastated children to dysfunctional parenting, while a world with all the parents in it edges toward the cliff.
“Dad! Are you home? Is anybody here?” No. Dad is out to lunch. And he should be — as I shall claim. His job is elsewhere — as I shall explain — because his fundamental value to the family is in maintaining the connection to elsewhere.
When we watch Dad on TV sitcoms and the accompanying ads, he’s a rather foolish man. He’s not quite with-it; a piece of him is astray. Commentators on contemporary fatherhood complain that he is being deliberately made to look foolish and antiquated, because this weakened image helps take down the stuffed-shirt power of the patriarchy, makes more equal the relations between the genders, and blurs the hierarchical differences between fathers and children. Therefore wives are shown to be more practical and connected, children to be more with-it and savvy. Even if he’s a good guy, Dad is a little dumb.
I want to suggest that something more is going on than shifting social conventions and softening of the patriarchal father. The comedy played out on TV has a subtle subplot with appropriate foundations. Maybe Dad’s true task is not knowing about coffee, bleach, and mouthwash or how to resolve pubescent dating dilemmas, and maybe his dumbness shows that this is truly not his world. His world is not shown in these sets, for it’s offstage, elsewhere and invisible. He must keep one foot in another space, one ear cocked for other messages. He must not lose his calling or forget obligations to the heart’s desire and the image that he embodies.
Of course, this is not an obligation only of men; but it is men who are defined as “absent.” So our psychological task is to explore this absence beyond the usual charges of desertion, workaholic addiction, negligent unrelatedness, lack of child-support payments, double-standardism, and patriarchal pomp, which are rightly laid at the feet of many fathers.
Fathers have been far away for centuries: on military campaigns; as sailors on distant seas for years at a time; as cattle drivers, travelers, trappers, prospectors, messengers, prisoners, jobbers, peddlers, slavers, pirates, missionaries, migrant workers. The workweek was once seventy-two hours. The construct “fatherhood” shows widely different faces in different countries, classes, occupations, and historical times. Only today is absence so shaming, and declared a criminal, even criminal-producing, behavior. As a social evil, the absent father is one of the bogies of the remedial age, this historical period of therapy, recovery, and social programs that try to fix what we do not understand.
The conventional father image, of a man at his job, coming home at dusk to his family, earning, sharing, and caring, with quality time for his kids, is another fantasy of the parental fallacy. This image is way off its statistical base. As of 1993 only a very few families in the United States fit the pattern of a working husband-father earning for a family consisting of a stay-at-home wife-mother and their own two children. Everyone else is doing something different. The statistical pull in a father is thus preponderantly not to fulfill this image, just as for a woman it is not to fulfill the image of a stay-at-home wife-mother. If “family values” mean parents’ togetherness with their natural children in their own house, these values have little to do with how the American people actually live.
Rather than blaming fathers for their absenteeism and the concomitant unfairness of loading extra burdens onto mothers, mentors, the schools, the police, and taxpayers, we need to ask where Dad might be when he’s “not at home.” When he is absent, to what else might he be present? What calls him away?
Rilke has an answer:
Sometimes a man stands up during supper and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking, because of a church that stands somewhere in the East. And his children say blessings on him as if he were dead. And another man, who remains inside his own house, dies there, inside the dishes and in the glasses, so that his children have to go far out into the world toward that same church, which he forgot.
Rilke accounts for the father’s absence. What about the quality of his presence — that anger, that hatred? Why is Father such an abusive, brutal family destroyer? What is this rage?
Is it really his wife he hates, his children he wants to beat, because no one does what he says and they cost so much? Or might there be another factor, less personal and more demonic, that has him and doesn’t let up?
I have come to be convinced that the parental fallacy itself has harnessed Father’s spirit to a false image, and his daimon turns demonic in kicking against the traces. He is trapped in a construct called American fatherhood, a moral commandment to be the kind of good guy who likes Disneyland and kids’ food, gadgets, opinions, and wisecracks.
This bland model betrays his necessary angel, that image of whatever else he carries in his heart, glimpsed from childhood into the present day. The man who has lost his angel becomes demonic; and the absence, the anger, and the paralysis on the couch are all symptoms of the soul in search of a lost call to something other and beyond. Father’s oscillations between rage and apathy, like his children’s allergies and behavior disorders and his wife’s depressions and bitter resentments, form part of a pattern they all share — not the “family system,” but the system of rip-off economics that promotes their communal senselessness by substituting “more” for “beyond.”
And so his absences — physical, mental, spiritual — call him away from the cage of American delusions that crush the angel’s wings. Without inspiration, what’s left is bare, aimless ferocity. Without desire for an ideal, what’s left is lustful fantasy and the seduction of free-floating images that find no anchor in actual projects. Present in body and absent in spirit, he lies back on the couch, shamed by his own daimon for the potentials in his soul that will not be subdued. He feels himself inwardly subversive, imagining in his passivity extremes of aggression and desire that must be suppressed. Solution: more work, more money, more drink, more weight, more things, more infotainment, and an almost fanatic dedication of his mature male life to the kids so that they can grow up straight and straight up the consumer ladder in pursuit of their happiness.
A “happy” child was never and nowhere the aim of parenting. An industrious, useful child; a malleable child; a healthy child; an obedient, mannerly child; a stay-out-of-trouble child; a God-fearing child; an entertaining child — all these varieties, yes. But the parental fallacy has trapped the parents also into providing happiness, along with shoes, schoolbooks, and van-packed vacations. Can the unhappy produce happiness? Since happiness at its ancient source means eudaimonia, or a well-pleased daimon, only a daimon who is receiving its due can transmit a happy benefit to a child’s soul. Yes, I am saying that “care of soul,” as Thomas Moore has written, may thereby help the child’s soul prosper.
Should the onus of soul-making in the parent shift to making the soul of the child, then the parent is dodging the lifelong task set by the acorn. Then the child replaces the acorn. You feel your child is special, and you care for it as your calling, seeking to realize the acorn in your child. So your daimon complains because it is avoided, and your child complains because it has become an effigy of the parent’s own calling. Your mother, as I said, may be a demon, but she is not your daimon; so your child, too, is not your daimon.
I have learned, through years of work with patients and in men’s retreats, and from listening to what cautions me, that when a child substitutes for your daimon you will resent that child, even grow to hate it, despite goodwill and high ethics. The novelist and brilliant social critic Michael Ventura writes that Americans hate their children. His observation seems preposterous. What culture in history ever spoke more as a child, felt more as a child, thought more as a child, or was more reluctant to put all childish things away? And what culture today campaigns more to save the children globally, provides more emergency help for preemies and for surgical transplants in infants whatever the cost, and engages in more front-line defense of the fetus? Yet all this is a cover under which hides an appalling neglect.
Just look at the evidence. Of the 57 million children (under fifteen years of age) living in the United States, more than 14 million are living below the official poverty level. The United States ranks below Iran and Romania in the percentage of low-birth-weight babies. One of every six children is a stepchild, and half a million make their “homes” in residential treatment centers and group and foster homes. More children and adolescents in the United States die from suicide than from cancer, AIDS, birth defects, influenza, heart disease, and pneumonia combined. Each day, at least 1 million “latchkey children” go home to where there is a gun.
Besides these children who find their way into sociological statistics, there are those from all economic classes in treatment for attention-deficit disorder, hyperactivity, obesity, defiance, bulimia, depression, pregnancy, addiction . . .
Gross economic injustice, political passivity, and the delusions of circuses (without bread) are responsible for the plight of children. But also I accuse the parental fallacy of sponsoring this negligence. Parents’ deficient attention to the individual call they brought with them into the world and the hyperactivity of their distraction from this call betrays their reason for being alive. When your child becomes the reason for your life, you have abandoned the invisible reason you are here. And the reason you are here as an adult, as a citizen, as a parent? To make a world receptive to the daimon. To set the civilization straight so that a child can grow down into it and its daimon can have a life. This is the parenting task. To carry out this task for the daimon of your child you must bear witness first to your own.
Any father who has abandoned the small voice of his unique genius, turning it over to the small child he has fathered, cannot bear reminders of what he has neglected. He cannot tolerate the idealism that arises so naturally and spontaneously in the child, the romantic enthusiasms, the sense of fairness, the clear-eyed beauty, the attachment to little things, and the interest in big questions. All this becomes unbearable to a man who has forgotten his daimon.
Instead of learning from the child, who is living evidence of the invisibles in everyone’s life, the father capitulates to the child, disturbing its growing down into civilization by setting it up in a toy world. Result: a child-dominated fatherless culture with dysfunctional children with pistol-packing power. Like the vampires that so fascinate them, children in our culture, sentimentalized for their innocence and neglected on account of the bother they cause, drain away the blood of adult life.
“The Parental Fallacy” is excerpted from The Soul’s Code. © 1996 by James Hillman. It appears here by permission of Random House.
