To be a parent is to be, not only a person, but also an icon. To be an icon means to become a public person, meaning who we are belongs not just to us, but to others as well-particularly our children. Our iconographic identity is created, not just by us, but also by our offspring. We may want to be known as great parents, but only our children can verify that.
As children of parents we want to believe in what they did for us so much, that we will vigorously pretend it was wonderful, for both of our sakes, even when it was the reverse. But whatever the truth may be, its meaning requires the input of both parents and children. That's the nature of an iconographic-public-relationship.
We humans believe vigorously both in making people into icons, and into becoming one our self. Success and fame are both measured, and rewarded, by our ability to become known in public ways. It gives us something to say, a sense of entitlement about each other, defining who and what we are. As icons, others partly belong to us, and we to them. It also makes them, and us, known by more than just our intimates.
Icons include parents, actors, politicians, priests, judges, police, representatives, business people, profiteers, criminals, etc., etc. All public identities make an icon of us. Indeed we believe and understand more about each other as icons, than we do as just one person to another. We trust iconographic identities more easily, because it's hard to get to know each other, and to trust our judgments about each other without public proofs.
What's more, education exists to verify the expertness of our iconographic identity, even more than it exists to educate us to have a mind of our own. Indeed that aspect of going to school has been almost discarded in present day; education has become almost exclusively training for a profession or trade. What classical education used to represent-becoming an enlightened individuated person capable of very independent thinking-has fallen into limbo. Perhaps because we no longer know how to conceptualize it, we're so preoccupied with verifying competence in an age defined by relativity-the loss of certainty.
In sharp contrast, there is one aspect of learning about which we are very sure-a child's right to form an independent sense of their personal identity. We've finally begun to give, in spades, this valuable opportunity to our children, though we haven't learned to give it to ourselves with such vigorous support. But that's probably only a matter of time, though nothing's any longer for certain.
In the meantime we adults must continue living primarily in a public world in which icons are more dominant than the individuality of specific people. Though we don't admit it, we prefer it that way. Even in our intimate circles, including our families, everyone is icono-graphized. We are parents, wives, husbands, lovers far more prominently than we are individual people. We most often perceive these shared roles as personally determined. But they are not defined just by us; they're also defined by the people with whom we have these public relationships. In effect, public means not to be alone; though being alone is the only vivid way to experience one's self.
Family has not traditionally been perceived as a public place, nor is intimacy a public event. But they are. That's what reputation is all about, defining how we're known by others, an issue that is usually one of our most important and vulnerable concerns; how are people listening and interpreting what we do or are with them? That includes our reputation with our spouse, both positive and negative parts of which may or may not be justified if the internal truth about every individual is known with vivid clarity. Everyone in a divorce makes the claim that they are being unfairly described.
Thus, as we try and teach our children nowadays, only inside of each one of us can we seek to define our identity in our own unique, and exclusive way. So we vigorously encourage them to think and act for themselves.
So where are we going with all of this? That as parents we have no right to claim righteousness about how we functioned as caretakers without first consulting the unconscious of our children. We can't trust their conscious mind, because we may have-probably did-unwittingly for sure, teach them to lie about what really happened when we had lapses of parenting skill of one kind or another. Losing it is what we usually call it, thinking children will recover from its ill effects. When instead, because such lapses always repeat themselves, children make the laws of their life out of such experience. In the sense of avoiding things their parents can't handle, even if it means giving up huge portions of their own identity by this partial self-burial. So lets not pretend we have no negative effects upon our children, most of which we know nothing about.
All psychic symptoms of dysfunction have this collaboration of fabricating the truth, put there in order to protect comfort, stability and the status quo of our parental assumptions about how to raise kids. All of these with time and progress will be judged as partly erroneous; such is the inevitable fate relativity has thrust us into.
In our child-centered society, there is a vigorous effort to deny that we ever make mistakes as parents. We try and pretend that psychic distress can be easily educated out, that it's just a hormonal or biochemical imbalance, that science has given us easy steps to slice symptoms out of a person's life. When, after such superficial treatment, next year the symptoms will be right back where they started. Fathoming the problems and distress of human experience requires far more effort and accomplishment, over aspects of experience that cannot be controlled-just influenced over time with great effort. So it is with anything human wrought. Nature didn't make growing up a few easy steps, or living life a piece of cake. So what makes us think we can change our self just by applying the right kind of short-term objectivity?
We seem to feel safer living in an iconographic reality. Some people call it religion. But it's more functional to call relating to each other as symbols, iconographic; it includes all the ways in which we do it, not just with God, but also with each other. Somehow these larger than life definitions of who we are, appears to make everything more valid and believable. We don't very well understand, or entirely trust, each other, or ourselves, as individuals.
What's our favorite antidote to this uncertainty? Be famous, making one's self somebody big, even if we're really small, and need somebody else's dialogue to make us real. Hollywood and Washington DC are full of such people.
It's as parents that we feel the biggest sense of liability in being icons, because all of us make mistakes. Nobody's got it right yet, and most likely never will. Perfection is a delusional concept, born out of a desperate and fearful need to feel justified in our lifetime. Yet imperfection is nature's way. But if in understanding all of this as parents, we have to experience the criticism or shame of our caretaking lapses, it's another question. We need respite from a steady diet that painful.
There is only one way for us, as beleaguered parents, to restore our reputation. That is to insist that we are two very distinct people-a parent, and an individual; and each identity must be conceptualized separately. It's only fair. To be judged in life by only the way we parented, denies any legitimacy to our life as an individual. A great many of my patients have been gifted people, whose parents were equally talented-as individuals. But as the parents of my patients, many of them were rotten! Mostly it's not their fault because they had no psychology, no sense of who a child is. We're just beginning to get that now. But in all truthfulness, they were terrible parents. Their appropriately angry children would call them abusive neglectful bastards.
But to address them exclusively in that way trashes what is a basically decent, even exemplary life. That is at least for those who regard other non-family achievements as equal to parenting. Some don't.
The problem is we're not used to regarding someone in more than one way, as both very individual as well as iconographic. We jumble it all together in the same bag, letting our preferences and prejudices determine how we interpret the mix, instead of giving each other our due-a better chance for respect from others, even if we weren't such great parents.
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