Bruno Bettelheim hated parents. Do I?

Not that I’m about to count, but I wouldn’t be surprised if at least a hundred of my five hundred-plus posts are critical and condemnatory of parents. Just saying this gives me a quiet self-satisfied feeling. The question, then, would be –

Is this just me, or is it them?

I have never hated, nor have I ever been able to conjure up any anger at, my parents. I just have an extremely low-key cold and empty feeling when I image them. For reasons preceding them and with them, I was a child with no connection to my mother but the grey paperweight of repression, and none with my father but a light visceral disgust. Yes, I’m talking about a child as young as five who floated invisibly in the family air and who knew he was an atheist at age eight (despite the poignant Jewish hymns and the prestige of being a “chosen one”).

Yet when I move my mind from my own parents to clients’ parents, something begins to burn. I picture almost all parents as loveless, immature and childish, incompetent, evil, unconsciously retribution-based, false gods, false grown-ups.

I know this is the problem of “splitting off and projecting,” a process cited by Alice Miller to explain Hitler and his followers. It means I must have buried my true feelings, owing to their intolerability and complete undermining nature, then projected them into a caricature of “parent.”

Still – Is it just me, or is it also them?

I define love in a certain way that seems, at first blush, to be a logical fallacy but which I believe is not. Love is that quality that enables a child to grow up without serious psychological dysfunction. Is it fair to grant, or deny, a feeling to someone by its effect on someone else? In this singular case, I believe so. “Unsullied love,” let’s say, has several aspects. It’s obviously not just a word (which everyone uses, regardless of circumstances). It’s not just a deeply intimate bond feeling: Many partners, for example, confuse their critical dependency need with love. Love must be differentiated from need, so the parent can appreciate – respect, value, enjoy, protect – her child as a real human being, separate and inviolate, not as a supply or appendage of herself.

My clients were not inoculated with respectful, valuing, enjoyed, protective love. They were starved or hurt in some way at their root, so their growth was not sturdy. They were incorporated into the parent, so they did not become separate. Something, or everything, in love was missing.

I know there are true loving parents in the world, somewhere. Leave it to Diogenes' lamp to find them.