parents
The term ‘Parent’ traverses the depth-psychology corpus along several distinct axes, each generating its own set of tensions. Hillman’s sustained critique of what he names the ‘parental fallacy’ constitutes one of the corpus’s most polemical positions: the assumption that parents are the primary architects of the soul is, for Hillman, a cultural ideology that displaces the daimon and divinizes ordinary human figures at the expense of the child’s own innate calling. Against this, attachment theorists — Bowlby, Siegel — ground the parent-child dyad in empirical developmental science, demonstrating how parental attunement or its absence literally shapes neural architecture and attachment organization across the lifespan. The Adult Children of Alcoholics literature introduces a third register: the internalized parent, split into the ‘Critical Parent’ and the ‘Loving Parent,’ becomes the theater of self-reparenting work, translating psychodynamic insight into a Twelve Step practice of inner re-mothering. Astrological depth psychology (Greene, Sasportas) complicates the empirical view by distinguishing the actual parent from the ‘parental imago’ — the archetypal image the child selectively constructs. Across all positions, the parent functions simultaneously as a real historical figure, an internalized complex, an archetypal carrier, and a site of cultural projection, making it one of the most contested and generative nodes in the entire field.
the primary instrument of our fate is the behavior of your mother and father… the idea of parenting and parents is more hardened than ever in the minds of moral reformers and psychotherapists.
Hillman identifies the belief that parents determine the soul as a pervasive cultural fantasy — a ‘parental fallacy’ — hardened rather than dissolved by contemporary psychotherapy.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996thesis
This ideology traps women in the parental fallacy and children in mother-blame… it aims to dissolve the fallacy that has made bonding a bondage.
Hillman argues that the ideological elevation of parental causation, especially maternal, functions as bondage rather than explanation, and calls for its deconstruction.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996thesis
Notice that these psychologisms draw attention away from the child and back to the parent, who asks: ‘How am I doing?’ They raise doubts and anxieties, not about the nature of the child, but about the parents’ own problems.
Hillman contends that dominant psychological discourse relocates agency from the child’s innate character to parental anxiety and self-scrutiny, thereby obscuring the daimon.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996thesis
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.
Hillman argues that the parent who has suppressed his own daimon projects that neglect onto the child, distorting rather than supporting the child’s natural unfolding.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996thesis
placements in the 4th… may not describe the way the parent actually was as a person, but rather the way in which the child experienced the parent — what is known as the parent-imago, the child’s inborn image of the parent.
Sasportas distinguishes the empirical parent from the archetypal parental imago, arguing that the child’s chart reflects a selective, constitutionally determined perception rather than objective parental behavior.
, The Twelve Houses: An Introduction to the Houses in Astrological Interpretation, 1985thesis
The Critical Parent is developed and entrenched in most adult children, so it takes effort and focus to develop a Loving Parent who can connect with the Inner Child on a consistent and meaningful level.
The ACA framework posits two internalized parental voices — Critical and Loving — and treats recovery as the deliberate cultivation of an inner Loving Parent capable of reparenting the wounded inner child.
, ADULT CHILDREN OF ALCOHOLICS DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILIES, 2012thesis
In Step One, for instance, we recognize that we are powerless over this Critical Parent and its judgments… We ask for the strength to turn over the false power wielded by the Critical Parent.
The ACA text maps the internalized Critical Parent onto the Twelve Step framework, treating its tyrannical judgments as a spiritual problem requiring surrender and transformation.
, ADULT CHILDREN OF ALCOHOLICS DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILIES, 2012supporting
there is an archetypal figure masquerading as a parent… the parent with whom one has the most overt and conscious conflict is usually the one with whom one feels safe enough to actually fight.
Greene argues that the horoscope reveals not the real parent but an archetypal figure inhabiting the parental role, and that overt conflict with a parent paradoxically signals greater psychological safety.
, The Development of Personality: Seminars in Psychological Astrology, Volume 1, 1987supporting
Many parents project their unlived life onto their child… The parent’s identification is usually strongest with the same-sex child although often a parent will unconsciously live out the anima or animus through the other sex child.
Hollis demonstrates how parents burden children with their own unlived potentials through projection, complicating the child’s capacity for authentic individuation.
, The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife, 1993supporting
When the parent is the source of fear and disorientation, it is impossible for the child to achieve an organized, effective adaptive state.
Siegel establishes neurobiologically that the parent who generates fear rather than safety precipitates disorganized attachment, the most pathological developmental outcome.
, The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are, 2020supporting
the ‘functional’ or nonalcoholic parent passes on just as many traits as the identified alcoholic… The long-term effects of fear transferred to us by a nonalcoholic parent can match the damaging effects of alcohol.
ACA doctrine extends pathological parental transmission beyond the identified addict to the codependent parent, arguing that internalized fear is as formative as substance exposure.
, ADULT CHILDREN OF ALCOHOLICS DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILIES, 2012supporting
We were forced to parent ourselves into perfectionism to win family approval… Our potential is a combination of survival skills and true love for ourselves.
ACA describes how dysfunctional parenting compels premature self-parenting in the child, a survival adaptation that becomes the foundation for conscious reparenting in recovery.
, ADULT CHILDREN OF ALCOHOLICS DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILIES, 2012supporting
Kierkegaard — along with Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche — became one of Laing’s spiritual parents… You expect less from your natural parents, and they become easier to bear once you have discovered the other family tree on which the life of your soul depends.
Hillman proposes that the soul’s true genealogy runs through intellectual and spiritual ‘ancestors’ rather than biological parents, relativizing the natural parent’s formative power.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting
parents have also usurped the protective duties and the demands for attention traditionally accorded to the invisible ancestors… Biogenetics replaces the spirit world.
Hillman argues that the modern reduction of ancestry to chromosomal connection displaces a richer spiritual cosmology in which protective ancestor figures need not be biological relatives.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting
individuals of this sort are far more likely than are those who grow up secure to have had parents who… found their children’s desire for love and care a burden and responded to them irritably.
Bowlby identifies parental irritability and rejection of the child’s attachment needs as the developmental precursor of anxious and ambivalent personality organization in adulthood.
, Loss: Sadness and Depression (Attachment and Loss, Volume III), 1980supporting
the effect that a parent’s death has on a child is powerfully influenced by the pattern of family relationships to which the child is exposed after it.
Bowlby underscores that parental loss does not act in isolation; the quality of family relationships following bereavement determines the child’s subsequent psychiatric vulnerability.
, Loss: Sadness and Depression (Attachment and Loss, Volume III), 1980supporting
the father is the first representative of masculinity and the first significant other apart from the mother. He therefore promotes social functioning… vital for the formation of generational and gender identity.
Post-Jungian analysis assigns the father a structuring developmental function distinct from the mother’s, particularly in the formation of social, generational, and gender identity.
, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985supporting
Opioids are necessary for parental love… Nurturing mothers experience major endorphin surges as they interact lovingly with their babies — endorphin ‘highs’ can be one of the natural rewards of motherhood.
Maté grounds parental love neurochemically, arguing that the opioid system is the biological substrate of nurturing bonding, situating depth-psychological insights within evolutionary neuroscience.
, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction, 2008supporting
children and adults often form a bond with perpetrating parents… based on a violation of trust by the abuser. When parents are abusive, the theory states that the child is forced to bond to that parent because the child is dependent on the adult for survival.
The ACA workbook introduces trauma bonding as the mechanism by which children maintain attachment to abusive parents, explaining the paradox of love coexisting with violation.
, The twelve steps of adult children steps workbook, 2007supporting
A ‘happy’ child was never and nowhere the aim of parenting… the parental fallacy has trapped the parents also in providing happiness.
Hillman critiques the contemporary parental mandate to produce happiness as a historically novel distortion that serves neither parent nor child’s deeper formation.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting
early complexes and other unfinished business from the past are passed on from one generation to the next, and how accurately these are reflected in the three charts concerned.
Greene traces intergenerational transmission of psychological complexes through a multigenerational astrological case study, showing how parental unresolved material enters the child’s chart.
, The Luminaries: The Psychology of the Sun and Moon in the Horoscope, 1992supporting
Insecure children… tend to have had mothers who found holding and physical contact difficult, who were unresponsive to their infant’s needs and not well attuned to their rhythms.
Bowlby’s attachment theory links specific maternal behaviors — unresponsiveness, poor attunement — to insecure developmental trajectories, grounding the parent’s role in observable interaction rather than fantasy.
, John Bowlby and Attachment Theory (Makers of Modern, 2014supporting
children who lose a parent to death… may fail to adequately mourn and later in life may present with symptoms of depression or the inability to form close relationships during the adult years.
Worden identifies parental loss in childhood as a specific grief risk factor with long-term clinical sequelae, linking disrupted mourning to adult relational and affective pathology.
, Grief Counseling and Grief Therapy A Handbook for the, 2018supporting
It stops when I tell the Dad inside my head, ‘You can’t beat me anymore.’
An ACA testimony illustrates the somatic persistence of parental introjects and the therapeutic moment of asserting inner authority over the internalized abusive parent.
, ADULT CHILDREN OF ALCOHOLICS DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILIES, 2012supporting
The two crucial items of information which sooner or later a child needs to know are first that the dead parent will never return and secondly that his body is buried in the ground or burned to ashes.
Bowlby identifies the communicative responsibilities of the surviving parent following a death as essential to preventing pathological mourning in the bereaved child.
, Loss: Sadness and Depression (Attachment and Loss, Volume III), 1980aside
One of the most difficult positions in which parents put surviving siblings is that of the substitute for the lost child.
Worden identifies parental substitution dynamics following a child’s death as a grief complication that places surviving siblings in psychologically untenable roles.
, Grief Counseling and Grief Therapy A Handbook for the, 2018aside
Unlike māter ‘mother’, pǝter does not denote the physical parent, as is evidenced, for instance, by the ancient juxtaposition preserved in Latin Iupiter.
Benveniste’s linguistic archaeology reveals that the proto-Indo-European term for father was not a biological designation but a social-authoritative title, complicating naturalistic assumptions about parenthood.
, Indo European Language and Society, 1973aside