Jonathan Lear, Love and its Place in Nature (1990). Chapter 7 (XXVI)

We concluded the last entry by suggesting that the process of “individuation” involves two, mutually-defining ingredients: on the one hand, one differentiates from one’s early environment — that is, from spontaneously-absorbed parental “attitudes”; on the other hand, one incorporates one’s desires — especially those archaic drives originally repelled from consciousness. I call these ingredients “mutually-defining” because one differentiates from one’s early environment precisely through the incorporation of desires originally excluded by it.

This thought can be put negatively: a person who “incorporates” only those desires authorized by his parents, and who refuses to acknowledge, even to himself, the existence of any desires that radically violate their strictures — such a person has assuredly failed to “differentiate” himself. Conversely, a reliable measure of the metaphorical distance a person has travelled from his original parental environment — his “differentiation” — is whether, and to what degree, he can “feel” and recognize in himself the presence of even those desires that are incommensurable with his “core” parental identifications.

Such a story will apply to anyone potentially capable of the full range of human desires — that is, virtually everyone — since every realistically conceivable upbringing must involve a parent valuing some of the child’s desires, diminishing others, and denying altogether the existence of still others.

It does not follow, of course, that all newly-incorporated desires are for that reason morally endorsable, ought to be acted upon, or point in a “rational” direction for their bearer. (These additional predicates suggest processes of reflection we have not considered.) It does follow, however, that my newfound capacity to feel desires, formerly repressed or dissociated, that earlier in life would have violated my core identifications — this capacity demonstrates an enlargement of my “will” past the constricted borders fixed by early experience, hence a “differentiation” from it. Or again, in simpler terms: I achieve differentiation from my original environment whenever I accept desires in myself that, for one reason or another, my parents could not accept. In extending the range of desires discernible as expressions of myself, I have also transformed the “will” at my core. For I have “relaxed” my second-order desires (or anxiety, rather)) at least to the extent of re-admitting the banished first-order desires back into consciousness.

Something paradoxical clings to this process, though. For whatever differentiation form this environment I achieve will rest on a more fundamental identification, hence — at least in this area — a stubborn non-differentiation. Recall that the “I” originates above all from its identification with a specific parental trait: the attitude of loving responsiveness. This I will fail to constitute itself, to coordinate its emerging agencies, if it cannot assimilate this attitude. It must establish a minimally “benign” self-relation patterned after the parents’ relation to him- or herself.

Of course, the parent will invariably fail to embody the trait of loving responsiveness universally — either at all times or, more damagingly, vis-à-vis all possible expressions of infantile desire. So long as these failures are not gross, however, they do not impede development and may even assist it. (Some frustrations, proportionate and appropriately timed, are necessary for any infant’s healthy growth.) Further, even the best-intentioned parents are imperfect, with an unconscious life of their own, so that, though they may vigilantly attempt to “accept” and nourish the unrestricted range of the infant’s drives, many of their responses — the messages of disapproval, refusal, or denial communicated to the infant — are transmitted outside of their control because outside of their awareness. As a rule, parents are unconsciously unable to accept in the infant desires they cannot accept in themselves.

But if the infant’s experience is “good enough,” the basically loving attitude he has assimilated allows him to survive the parent’s imperfect embodiment of it; love has become the substance of his “core” self. And this, finally, is the unchanging, identificatory “anchor” which permits the self’s gradual differentiation from the parent. If I have indeed identified with this trait of loving responsiveness — a trait that, in the event, my parents were able to embody only imperfectly, such that some desires underwent repression — I am then in a position to extend its application to these same desires. That is, it is available to the child, in the course of normal development, to distribute this parent-inherited love to areas of mental functioning (inadmissible thoughts, wishes, fantasies) that his parents could not abide. In this respect, then, the ur-identification of love becomes an enduring condition of possibility for all subsequent non-identifications.