Metagenealogy: Self-Discovery through Psychomagic and the Family Tree by Alejandro Jodorowsky & Marianne Costa

Author:Alejandro Jodorowsky & Marianne Costa [Jodorowsky, Alejandro]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Spirituality/Psychology
ISBN: 9781620551639
Publisher: Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
Published: 2014-08-25T16:00:00+00:00

The place of the dead child among siblings can be dominating. Conversely a child whose death was not successfully mourned, but rather erased, may still be present like a kind of shadow and weigh heavily on the rest of the living.

We must distinguish between several situations.

The Hidden Child

A death that no one talks about, that one or both parents never mention. This may be a stillbirth, miscarriage, abortion, or even a child considered to be “illegitimate” with whom all contact is lost and who is “dead” to the family. Silence may make mourning impossible, but shameful as well (to have lost a baby, to have aborted, to have given birth to a monster), so the personal Unconscious and the familial Unconscious are closely related. The other members of the sibling group will have a vague awareness of this child, whom they may sometimes evoke under the symbolic form of an illness or imaginary friend. A daughter who experiences a miscarriage, ectopic pregnancy, or delivery of a stillborn may be experiencing this “accident” of pregnancy at precisely the age her mother was when she had an abortion.

Example: A wealthy couple from North America conceived their first child after having taken all possible precautions, but on the day of the birth, the woman learned that the child has Down syndrome, which amniocentesis had not detected. Incapable of dealing with this, the mother abandoned the child to foster care and decided to never speak of the incident again. Two years later, the little brother developed a special relationship with an imaginary friend whose first name (which stupefied the parents) was the same as that of the older brother. The child’s school psychologists regarded this relationship with alarm, and the couple eventually understood that the weight of the secret about the birth and abandonment of the older brother with Down syndrome likely destabilized the “normal” younger brother. After a lot of work, littered with resistance, the parents decided to introduce the two brothers to one another. The eldest brother’s adoptive family, in this case, demonstrated wisdom and exceptional tolerance in allowing the biological family to resume regular contact with this once-hated child.

The Idealized Child

The idealized child is the disappeared child who, after dying in childhood or early youth, becomes a family hero who takes up all of the space, whom the parents place above everyone else, on whose absence the mother blames all of her dissatisfactions. The rest of the children receive the message that “Mom (and/or Dad) loves the dead more than the living, and I would be more loved if I were dead.” In this case, it helps to go back to the reasons why the mother (and/or father) prevented any mourning, therefore creating the beginning of an endless depression and a break from the rest of the children. For someone who has no desire to be a mother, the dead child may become a pretext for resigning her maternal role and for refusing to give the living children the love she claims to carry for the idealized child.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.