Freud - Complete Works (344 page)

1985

FAMILY ROMANCES

(1909)

1986

Intentionally left blank

1987

FAMILY ROMANCES

The liberation of an individual, as he grows
up, from the authority of his parents is one of the most necessary
though one of the most painful results brought about by the course
of his development. It is quite essential that that liberation
should occur and it may be presumed that it has been to some extent
achieved by everyone who his reached a normal state. Indeed, the
whole progress of society rests upon the opposition between
successive generations. On the other hand, there is a class of
neurotics whose condition is recognizably determined by their
having failed in this task.

   For a small child his parents are
at first the only authority and the, source of all belief. The
child’s most intense and most momentous wish during these
early years is to be like his parents (that is, the parent of his
own sex) and to be big like his father and mother. But as
intellectual growth increases, the child cannot help discovering by
degrees the category to which his parents belong. He gets to know
other parents and compares them with his own, and so acquires the
right to doubt the incomparable and unique quality which he had
attributed to them. Small events in the child’s life which
make him feel dissatisfied afford him provocation for beginning to
criticize his parents, and for using, in order to support his
critical attitude, the knowledge which he has acquired that other
parents are in some respects preferable to them. The psychology of
the neuroses teaches us that, among other factors, the most intense
impulses of sexual rivalry contribute to this result. A feeling of
being slighted is obviously what constitutes the subject-matter of
such provocations. There are only too many occasions on which a
child is slighted, or at least
feels
he has been slighted,
on which he feels he is not receiving the whole of his
parents’ love, and, most of all, of which he feels regrets at
having to share it with brothers and sisters. His sense that his
own affection is not being fully reciprocated then finds a vent in
the idea, often consciously recollected later from early childhood,
of being a step-child or an adopted child. People who have not
developed neuroses very frequently remember such occasions, on
which - usually as a result of something they have read - they
interpreted and responded to their parent’s hostile behaviour
in this fashion. But here the influence of sex is already in
evidence, for a boy is far more inclined to feel hostile impulses
towards his father than towards his mother and has a far more
intense desire to get free from
him
than from
her
. In
this respect the imagination of girls is apt to show itself much
weaker. These consciously remembered mental impulses of childhood
embody the factor which enables us to understand the nature of
myths.

Family Romances

1988

   The later stage in the
development of the neurotic’s estrangement from his parents,
begun in this manner, might be described as ‘the
neurotic’s family romance’. It is seldom remembered
consciously but can almost always be revealed by psycho-analysis.
For a quite peculiarly marked imaginative activity is one of the
essential characteristics of neurotics and also of all
comparatively highly gifted people. This activity emerges first in
children’s play, and then, starting roughly from the period
before puberty, takes over the topic of family relations. A
characteristic example of this peculiar imaginative activity is to
be seen in the familiar day-dreaming¹ which persists far
beyond puberty. If these day-dreams are carefully examined, they
are found to serve as the fulfilment of wishes and as a correction
of actual life. They have two principal aims, an erotic and an
ambitious one - though an erotic aim is usually concealed behind
the latter too. At about the period I have mentioned, then, the
child’s imagination becomes engaged in the task of getting
free from the parents of whom he now has a low opinion and of
replacing them by others, who, as a rule, are of higher social
standing. He will make use in this connection of any opportune
coincidences from his actual experience, such as his becoming
acquainted with the Lord of the Manor or some landed proprietor if
he lives in the country or with some member of the aristocracy if
he lives in town. Chance occurrences of this kind arouse the
child’s envy, which finds expression in a phantasy in which
both his parents are replaced by others of better birth. The
technique used in developing phantasies like this (which are, of
course, conscious at this period) depends upon the ingenuity and
the material which the child has at his disposal. There is also the
question of whether the phantasies are worked out with greater or
less effort to obtain verisimilitude. This state is reached at a
time at which the child is still in ignorance of the sexual
determinants of procreation.

  
¹
Cf. ’Hysterical Phantasies and their
Relation to Bisexuality’ (1908
a
), where a reference
will be found to the literature of the subject.

Family Romances

1989

   When presently the child comes to
know the difference in the parts played by fathers and mothers in
their sexual relations, and realizes that ‘
pater semper
incertus est
’, while the mother is
‘
certissima
’,¹ the family romance undergoes
a curious curtailment: it contents itself with exalting the
child’s father, but no longer casts any doubts on his
maternal origin, which is regarded as something unalterable. This
second (sexual) stage of the family romance is actuated by another
motive as well, which is absent in the first (asexual) stage. The
child, having learnt about sexual processes, tends to picture to
himself erotic situations and relations, the motive force behind
this being his desire to bring his mother (who is the subject of
the most intense sexual curiosity) into situations of secret
infidelity and into secret love-affairs. In this way the
child’s phantasies, which started by being, as it were,
asexual, are brought up to the level of his later knowledge.

   Moreover the motive of revenge
and retaliation, which was in the foreground at the earlier state,
is also to be found at the later one. It is, as a rule, precisely
these neurotic children who were punished by their parents for
sexual naughtiness and who now revenge themselves on their parents
by means of phantasies of this kind.

  
¹
[An old legal tag: ‘paternity is
always uncertain, maternity is most certain.’]

Family Romances

1990

   A younger child is very specially
inclined to use imaginative stories such as these in order to rob
those born before him of their prerogatives - in a way which
reminds one of historical intrigues; and he often has no hesitation
in attributing to his mother as many fictitious love-affairs as he
himself has competitors. An interesting variant of the family
romance may then appear, in which the hero and author returns to
legitimacy himself while his brothers and sisters are eliminated by
being bastardized. So too if there are any other particular
interests at work they can direct the course to be taken by the
family romance; for its many-sidedness and its great range of
applicability enable it to meet every sort of requirement. In this
way, for instance, the young phantasy-builder can get rid of his
forbidden degree of kinship with one of his sisters if he finds
himself sexually attracted by her.

   If anyone is inclined to turn
away in horror from this depravity of the childish heart or feels
tempted, indeed, to dispute the possibility of such things, he
should observe that these works of fiction, which seem so full of
hostility, are none of them really so badly intended, and that they
still preserve, under a slight disguise, the child’s original
affection for his parents. The faithlessness and ingratitude are
only apparent. If we examine in detail the commonest of these
imaginative romances, the replacement of both parents or of the
father alone by grander people, we find that these new and
aristocratic parents are equipped with attributes that are derived
entirely from real recollections of the actual and humble ones; so
that in fact the child is not getting rid of his father but
exalting him. Indeed the whole effort at replacing the real father
by a superior one is only an expression of the child’s
longing for the happy, vanished days when his father seemed to him
the noblest and strongest of men and his mother the dearest and
loveliest of women. He is turning away from the father whom he
knows to-day to the father in whom he believed in the earlier years
of his childhood; and his phantasy is no more than the expression
of a regret that those happy days have gone. Thus in these
phantasies the overvaluation that characterizes a child’s
earliest years comes into its own again. An interesting
contribution to this subject is afforded by the study of dreams. We
learn from their interpretation that even in later years, if the
Emperor and Empress appear in dreams, those exalted personages
stand for the dreamer’s father and mother.¹ So that the
child’s overvaluation of his parents survives as well in the
dreams of normal adults.

  
¹
Cf. my
Interpretation of Dreams
(1900
a
).

1991

CONTRIBUTION TO A QUESTIONNAIRE ON READING

(1907)

You ask me to name ‘ten good
books’ for you, and refrain from adding to this any word of
explanation. Thus you leave to me not only the choice of the books
but also the interpretation of your request. Accustomed to paying
attention to small signs, I must then trust the wording in which
you couch your enigmatical demand. You did not say: ‘the ten
most magnificent works (of world literature)', in which case I
should have been obliged to reply, with so many others: Homer, the
tragedies of Sophocles, Goethe’s
Faust
,
Shakespeare’s
Hamlet
,
Macbeth
, etc. Nor did you
say the ‘ten most significant books’, among which
scientific achievements like those of Copernicus, of the old
physician Johann Weier on the belief in witches, Darwin’s
Descent of Man
, and others, would then have found a place.
You did not even ask for ‘favourite books’, among which
I should not have forgotten Milton’s
Paradise Lost
and
Heine’s
Lazarus
. I think, therefore, that a particular
stress falls on the ‘good’ in your phrase, and that
with this predicate you intend to designate books to which one
stands in rather the same relationship as to ‘good’
friends, to whom one owes a part of one’s knowledge of life
and view of the world - books which one has enjoyed oneself and
gladly commends to others, but in connection with which the element
of timid reverence, the feeling of one’s own smallness in the
face of their greatness, is not particularly prominent.

   I will therefore name ten such
‘good’ books for you which have come to my mind without
a great deal of reflection.

                                   
Multatuli, Letters and Works.

                                   
Kipling,
Jungle Book
.

                                   
Anatole France,
Sur la pierre blanche
.

                                   
Zola,
Fécondité
.

                                   
Merezhkovsky,
Leonardo da Vinci
.

                                   
G. Keller,
Leute von Seldwyla
.

                                   
C. F. Meyer,
Huttens letzte Tage
.

                                   
Macaulay,
Essays
.

                                   
Gomperz,
Griechische Denker
.

                                   
Mark Twain,
Sketches
.

Contribution To A Questionnaire On Reading

1992

   I do not know what you intend to
do with this list. It seems a most peculiar one even to me; I
really cannot let it go without comment. The problem of why
precisely these and not other equally ‘good’ books I
will not begin to tackle; I merely wish to throw light on the
relation between the author and his work. The connection is not in
every case as firm as it is, for instance, with Kipling’s
Jungle Book
. For the most part I could just as well have
singled out another work by the same author - for instance, in the
case of Zola,
Docteur Pascal
- and the like. The same man
who has given us one good book has often presented us with several
good books. In the case of Multatuli I felt in two minds whether to
reject the private letters in favour of the ‘Love
Letters’ or the latter in favour of the former, and for that
reason wrote: ‘Letters and Works’. Genuinely creative
writing of purely, poetical value has been excluded from this list,
probably because your charge - good books - did not seem exactly
aimed at such; for in the case of C. F. Meyer’s
Hutten
I must set its ‘goodness’ far above its beauty:
‘edification’ above aesthetic enjoyment.

   You have touched on something,
with your request to name for you ‘ten good books’, on
which an immeasurable amount could be said. And so I will conclude,
in order not to become even more informative.

Yours
sincerely,

FREUD
.