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Parental divorce in late adolescence: Discontinuity, repetition and the family ghost
Abstract
Interviews were conducted with twenty-one adults who were between the ages of 18 and 25 when their parents divorced. In depth interviews, which included discussion about past family life, took place an average of seven and up to eighteen years after the divorce occurred. The psychoanalytic concept of adolescence as a second individuation was used to conceptualize how the sense of self that offspring have established prior to the divorce is an important mediator of their experience. Most offspring appeared to experience parents ending their relationship as ending the family and declaring it a failure. That divorce was often interpreted as an act of parental will was seen to compromise offsprings' ability to mourn the loss of their families. Most offspring conveyed an unarticulated discontinuity between the past and the present which was conceptualized as the "family ghost." Renegotiating relationships with parents was the only universal experience of all participants. Changes in relationships with fathers usually involved distance and closeness; changing relationships with mothers included renegotiating dynamics of triangulation and boundaries, and for daughters, sharing with mothers as now single women. It was observed that complications in parental relationships after the divorce compounded the internal work of individuation. At the same time, unresolved narcissistic or dependency needs complicated renegotiating current parental relationships. Divorce was seen to potentially complicate recovery for offspring from problematic families. These offspring still seemed occupied with dyadic relationships with parents and with an uncertain sense of self. In contrast, offspring from more harmonious backgrounds appeared to have achieved greater emotional independence but still missed the lost family. Finally, the impact of divorce on the renegotiation of oedipal issues and the consolidation of a triadic level of relatedness is discussed. It is suggested that there is a gap between object relations and systemic theory in terms of how the family is internally represented.
Subject Area
Clinical psychology|Social work|Developmental psychology
Recommended Citation
Copperman, Joan M, "Parental divorce in late adolescence: Discontinuity, repetition and the family ghost" (1994). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI9420613.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9420613