Premium
Confronting Bluebeard : totalitarian regimes in childhood and in the collective psyche
Author(s) -
Wright Susanna
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
journal of analytical psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.285
H-Index - 23
eISSN - 1468-5922
pISSN - 0021-8774
DOI - 10.1111/1468-5922.12515
Subject(s) - psyche , aggression , identity (music) , collective identity , psychology , psychoanalysis , quality (philosophy) , sociology , social psychology , politics , epistemology , aesthetics , political science , philosophy , law
Beginning with the story of Bluebeard, the author considers how traumatic overwhelm can occur in everyday childhood situations of a psychically murderous quality; for example, a nanny’s totalitarian regime may be invisible to parents ruled by collective social and cultural norms. A child who is remote from mother and idealises a father embodying a powerful patriarchal system may remain naïvely dependent in marriage and unable to cope with the realities of human aggression. The paper describes analytic work with a woman who had suffered repeated breakdowns and needed to relinquish a fragile, socially constructed identity in order to establish her own true orientation.