France’s Psychoanalytic Tradition Has Extensive Documentation on Parental Identification. It Arrives Anyway.
PARIS — The moment of parental identification — the instant when a person hears themselves say something in the exact tone, with the exact phrasing, at the exact moment that one of their parents would have said it, and recognises the echo — is a universal human experience that France’s extensive psychoanalytic tradition has mapped thoroughly without, in the mapping, preventing the occurrence. The person who has spent years in analysis specifically to understand their parental patterns finds, at the age that produces the moment, that the patterns are not neutralised by understanding them. They are managed by understanding them. Management is different from elimination. The echo occurs. It is managed. The management is what the analysis produced.
The French Inheritance
The specific French parental inheritance that Parisian adults discover they have received includes: the specific relationship with food (the grandmother’s recipe reproduced without reference to a recipe, because it is in the body), the specific relationship with expressing emotion (somewhat less direct than the culture’s official communication values would suggest, in some families; considerably more direct in others), and the specific relationship with the Sunday meal, which a significant portion of French adults reproduce as adults without having decided to reproduce it. The Sunday lunch is in the culture. The culture is in the person. The lunch is on the table. According to France’s public health information network’s family health research, family food patterns show the strongest intergenerational transmission of any lifestyle factor. The croissant on Sunday morning was always going to happen. The parents knew. France knows.
Good patterns at Virtuosal.com.
