Parental Desertion

Most psychological maladaptation, perhaps as much as 90%, is caused by parental desertion. Of the remainder, most of it will be attributable to birth defect or infection.

This is an empirical observation and can be checked by observing the series Biography on A&E over an extended period of time. There are two categories of people to watch carefully, criminals and movie stars. In almost every case, criminals will be observed to have suffered parental desertion at a young age. In the case of movie stars, many will be discovered to have had the same experience.

The types of parental desertion are manifold. It is not just a case of disappearing, it is in many cases psychological desertion, which I would define as interacting with the child in a non parental way. Parental normalcy must now be defined. Parenting is, of course, instinctual behavior. By this it is meant that any animal has instructions regarding how to relate to a child built into its DNA and communicated to him or her via feelings. This amounts to supplying the child's needs and relating to it with warmth. It also entails providing for the child's departure from the family at the appropriate time.

Sometimes, parental desertion isn't the parent's fault, as in the case of death for example. None the less it will have the usual effect, since the child isn't able to evaluate the reasonableness of the event and misses some of the important experiences provided by the parent and not fully recreated by a substitute.

Loss of the father is most devastating to females and loss of the mother is most devastating to males. This is because the development of a realistic understanding of the opposite sex is crucial to the future success of the child. The deserter, whatever his or her motives or power over the situation, will be blamed by the deprived child, which will lead the child to reject some or all qualities of the absentee parent, both in others and in themselves. The result will be a complex which is a split off portion of the personality containing the qualities denied by the child in him or herself.

This rejection will produce a compulsive attraction to people projecting the qualities denied in the experiencer and that will produce a demand that the object of the compulsive attraction display all of the expected qualities rejected by the subject which will inevitably lead to disappointment when they don't exist in the object. Typically the object will pretend their existence until his or her needs, usually sexual, are fulfilled at which time the pretense will be dropped. This will result in conflict initiated by the disappointed subject.

The range of responses to this problem by the subject are manifold. Some will compensate by overdeveloping some feature of their personalities to gain acceptance in spite of the missing aspects. This will be typical of movie stars suffering from this problem. Judy Garland is a good example. At the other extreme, some will emphasize the most negative aspects of their personalities as revenge on society for giving them the pain they suffer from. This is typical of mass murderers.

Variations in manifestation of these personality flaws arise from many sources, the most important of which are the particular aspects of the personality that are repressed. A common example in males is the loss of faith that results when the father disappears because of the over generalization and identification of the father with God. Another possible result will be feminization of the personality due to loss of characteristics of maleness. In the first case, a common result is the religious conversion experience of St. Paul. It varies in intensity, of course, depending on how intense was the rejection.

Almost as important as what is repressed is what is emphasized as a result of the repression. The repression results in a flawed personality containing less than is normal and experienced by the subject as inferiority. The sense of inferiority will lead to over emphasis of some other feature of the personality. The male may emphasize sports, or entertainment, or intimidation. All of these will be intended to gain respect from one's peers and inclusion. Charles Manson is an excellent example of this.

Unhappily, this behavior is self reinforcing over generations. When a desertion occurs, and it may happen through no fault of the parent, the result will be the above described psychological adjustments which will normally lead to failed marriages and new desertions in the lives of the children of the sufferer. This would normally lead to the expectation that humans as a species are unworkable if there were not some mechanism for overcoming the problem. In fact, as the Bible says, the problem usually runs its course in three or four generations.

How is the problem solved? Intelligence and industriousness, I would say. Eventually over the generations, patterns emerge, negatives (degraded survivability) are assigned and the patterns are avoided. Successful adaptations are passed along to the children, strength is achieved and competitive success results.

This is a family experience and can be observed in the culture. A lower class family will frequently experience these kinds of problems and as they are overcome rise in the social scale. Eventually they will arrive in the upper class and life will lose its meaning, they will have fewer children and die out. The room thus made will be filled by new lower class individuals because they propagate more, and the cycle recurs. The number of individuals in the culture will always match its capacity to provide for them.

How do feelings impact on this process?

Feelings can be thought of as unconscious commentaries on our actions. The source of feelings is, in my view DNA. They control the behavior of animals much more completely than they do humans. Why is that?

Humans are unique in that they create as a natural product of life a personality. They do this by emphasizing some aspects of life and de-emphasizing others. Their choices will usually be a result of parental pressure which is to say that they will be a result of the stage of development being passed through by their families. As a result of personality creation, feelings are distorted when they are passed through it in the same way that apple juice is changed by being filtered. Sometimes the personality detracts from the feeling as some aspect of it is filtered out, sometimes the reverse happens.

As the generations go on and the personality more and more becomes a faithful representation of the environment in which it is created, the feelings are less and less affected and arrive in purer and purer form. This has the effect of increasing the momentum of the movement of the personality from abnormal to normal.

Can therapy aid in the resolution of this problem? Probably, though it isn't exactly clear what the value of speeding up the process would be.

It is not an over generalization to say that parental desertion is the cause of the entirety of human cultural variety. It is also inescapable that humans are not responsible for their behavior, their parents are. I'm sorry about where this leads, but we should try to pay attention to the way life is, rather than the way we want it to be. It is possible that individual humans will overcome the problems that their parents have imposed on them, but that can only happen if the individual is unusually bright and industrious and lucky. Lucky in the sense that he or she would also require that some sort of guidance have steered them into a useful field of study, like religion or anthropology or psychology and that they were able to absorb it and apply it to themselves and to avoid the pitfalls of subjectivity.

Success in life, which I would define as contributing as much or more than one gets, is also very dependent on marrying well. Success depends heavily on an accurate perception of the opposite sex, which is hard to achieve outside of marriage. An adult, psychologically damaged by desertion isn't likely to attract a well adjusted spouse, or to successfully marry, if he did. To make matters more difficult, the subject will be participating in the family psychology which will require him to continue participating in the aberrant behavior currently in use to compensate for the failed perceptions that produced the desertion in the first place. This is the reason for the perception of the therapist of the intractability of aberrant behavior. It is also the reason for family therapy. To really succeed would also call for cultural therapy.

So, only unusual humans will be able to overcome their environmental situation to the extent necessary to shorten the path. However that may be, it would seem a reasonable conclusion that this feature of life is exactly what makes life as a human an interesting experience, no matter how it is dealt with.