Introduction

In this book I have argued that the manner of child rearing that developed from c. 1920s until c. 1970s, especially under the influence of post-1945 social democracy, was very different from that which followed during what is often called late modernity. Whereas the first period had as its ideal a psychoanalytically informed parental desire to help and understand children, and to treat them with tolerance and empathy, in the latter years, through the tutelage of neoliberalism, new social movements, notably second-wave feminism, striving for identity and recognition, and the psychology of the new behaviourism, we have witnessed the emergence of parental narcissism – impatient, anxious, managerial, controlling, disciplinary – as an expression of the minimal self. To an extent, this may be something of a caricature. But it is not, I think, untrue. Our world is profoundly troubled in all sorts of ways, and whether we like it or not, we are all involved. Probably the majority of us would like it to be different, and bookshops are filled with well-intentioned analyses suggesting how to escape the mire. Where parent–child relations are concerned, as a first step, I suggest that we need to recognise the extent to which children suffer from childism, and be clear about how we got to be where we are. This book has attempted to do that: to show how and why we have reached the present position characterised as it is by the narcissistic impulse. While it has not been possible to consider all the reasons that explain the omnipresence of egotistical mean-spiritedness, I conclude with an overview of some thoughts about what has been a major historical feature of our contemporary malaise, namely the well documented interest in, some would say obsession with, the Self – not only to the detriment of others, but also to that of our potential to fulfil our better natures. While the Victorians, under the sway of the momentous changes wrought by the industrial revolution, urbanisation, class conflict, and the rupture between science and religion, struggled to reconcile the self to the social (if not to God), our secularised predicament is that having abandoned the social, seemingly we have nowhere to go. We are adrift.