Parenthood between old sorrows and new horizons

Becoming parents it is an experience that solicits every single person to compare with him/herself, with his/her own history and with his/her own relational possibilities. On the base of actual resources in the single individual and in the environment to which he belongs (couple, family, social support), parenthood is able to make set an existing psychopathology (with great suffering for the children) or open to a different perspective and becoming moment of activation of new resources and possibility of growth. Particularly in the cases in which the adults that become parents have negative or dysfunctional experiences in their past, the new relationship with the child can represent an experience from which the subject is able to learn - in bionian sense - and to express himself, in different ways, through new relational competences that allow the creation of most satisfactory psychic equilibriums or the awareness of their own uneasiness and the formulation of an help request to a professional both as couple that as individual. The present job, through the exemplification of some cases that, in different way reached the clinical observation, wanted therefore to set the attention on the evolutionary possibilities that can be to be born or to grow with a child.

Keywords: Parenthood, psychic structure, learning from experience, health, pathology, evolution

Paola Manfredi, Chiara Benedini, Genitorialità fra antichi dolori e nuovi orizzonti in "INTERAZIONI" 1/2011, pp 101-110, DOI: 10.3280/INT2011-001009