ALMEIDA, Caroline Trevisan Mendes de. Contemporary challenges of parenting: the narcissistic investment in children. 220 f. Doctoral Thesis (Doctorate in Psychology) – São Paulo State University (UNESP), School of Sciences and Letters, Assis, 2024.
Available on: https://hdl.handle.net/11449/255025
Abstract: The family plays a key role in the constitution of individuals, being the basic matrix of subjectivation and responsible for the physical and emotional nourishment of its members. Narcissistic investment is fundamental for psychic structuring, in which parents invest in their children narcissistically, assigning them a position and function in the family environment, as well as providing a history of their origin and an identity record. Parenthood consists of a construction process in which parents reorganize themselves psychically and affectively in order to exercise their parental role, taking care of their children’s needs in various dimensions and throughout the continuous transformations that bring challenges for parenthood to be exercised. Objective: The aim of this research was to understand the organization of parenting today, around the arrangement of narcissistic and parental investments and their transformations throughout family life. This is a qualitative study in which three families took part, made up of couples who are the biological parents of children aged between six and eleven, one of whom is a remarried family. Method: The couples were interviewed, the family life line technique was applied, and the children were given Walter Trinca’s Drawing-of-Family-and-Story Procedure (DF-E). Results: The results indicated that all the families were experiencing an adolescent crisis, which had repercussions on the parent-child relationship with the adolescent daughters, mobilizing a rearrangement of narcissistic investments and the need to knit bonds, leading to a reorganization of parenting, while also mobilizing conflicts and anxieties, corroborating the data presented by the children. The intensity of this crisis may have contributed to a possible idealization of the children by their parents, as adolescence stands out in terms of parental difficulties. Conclusion: It was found that families have been going through a process of transition, in which male figures have been more welcoming and closer to their children, even though mothers play a central role in the family environment. It is considered that narcissistic investments are fundamental in any period of the family life cycle, mobilizing bonding skills that need to be developed in a process of joint construction between parenthood and filiality.