Are You Training Your Child or Truly Loving Them?
Massimo Recalcati - “Every child must feel wanted and loved by their parents. Loving a child means giving them the freedom to be different from how we would have wanted them to be, allowing them to be themselves.”
We often wonder if manuals exist that can adequately explain how to be good educators, whether as parents or teachers: a set of standard instructions for properly raising a child or student.
So, are there specific methods that can make parenting effective? Are there manuals that explain, for example, how to regulate a child's sleep, cognitive abilities, temperament, and even their behavior in general?
On this topic, Italian psychoanalyst and essayist Massimo Recalcati explains that our modern approach often equates "the life of a child with that of a horse that must be properly trained. The wild nature of its character must be tamed by a sort of educational psychotechnique. In this way, it will be able to learn to gallop, trot, and perform the skill exercises we will subject it to in order to make it as docile as possible to our commands. Consequently, education will cease to be an impossible task and become a psychotechnique for training and disciplining the body and mind."
These, then, would be the rules to follow that would supposedly guarantee educational success, allowing every child to achieve an ideal level of performance.
In reality, as the psychoanalyst explains, “the standard pedagogical discourse must be reversed here: it is not a question of applying knowledge to life, of making life uniform to that knowledge, but it is a question of recognizing how the absolute singularity of the subject coincides exactly with the hole in the anonymous network of universal knowledge.”
Consider, for example, two parents complaining about problems with their child. In this case, it will not be important to know how they managed to find a balance between their normative and permissive roles, between frustration and gratification; instead, it will be crucial to ask whether that child was truly desired, strongly wanted by both parents, and recognized in their uniqueness.
This is because, as Massimo Recalcati continues in his profound examination, "what matters most in the process of humanizing life is the parents' faith in their desire for their children. And the first form this faith takes is in having desired their child, in having wanted their existence, in not having experienced them as a burden, as a superfluous or annoying weight.
It is, in fact, the parents' desire that links their child's life to the order of meaning. When, on the other hand, this desire is lacking or appears to be overshadowed by other needs, the desire in the child's life seems to find no place. In other words, the more a child has inherited the desire of his parents, the more his desire will tend to reveal itself as affirmative."
Therefore, parents can only truly love a child when they do not try to subject them to their own expectations or plans. Instead, they must allow them the freedom to be different from how they might have wanted them to be—to be themselves. This means staying by their side when they fall so that they can always teach them to get back up.
About Massimo Recalcati
Massimo Recalcati, born in Milan in 1959, is one of Italy's best-known psychoanalysts and essayists. He currently lives and works in Milan, where he directs the IRPA (Institute for Applied Psychoanalysis Research) and in 2003 founded Jonas Onlus, a center dedicated to psychoanalytic treatment for new symptoms. He is also a university professor, teaching dynamic psychology at the University of Verona and psychoanalysis, aesthetics, and communication at IULM in Milan.
Recalcati is considered the leading exponent of Lacanian psychoanalysis in Italy. He has edited and written numerous books on topics such as the family, the parent-child relationship, social change, desire, and the centrality of the unconscious. He has published highly influential works such as L'uomo senza inconscio (The Man Without an Unconscious), Il complesso di Telemaco (The Telemachus Complex), Le mani della madre (The Hands of the Mother), and L'ora di lezione (The Hour of the Lesson).
In addition to his clinical and scientific work, Massimo Recalcati contributes to major newspapers like La Repubblica and edits the specialist journal Frontiere della psicoanalisi (Frontiers of Psychoanalysis). His books have been translated into several languages and are considered a reference point in the fields of Italian psychology and philosophy.
International psychoanalyst Massimo Recalcati challenges performance-based parenting. Discover why authentic love means abandoning expectations and allowing a child the freedom to be themselves.
Editor's Note: The following article by Massimo Recalcati, which originally appeared on, A Scuola Oggi (At School Today), is republished here for educational purposes only.
