Tethered Love
When Failures in Adult Development Forge Inescapable Archaic Bonds
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21630231 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Bruce Herzog (Toronto Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 32 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 138-152 |
| Publication date | 2022-03-04 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Psychoanalytic Dialogues (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1048-1885 • E-ISSN: 1940-9222 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/10481885.2022.2032075 |
| OpenAlex | W4220810786 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 34 |
Character development does not end in childhood. It is a lifelong endeavor in which the undertaking of parenthood is a developmental stage. Parenting presents various challenges that promote maturation of the adult, while securing autonomy of the child. These adult developmental tasks include some that enhance abilities: respecting difference, accepting defiance, enduring anger, managing separations, and establishing identification with the child. In addition there are tasks that involve loss: relinquishing fantasies, tolerating disappointment, releasing the archaic bond, surrendering the helm, and withstanding one’s own abandonment. When the adult is incapable of successfully transiting through these parenting challenges, the child’s early ties to the primary caregiver are at risk of being abnormally extended. Parental refusal to relinquish the archaic attachment scuttles their offspring’s journey toward independence, and is referred to as “tethered love.” The concept of tethered love posits a pathogenesis of exaggerated compliance (or defiance) in children that begins with adult developmental failures in their caregivers. Clinical examples are used to underscore the suffocating impact of tethered love and demonstrate how the therapist must put aside feelings of distaste to better understand the child’s continuing connection to a constraining, even crippling, but often intensely loving parent
Anger · Autonomy · Developmental psychology · Disappointment · Feeling · Psychoanalysis · Psychotherapist · Child Therapy and Development · Family Support in Illness · Psychology · Social Psychology · Themes in Literature Analysis
Thoughts about Development and Individuation
Aspects of early gender development
Pathological identification
Systems of pathological accommodation and change in analysis
Repetition and incomplete mourning
Untold Stories and the Power of Silence in the Intergenerational Transmission of Social Trauma
Some Forms of Emotional Disturbance and their Relationship to Schizophrenia
The Intergenerational Transmission of Holocaust Trauma
Assault on a Child’s Individuality
On Those Wrecked By Success
Approaches to prevention of intergenerational transmission of hate, war and violence
The Problem of Ego Identity
Thoughts on the Emergence of the Sense of Self, with Particular Emphasis on the Body Self
The Waning of the Oedipus Complex
Is Emerging Adulthood a New Developmental Phase
Separation-Individuation Phenomena in Adulthood
The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association
Parenthood As A Developmental Phase
The Femininization of the Female Oedipal Complex, Part Ii
A conception of adult development
Emerging adulthood
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |