You can't miss what you've never had: Can you?: The challenges and struggles of single parenthood from a psychoanalytic perspective

Abstract

The issue of the growth of single-parent families has been in the forefront of political, social and moral debate in recent years. Children from single-parent families tend to be over-represented in clinic populations. Yet this state of My being may be no more potentially pathological than the nuclear family, which can become conceptually idealized The aim of this paper is to look behind the statistics and examine the impact on children of life in a single-parent family, to explore how this may be managed, and to look for potentiating factors which can enable good-enough development to unfold. Case material is used to illustrate the theme.

Key Words:

• Single parents;
• psychotherapy;
• internal space;
• Oedipus complex;
• identification.