The Moral Life of the Child and the Family Unconscious

By Royal E. Alsup, Ph.D.

The moral life of the child develops in a process of mutuality as the child interacts with the "family unconscious." The three domains of the child's internal life are her conscious awareness and sense of being, her personal unconscious and her collective unconscious. The child's personal unconscious consists of life experiences that do not match her ego-ideal and are repressed into unawareness. Her collective unconscious is the particular configuration of archetypal/spiritual patterns she has inherited from her culture and her family. The physical, mental and emotional spheres of the child interact with the family's geographical region, culture, socioeconomic level and the family unconscious.

What we know to be right or wrong is learned through our families. Within the family there is an unconscious field of energy, ideas, emotions and behaviors that form and shape the child's way of evaluating and trusting herself, her family and the world. The alcoholic family unconscious is a good example. In an alcoholic family the child is taught not to feel, not to think and not to act in anyway that will disturb the harmony of the alcoholic in the family. The family members learn through the family unconscious how to become dependent on the alcoholism of the acting alcoholic in order to appease them and to avoid chaos, even if the everyday life is miserable. The family unconscious is active in alcoholic families when the alcoholism skips a generation. A grandfather who was an alcoholic and has been deceased for several years had a daughter who married a man with absolutely no trace of alcoholism in his family, but their teenage son developed a severe alcohol problem. Although the maternal grandfather died several years before the boy's birth, his mother passed the family unconscious of the alcoholic experience on to her son. This happened even though the mother had made an adamant vow to herself never to drink so that her children would not repeat the misery she had experienced from her father. She conformed to the alcoholic family unconscious, however, and made the immoral decision to be silent, not to think, not to feel and not to be assertive in letting other family members know when they were hurting her feelings. The script of silence in the alcoholic family is an act of deceit to oneself, to the family and to future family members because of the misery and pain that is caused as it is taught intergenerationally through the family unconscious. The moral problems that parents repress and deny will inevitably be passed on through the family unconscious for the children to act out in the histories and experiences of their lives.

A different example is a family in which the father unconsciously demands unrelenting loyalty from his daughter, making her feel and think that she owes him a large debt that she can never pay back. He tells her that she has a right to have opinions of her own and does not have to agree with him. But when she decides not to stand with him during a family argument his negative reaction makes her feel like she has done something wrong. His mixed message puts his daughter in a double bind and she may have difficulty forming a committed relationship with another man in her adult life. As she gets deeply involved with a man her unconscious legacy of loyalty to her father will cause her discomfort and will probably lead to her shopping around for another relationship to avoid her fear of commitment. This pattern will continue, causing a lot of broken hearts and human misery. The father's deceit has left her with the unconscious belief that she can't please any man by being truthfully herself. The mixed messages she received as a child have become the guiding moral principles on which she bases her decisions of relationship. Her potential partners will see her as dishonest and manipulative as she practices her unconsciously inherited immoral dance of deceit with them. Through her family unconscious she still owes a debt to her father, even if he is deceased, that can never be paid off and the ledger balanced, depleting her resources to invest in an intimate relationship in her adult life. The legacy that she is "daddy's girl" will haunt her until the family unconscious is confronted and brought to awareness.

The family unconscious is created at the junction of a family personal unconscious that is formed by the enfolding of individual histories and experiences with a family collective unconscious that is formed by the unfolding of archetypes or cultural and biological inheritances of being human. The above examples demonstrate the existence of the family personal unconscious. The intergenerational history and family unconscious system was being formed and shaped before the birth of the first child. Individually and collectively the family members participate in shared imagery, feelings, thoughts and behaviors that shape and mold their moral life.

The family collective unconscious is formed by the universal archetypes shared by humanity from time immemorial. The universal aspects of the archetypes are revealed in that we all belong to a family and throughout the world human existence expresses some type of spiritual life. The universal archetypes are passed on to the child's family through the cultural context of the family. The cultural mythologies, rituals and stories form the traditions that shape the moral lessons of the family collective unconscious that the child inherits.

The family unconscious system constantly unfolds and is being enfolded into. It is a two directional, simultaneous process. Individual members are born to the family unconscious system and with the birth of each child the configuration of the system and all its members are changed. The child's particular temperament puts her own stamp on the family moral history, enfolding her unique interpretation and experience into the unconscious of the family. The child unfolds the family unconscious by giving personal expression to the universal archetypes of the collective unconscious and by responding to the repressed material in the personal unconscious. The process of enfolding and unfolding the family unconscious through the family member's personal, moral decisions and behaviors changes the nature and formation of the family unconscious.

Most cultures provide instruction for the family to introduce each child into the mysteries of the archetypal/spiritual life of that culture. Cultural rituals and ceremonies are the external expression of the internal archetypal/spiritual experience, which unfolds into the families of the members participating in the ritual. Simultaneously, the family members are giving their unique expression to this ritual and thereby enfolding and changing the cultural/spiritual unconscious. The rituals, ceremonies, stories and mythologies are the containers that the culture uses to pass on its morals and ethics to the family unconscious that each child of that culture and family inherits. The community drama of ritual and ceremony enables the child to have a positive bonding with her culture and community and gives the child the container to become a moral and ethical participant in her society.

The child learns to be a moral acting human being by developing a self that is differentiated from but interdependent with her family members. Family rituals like prayer, meditation, dream recall, and weekly family healing circles facilitate healthy family bonding and maintain a nourishing family life. In a family healing circle each member is allowed to take turns expressing their dissatisfaction and their joy without interruption, sermonizing or lecturing. Such unguarded sharing of thoughts and feelings insures that the dysfunctions of the family personal unconscious, such as denied alcoholism or denied loyalties, are brought out into the open for family scrutiny. This open examination of family dysfunction protects the child from emotional, mental, physical, and sexual abuse.