To read this content please select one of the options below:

11. THE EXPERIENCE OF AMBIVALENCE WITHIN THE FAMILY: YOUNG ADULTS “COMING OUT” GAY OR LESBIAN AND THEIR PARENTS

Intergenerational Ambivalences: New Perspectives on Parent-Child Relations in Later Life

ISBN: 978-0-76230-801-9, eISBN: 978-1-84950-518-5

Publication date: 17 December 2003

Abstract

Understood as the simultaneous experience of necessarily conflicting attitudes, wishes, feelings, or intentions, the concept of ambivalence has a complex history in psychological and social analysis. Lüscher (2000) reviewed the history of this concept, initially used in the study of abnormal states, and then generalized to the realm of the usual and expectable in social life. It should be noted at the outset that the term “ambivalence” presents two problems for social analysis: adoption of a term initially intended to portray abnormal states for the expectable course of adult life, and the extension of a concept founded on the study of personal states to social analysis. Consistent with Bleuler’s (Riklin, 1910/1911) initial discussion of the term ambivalence,1 Freud (1909, 1912, 1912–1913, 1914) attempted to resolve the first problem by showing that ambivalence – as the experience of mixed and conflicting sentiments regarding those who are particularly important in one’s own life – inevitably emerges out of the child’s effort to resolve the tension between social reality and his or her own desire focused on the parents of early childhood. At the same time, Freud compounded the second problem by regarding the realm of the social as the personal writ large.

Citation

Cohler, B.J. (2003), "11. THE EXPERIENCE OF AMBIVALENCE WITHIN THE FAMILY: YOUNG ADULTS “COMING OUT” GAY OR LESBIAN AND THEIR PARENTS", Pillemer, K. and Luscher, K. (Ed.) Intergenerational Ambivalences: New Perspectives on Parent-Child Relations in Later Life (Contemporary Perspectives in Family Research, Vol. 4), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 255-284. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1530-3535(03)04011-1

Publisher

:

Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2003, Emerald Group Publishing Limited