In memory of an existentialist clinician and his children

the existentialists on their children

  Nietzsche on his son, Hugo, as a middle child
 
  Kierkegaard on his oldest daughter, Sarah
 
  de Beauvoir on her youngest daughter, Claire
 
When Richard (Dick) Eaton Johnson was working on his book on Henri Bergson - a book he abandoned for an effort to write a book on Karl Jaspers - he was writing with two young children at home.

An existentialist reading of Bergson as an author treating lived-temporality has an awkward moment - my relation with my adult child - even my grey-haired adult offspring - is not my relation with a child. There is the extreme border case of my relation to the dying child - or the young child to the dying parent - but in the normal case (oh, a troubling notion, that) this is not the relation to the growing child.

There is the case of the male existentialist author and his young bride: as a mature woman she may have quite a different relation to her former husband and his young companion.  But from age 2 to 10 this is not the manner of disruption/irruption/rupture usually characteristic of a healthy relation of
parent to child.  'Healthy', I say, for having been free of violence verbal or physical, whether as victim or witness; for having been free of threat of starvation, loss, pointless separation or complete lack of privacy or lack of other respect of boundaries as accepted in a cultural community. And a child not ridiculed before peers or shamed before peers without provocation or cause. And a child not exposed to wanton drunkeness as a daily regimen.

Gabriel Marcel has written of the child, but who was the child Isaac to Kierkegaard?  Or the child Jeshua, later called 'the Nazarene', an itinerant stone-cutter, preacher, healer - and even if not of his own choosing - prophet.

Not that we have always had our notions of child, teen, single young adult woman, single mature woman, bored retiree, retired female executive.

What we do now have is a spectrum of relations of parnet to child charateristic of Aspergers and varying degrees and styles of autism.  This might have given the existentialist pause.  These are neither extreme of the prodigee, the genius or the psychotic or simply demonically evil.

What will count as a cure for the existentialist child psychiatrist?  Would it not be a more or less normal relation of the child to parent? But what about the child's independence and relation to arbitrary school children - the normal lot in urban life?

What we come to here is repetition: the parent reports that her child brought her flowers and said,

"These are for you - do you like them?"

What is key is that she reports* this.  And if this were one singular instance, never repeated, and before no witness?  Here is the nexus where Spinoza and Hume collide with Heidegger and in which we can see most clearly that Jaspers was the existential clinician's philosopher.

* To report is not to recount.  In recounting I often repeat myself, or even mistake the context. What I recount about my child, most often my wife has heard me tell before.  [ to be continued ]