[Grandparenthood].

Abstract

This is a study about grandparenthood and represents an approach to the organization of the human psychodynamics along the individual's development toward becoming a grandparent. Grandparenthood is an important function that has its roots in the nuclear oedipical bonds and in previous narcissistic relationships. It is not always, though, an idylic happy end, reached by the only fact of having been a parent and then a grandparent with many grandchildren. In this paper, the author expands on three basic items: The desire of the individual to become a grandparent. The meaning for the grandparent of this desire. The way in which the tumultuous libidinal metamorphose, which can be called "grandparenthood crisis" develops. Human beings do not willingly give up their libidinal strongholds, not even when potential compensatory substitutes are rising up. But in the normal case, the sense of reality prevails. Meanwhile, losses continue their existence in the psyche as inscriptions of a lack, making encounters and reencounters possible. Parents may be lost and sons may become independent but they are recovered through grandchildren and new social bonds that provide richer fulfillment feelings to the grandparent. The family, the environment in which the emergence of desire puts to the proof the interdiction of incest, the sex differences and the generational gap, is the most intimate and adequate field for the development of the strongest tendencies either in the realm of creativity or in the realm of destructivity. And grandparenthood takes place in this field of tendencies.