Continuing the previous Post, getting backing to clinical discussion, let’s look at how cultural changes have affected individuals throughout three generations. Boomers and Xres are liberal parents: they appreciate dialogue and are against moral rigidity. Millennials, their sons, by the time are they are grown up, they will have introjected models of individual freedom. For them, that’s how things are. It is a questioning generation, less used to renouncing and more used to negotiating. This new script of moral behaviors results in a bunch of brief /focused specializations in areas such as law, mental health and psychological/psychiatric services, whose goal is to mediate parts and make room for hard talks and agreements. Couples and family therapies, for instance, is a branch from psychotherapy that expands enormously during this period. Without getting into details that exceed our knowledge and goal, the main point is that the change in values and behaviors, which have slowly been taking place since the 60s, results in a questioning culture. The old moral values vehicles (family, school, and Church) become less strong. In this new way of life, the new moral vehicles that work as identity references are mostly TV, and, later, digital medias, especially social medias. They offer models and horizons to be aspired. Values associated with individual achievements are elevated to the top of life aspirations. Freedom of speech and sexual freedom move along side by side with laicism, shrinking considerably the role of Church as a source of essential moral values vehicle[1]. At the same time, we see parents who, despite being identity models, aren’t taken as models of life aspiration anymore. They are open to dialogue and encourage their kids to search for their motivations but aren’t, themselves, models of success most of the time. Extended families (uncles/aunts, grandpas) and the old identity models form childhood (teachers, for instance) are still quite important as affective references but not as aspiration models to an adult life. We have got an authority crisis. What are the consequences of this new reality in the formation of new egos? Firstly, kids are exposed to a much more complex moral universe. The old “binary” framework- right or wrong, black or white- and superegoical childhood (of repressed desires) is replaced by a “questioning framework”. And, this context, in the long run, results in more creative children- exposed to continuous stimulation-, and in children with difficulties with self-restraint (lacking contour,) once references are abundant and, also, unstable. This topic will be developed in the following Posts. Secondly, the most relevant identity models- parents- become weaker in what concerns models of aspiration, although it doesn’t mean they are weaker as moral reference identities. They work more often as counseling models, sometimes hesitant, which may contribute to emotional instability in critical times of personality development, especially in adolescence.
To be continued in the next Post
[1]Dias, V.S. Sexual Identity Evolution. In Conjugal Bond in Psychodramatic Analysis (2000). Agora, SP.
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