The Influence of Parental Death on Identity Formation

The Influence of Parental Death on Identity Formation by Patricia Weenolsen As an existential psychologist, specializing in life span development, I see Michael Ende' s THE NEVERENDING STORY in terms of a life and death struggle in a boy on the threshold of puberty. If he is successful, he will continue the crucial process of authentic identity formation. He will be well on the journey of becoming who he is. If he fails, he will be as others define him, or he will become what others want him to be, and ultimately he will experience non-identity or nonentity, emptiness, nothingness. This is the existential quest we all must make from birth onwards, but the circumstances of this boy's life have propelled him into an untimely stage of the struggle. Bastian is a boy "of ten or twelve," fat, defenseless against the taunts and bullying of other children, unable to box, wrestle, swim or climb the gymnasium rope; in other words, he does not conform to the societal ideal of the male. The other boys at school call Bastian a "nambypamby ," and also a "screwball" because he invents fantastic stories, words and manes. This teachers seem to share these opinions of him, and Bastian accepts them. The bookstore owner, Mr. Coreander, calls him a "weakling" and a "failure." Bastian defines himself as others see him. As the book opens, Bastian's mother has died some months before. We are given no information about her, or the relationship she had with Bastian. The book is a succession of adventures in overcoming death. However, almost no death is permanent; almost everyone survives in some form. It is therefore reasonable to see these adventures as a way of "undoing" his mother's death, of denying that it is permanent, of working through the loss. Both undoing and denial, as well as fantasy, are ego defense mechanisms, protecting the core personality from disorganization and possible destruction. In fact, George Vaillant lists denial as a "psychotic" defense mechanism. He states that denial affects the perception of external reality, and "includes the use of fantasy as a major substitute for other people—especially absent other people. (1I will make a new him in my own mind')" (Vaillant 383). As a result of his mother's death, Bastian's father is going through his own process of normal grieving, during which there is numbness and withdrawal. Bastian experiences this as distance and disinterest; his father behaves as if Bastian were not even there. Thus we have a boy who is sustaining a devastating loss for his age, and without even the normal coping resources of support from other family members (none are mentioned), teachers and friends. Without support in this world, he creates and enters another. He must do this because he himself is in danger. The many dangers faced in Fantástica are a kind of internal externalization, a projection of his own sense of being at risk. He, too, may become nothing. With the death of his mother, and the distancing of his father, much of Bastian's identity has been destroyed. He is no longer his mother's son. That his father is withdrawing shows him he is no longer his father's loved son—an unloved son, perhaps, but someone else, someone he was not before. As I have shown in my own work on the relationship of self-creation to loss and life meaning, a child is, to some extent, his/her parents. If that parent dies, part of who s/he was dies as well. Further, the death of a parent means there is no longer an opportunity to work through problematic issues. Nor is there an opportunity for the reconciliation, that had always been a possibility at some future time. The childhood freezes like a photograph. Change is impossible. Further still, it is the parents who provide the child with a sense of "ontological security," that basic sense that s/he exists, that s/he is real (Laing). Bastian's ontological security is threatened. He protects himself from one unreality by inventing another. A child Bastian's age is normally insulated from the death of those humans close to...