01-05-2007 - Traces, n. 5 Obedience and... The Family Luisa Leoni, a mother and a neuropsychiatrist, recounts her experience of the obedience of her children and the obedience between spouses by Stefano Andrini “Obeying in the family has a particular conjugation because in the family you find a ‘natural’ authority; that is, you primarily experience a good: parents hold you, nourish you, protect you, give you what you couldn’t give yourself on your own (a place, food, affection, direction for making your way in the world), allowing you to participate in their own way of staying before the world, walking in their footsteps. This is a substantial authority that enables you to consist, that you experience but don’t judge, as a child,” affirms Luisa Leoni, child neuropsychiatrist in Bologna, Italy, married, with seven children. “Even so,” she explains, “the child has trouble obeying and has to learn to do so. The child doesn’t know what’s good for him; he can recognize it when he experiences it, but his capacity for judgment is limited, and thus he is not able to exercise his freedom. In obedience to those who know what’s best for him, he also experiences his own freedom because he gains access to the good that he wouldn’t be able to see on his own.” Thus, a very important dynamic is in play. “Not only in the present, but also for the future, when, as that child’s capacity for judgment grows, so grows his possibility of exercising freedom. Asking the child to obey enables him to gain access to the substantial truth: man is not the source of his own consisting; what he is he receives from another; he is not master of the world and reality; reality is given by an other and he himself, man, is fruit, ‘given’ by an other.” Today, Leoni stresses, “it is difficult to find within families a position of reciprocal obedience between spouses. It seems to me that one of the gravest problems is the absence of a real recognition of the authority of the one toward the other, man or woman–authority, meaning, power to interfere in and influence my life; recognition that the good for me is not given by myself; that without reciprocal obedience there is no sharing, and thus one experiences a substantial solitude.” Children, particularly in adolescence, disobey their parents in the attempt to affirm their own separate identity, in the need to prove to themselves that they don’t need their parents in order to consist. “This is the moment,” concludes the neuropsychiatrist, “when rules can be a useful instrument, a buffer zone more for the parents than for the children; through rules, the adult gives the son incrementally wider space for the progressive exercise of his own judgment, in a comparison that enables the parent to take stock of the son’s growth, to recognize and trust what’s in that son’s heart.”