ABSTRACT
This chapter describes some of the phantasies which seem to help make sense of the events around birth and death, and relations between parents and children at various stages of the life cycle. The identification between them can be extremely strong if the older child has not separated itself out from its mother sufficiently, in phantasy and probably in terms of behaviour. The resistance of other people in adulthood to being manipulated into playing out scenarios can be of major importance for the modification of memories in feeling. Loving feelings towards the parents may be evoked where the conscious memory was made up mainly of angry fights; similarly, angry or bitter feelings towards the parents, seen in the children, may arise where the memory was mainly of a good and happy home. One common phantasy which seems to be played out by adults around a new baby is the phantasy that there exists a perfect mother somewhere.
