ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the Freudian psychoanalytic model of the family as a Leonardo painting of the Virgin and Child, whereas we may need to be open to the possibility that the inner world is more like a Bruegel village scene. In psychoanalytic terms the 'primal scene' has been distorted, but the task nevertheless is to find a way of bringing the parents back into some sort of oedipal resolution. Grayson Perry elaborated further about what he meant when he said that one reason for not writing about stepparents in the psychic development of a child of divorce was that the psychoanalytic task is to help the child to an Oedipal resolution. The absence of stepparents in S. Freud's work is surprising because Freud's mother was a stepmother to Freud's two elder half-brothers, and there is evidence that this caused conflict within the family and confusion within the mind of Freud as he grew up.
