How to Kill Your Parents (Symbolically)  or  The Final Symptom: Untangling the Knot of the Parents

 


I remember the exact moment the pedestal cracked, the day I realized my imperfect father would never change. I was already in my fifties.

As children, we believe our parents are complete. They are the law, the source of love, the stable center of the world. In our early fantasy, they occupy the center of the triangle, the place of the Symbolic Man, a figure of perfect harmony and balance. If something goes wrong, anger, absence, cruelty, we assume it must be our fault. They are flawless, so we must be broken.

This is how the knot is tied: a reconciliation of contradictory images into a single illusion of their perfection at the expense of our imperfection. To explain the painful contradiction of their flaws, the child’s only option is to retreat into one of the triangle’s corners, taking on the burden themselves through neurosis, perversion, or psychosis.


But the truth is harder and freer: our parents are not perfect. They too are trapped in what I call their final symptom, the crystallized unconscious pattern that structures their entire existence. By old age, these patterns do not dissolve, they only harden.

My father, at ninety, did not mellow. He remained narcissistic, manipulative, perverse, unchanged, even exaggerated. For years I thought the problem was me, until I repositioned him: I moved him from the center of my fantasy into his rightful corner. I saw him not as an impossible ideal, but as a man imprisoned by his own symptom. That freed me from waiting for him to give what he could never give.

But something still weighed on me. I realized I had repositioned my father, but not my mother. In my unconscious map, she still occupied the center. She was the moral authority, the religious zealot, the figure of righteousness. I continued to feel guilty, broken, “less than,” because in my fantasy she remained perfect.

It was only when I moved her too, out of the center and into her own corner, that the knot loosened. She too was trapped, neurotic in her guilt, at times even psychotic in her religious fanaticism. Once I accepted that, I felt lighter. The burden of living up to her illusion fell away.


This is the path of liberation through “repositioning”, the symbolic death of their ideals. Both parents must be moved. Neither belongs in the center. Once we see them clearly, as flawed beings locked in their own final symptoms, we can finally step into the middle ourselves. Not as an image of perfection, but as a livable position: the Symbolic Man who accepts lack, who knows that balance is always fragile, and who no longer carries the impossible weight of their contradictions.

Their final symptom is their prison.

Recognizing it is our freedom.

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