In Freud’s Family Romance, part of Freud’s idea is: a child would learn everything from his/her parents and want to be exactly like his/her parents at the child’s early years, but would come back to criticize the parents later after he/she gets to know more other parents.

Isn’t this the way we learn everything?

In my opinion, a child would learn everything from his/her closest guardian/caretaker/food provider, because that’s the most convenient and accessible way to learn anything at all. So before the child gets to access to different ideas and opinions, it is not surprising that the child would hold on to his ONLY opinion of many things, which he/she copied from his/her guardian. But as the child grows, he would be exposed to many other ideas inevitably. That’s when the child realizes there’s more than one way to see things. And it is also at that moment, the child begins to doubt his/her previous learned ideas. Therefore, conflicts are started. The child is forced to contemplate the correctness of the different ideas and make decisions on choosing one to follow. I believe this is called critical thinking. In the process of evaluating different ideas and opinions, the child also starts to form his/her individuality.

So the connection between individuality and conflicts would be: you have to go through conflicts to find individuality.

An example would be:

Mom and dad are right! (before getting to know other opinions)

Mom and dad are right?(get to know other opinions and start to doubt)

Mom and dad are right. (after assessing different opinions and make his/her decision)

Dave Cen