Introduction

This content is motivated by a personal process of elaborating atypical paternity and by the realization that Jungian psychology still has little dedication to the vast field of study around neurodiversity and neuroatypias¹.

Working out the de-idealization of a child’s image is an arduous task; it will not always occur naturally and will often run into a barrier (such as the sustaintion of an ideal ormorality) destined to contain what is unwanted by consciouness as a manifestation of life. Such impediments call for the emergence of defenses against such de-idealization, in order to deny the reality that presents itself.

One of these observed phenomena is the Blue Angel phenomenon, widespread among parents of people with autism, in which the expression “blue angel” is used to designate an autistic person. Its origin is not known, but the expression is widely disseminated and used as names of institutions, on social medias, in the speech of fathers, mothers and therapists. ^{Abreu (2021)} points out that the term became popular on the internet mainly from 2010 and is already common jargon to refer to an autistic person. The use of this expression denotes a form of denial of the pathologizing as it identifies in a literal, concrete, and fixed way, the atypical person with the image of an angel, charged with goodness, lightness, asexuality, and puerility, dehumanizing the autistic person.

This speech, with variations on the same theme, presents the autistic son as an envoy of God who specially chooses a family for the noble mission of caring for a special and pure being who comes to teach us how to be better people. This phenomenon, unconsciously ableist, places an unfair, one-sided, and too heavy load for any human to bear.

Fathers and mothers of newly diagnosed children enter unwittingly into this collective phenomenon; the post-diagnosis moment is haunted by doubts, ignorance andfear, making us thirsty for narratives that can explain the past (why is my child autistic?), appreciate the present (what does it mean to have an autistc child? and guarantee the future (What will become of him and of us?) As fathers and mothers, we are offered a generic discourse that aims to ensure this frightening, unknown occasion.

The mythical uprooting (BARRETO apud ^{CORAZZA, 2021}) and the absence of connection with the inner world, typical of our time, favors that parents extract from the idealized image of their children the support and meaning necessary to deal with the adversities of parenthood and life. We must seek in the kingdom of the depths the source of these powers, through the imaginary figures that inhabit us, our angels and daemons, and thus remove from our children the burden of ridding us of suffering and delivering us some meaning².

Defense against deidealization

From before conception, fatherhood is permeated by the fathes’s fanciful expectations, about himself and regarding the child. According to the prevailing archetypal regency in the father’s psyche, these fantasies can be more heroic and protective, moralistic and repressive, spiritual and rationalistic, normative and mediocreizing, etc.

The arrival of an autistic child probably does not correspond to any of these expectations, on the contrary, it deeply frustrates them. The father will have to deconstruct such idealizations, not only to bond lovingly with his child but also to effectively exercise basic roles of fatherhood: to recognize them with acceptance and legitimization of who they are. In this way, not only the child needs to be de-idealized, but the father himself, since a diverse child also requires a diverse paternity (^{VILLAR, 2022}).

With sufficient psychic openness, one realizes that “psychopathologies are as authentic as the child itself [...] they are neither secondary nor contingent” (^{HILLMAN, 1997}). If the pathology is inseparable from the child, the protecting parent cannot avoid suffering, just as the repressor cannot straighten out its deviant form, and neither can the rationalist be able to give it absolute coherence; the pathologizing nature of the soul will reveal itself according to the child’s spirit.

The ideal of perfectionis a robust and resistant archetypal phenomenon, reborn with each new coagulated image, therefore, this psychic openness is benefic for dealing with defenses and resistances, making possible to dodge from idealizations through different paths of deconstruction. However, such a process of deconstruction and recreation can remain paralyzed halfway, in a situation in which the previously idealized child no longer exists, but the real child has not been admitted (^{VILLAR, 2022}). I propose a brief investigation into how such resistances to de-idealization constelate, their motivations and eventual consequences.

The most frequent denial in atypical paternity is the absolute denial of the paternity itself, that is, the abandonment of the atypical child. Data from a survey released by the Baresi Institute (^{VARGAS, 2022}) point out that 78% of fathers have abandoned their children with disabilities or rare diseases before they turn 5 years old, relegating them to the exclusive care of their mothers. Solo mothers, along with their children, suffer from financial and emotional, abandonment, with all the devastating consequences of this absurd socio-cultural phenomenon.

Another form of denial often observed is that of the unrealistic search for a cure, in which the physician is placed as the saving figure, when healing by science is expected, or the priest is placed as the saving figure, when healing by religion is expected. The promised healing saga is inevitably tragic and is an expression of the denial of pathologizing by nominalism (^{HILLMAN, 2010}).

As previously pointed out, this article focuses deepening our understanding on the denial of the pathologizing through transcendence, expressed as a resistance to de-idealization. About this form of denial, James Hillman says that:

In an attempt to restore dignity to the man, this psychology idealizes him, sweeping his pathologies under the carpet. By putting pathologies aside, or by keeping them out of sight, this kind of humanism promotes an ennobled unilateralism, a sentimentality that William James would have recognized as the softness of mind (^{HILLMAN, 2010, p. 148-150}).

By the blue angel phenomenon, its observed that in atypical fatherhood the ableist devaluation of the divergent condition is often compensated through a reduction of the child’s image to some characteristic that allows a new idealization. Even when the expression blue angel is absent, the compensatory phenomenon presents itself. We project ideas such as that of the “genius”, when high cognitive abilities are present; or images such as that of the “innocent enlightened”, when naivety, concreteness of thought, and social spontaneity make it possible to paint a picture of the child that is pure, giver of love and incapable of evil; or as that of the “overcoming hero”, when the child’s condition imposes more visible and dramatic challenges to exterior looks.

These reductions allow the coagulation of a simple and coherent image that is easier for parents to assimilate. As one young autistic patient in the therapeutic process summed up: “parents glorify this disability in order not to admit its true nature”³.

If the nature cannot be admitted, there is a prejudice underlying this impediment. Ableism is its name, and it’s characterized by “a prejudiced behavior that hierarchizes people according to the adequacy of their bodies to an ideal of perfection and functional capacity”, and from which “people with disabilities are discriminated against [...] as incapable (unable to love, to feel desire, to have sexual relations, etc.)” (^{MELLO, NUERNBERG, 2012}).

Contrary to what the ableist look supposes, an autistic person does not diverge in anything from the soul and its potencies: lovecruelty, altruism, cowardice, etc. After all, the autistic does not diverge from anything that is essentially human. All this can manifest itself differently; empathy, for instance, can be intensified in its emotional aspect (feeling as if it were in one’s own skin what happens to the other) and hindered in its cognitive aspect (imagining oneself in the place of the other without emotional activation).

All psychic functions are rooted in the body through the nervous system, which is divergent in its development, and therefore might express themselves in distinct ways, such as the reception and computation of sensory data, the manipulation of cognitive information for the elaboration of metaphors, and the emotional regulation after intense excitement, etc. However, even in a distinct presentation, all psychic functions will potentially be present with their own singular form of expression.

Ableism sustains the ignorance that hinders assimilation about the child’s reality and thus prevents the germination of this atypical paternity, whether due to narcissism, moralism, or other forms of self-absorption. Naturally, this can occur not only in the fatherhood of autistic children, or children with other disabilities, but whenever our children bring some deviation from the norm and frustrate expectations about our own parenting. The defense against deidealization prevents the mourning process from occurring and the image of the idealized child from decomposing, which would fertilize the psyche so that another image of the child would be reborn

Tha blue angel phenomenon and the denial it represents are problematic as the reduction of the child to an aspect of their personality is unsustainable. Naturally, what was denied ends up being imposed little by little: the gifted child may not be emotionally intelligent; the naive one eventually learns the benefits of lying; and the heroic one soon gets tired of proving that they have overcoming value.

The heavy angelic robe: barriers to individuation

Some consequences of the angelic projection on the child can be understood as barriers⁴ to their individuation; barrier can be defined as “any obstacle, attitude, or behavior that limits or prevents the person’s social participation, as well as the enjoyment, fruition, and exercise of their rights” (^{TORRES, 2022}). The maintenance of an unshakable link with the ideal creates an imagetic prison in which the atypical person is placed and from which they will have to escape in order to live their individuation.

The psyche’s shades and gradations are erased by the monotonous glow of the angelic image. The child is deprived of the validation of its human contradictions, radical inconsistency, and awareness of every archetypal plurality that conflicts with the image that has been imposed. Angels have no evil, protagonism, sexuality, or maturity, so the one who has been imprisoned under this image may have difficulties in several areas of their development, such as:

Development of ethics: evil, as a legitimate potential of every human being, will be at most considered an expression of autism, and will be hypostasized and seen in a dissociated form from the child, as if it was an entity by itself which invades and corrupts like a demon. Expressing and causing evil is part of our human trajectory, and exercising ethics depends on freedom for good or evil. An ethical attitude requires from us the broadest awareness in the search for better directions. Someone who supposedly cannot do evil cannot be ethical either; their opinions and attitudes are thus delegitimized, and their citizenship, political participation, and place of speech are relegated to an exhibitionist showcase that lends itself, at most, to elicit emotional reactions of pity or admiration, when well-intentioned, or contempt and sadism disguised as humor, when openly pejorative.

Appropriation of protagonism: the father, while idealizing the child, obtains for himself a narcissistic connection with the divine, as chosen to be the guardian of the angel. He becomes the hero in charge of the superhuman task, receiving the strength that God gives him as the chosen one for this mission; meanwhile, the child is dehumanized and transformed into an angelic entity, limited by the image imposed on it. The father, as a protector of the evolved being, steals for himself the human protagonism of the plot. He is the figure with whom the collective can identify because he is also people; the collective listens to him because he speaks the human language and not that of angels.

The protagonist is the one who has a voice to claim, denounce and transmit to the world the experience of being who one is. The infantilized image of the angel hinders adolescence, a period in which children put their wings out and begin to rehearse their first autonomous flights, revealing who they are regardless of who their parents expect them to be throughout the process of de-idealization of the parents’ image (^{GALIÁS, 2003}). This movement, at first exaggerated, gains balance and more interesting contours as they mature and it’s only possible through experimentation.

The asexualization results from the same process, taking away from the autistic person the legitimacy of the libidinal gush as well as the possibility of meeting with another desirer, to smear themselves with love, impudence, heat, and everything that two lovers create in the intoxicating encounter of small orgasmic deaths. All of this is obviously inappropriate for angels.

The unsustainability of denial: the voracious absence

In addition to the barriers to individuation, other consequences emerge of the grief denial scene in support of the ideal. such as depression and the physical and mental exhaustion of the family and the autistic individual.

In the passage “Raven becomes voracious”, from the amerindian nations Haida and Tsimshian nationsmythical cycle about the Raven, the following is told: the primordial village’s chief and his wife had an only son, whom they loved very much and protected to the extreme, having built for him a bed above their own where they bathed and protected him. At a very young age, he fell seriously ill and soon died. The chief had the son’s intestines removed and burned before taking his body back home. The community came every day to watch over the son’s body and support the parents. However, the chief and his wife went into such suffering that, after a few days of crying over the son’s eviscerated corpse, they had a surprise: one morning, the mother came across a being of light, bright as fire, sitting on the son’s bed. The joyful parents celebrated his return, however, the son didn’t feel hungry and didn’t want to eat. The whole community celebrated the son’s coming, but they were surprised by his revival and lack of appetite.

The chiefs had a couple of slaves called Mouth at Each End, a name that refers to the burned intestine itself. They had bruises on their shins from which they ate the scabs, and this is what gave them much appetite to eat whale blubber. In an attempt to regain his appetite, the chief’s son tasted the slaves’ scabs. This opened up a huge appetite in him and transformed the boy of light into a voracious being who devoured all the provisions of the village. The father, as head of the tribe, gathered the council and recognized that he needed to expel his own son since his stay in the village was unsustainable. The father presented his son with a raven blanket, a stone that turns into soil for landing, and seeds and fish eggs so that he could create the world in which humans would later appear. Also, the son could distribute plants and animals throughout the land so that he would always have something to satisfy his hunger with.

In this story, we realize that the luminous young man is not the son, but “a kind of emissary from heaven sent to take the young man’s place as an antidote to pain” (^{HYDE, 2017}), and the young man himself tells us that “heaven was very upset by their constant crying (from parents), then sent me to bring comfort to their minds”. The dead son did not have a chance to be reborn organically and to give himself up to the cycle of matter. When he has his intestines removed and burned, the phenomenon of idealization sets in, and his interchange with the matter of the world becomes impracticable. The parents lose sight of their son and, in his place, they see a luminous being, which is ethereal as fire. Something that has been denied and excluded tends to show up symptomatically later. The luminous son ate the scabs of Mouth at Each End as if they were from the wounds of his own excised intestine, and in doing so, opens up his immense devouring emptiness that made his stay in the village untenable.

The intestines, as a person’s bowels, are a valuable image of their interiority. In English, the bowels are called guts, and to have the guts means to have courage. We can imagine that the child, having his intestines ripped out, loses the courage to support his own nature and free himself from imprisonment under the image that was idealized by his parents. The intestine is also the organ responsible for separating the elements that will be assimilated from those that will be excreted, as a barrier that filters with selective permeability what should or should not be incorporated. Removing the intestines denies the child the ability to exert such a filter concerning parental projections, thus subjecting him to absolutely correspond to what is expected from him.

The slaves eat their scabs in a circular movement, which refers to the food cycle, or ecological interdependence, in which life feeds on life in an uroboric movement of metamorphosis. The intestines refer to the fate of life and what depends on it. A lot of life metamorphoses in us through the intestines, and the same will happen to our flesh, which will be eaten by other beings one day (^{COCCIA, 2020}). Whitout intestines, we remove from the son the ability to digest and transform the world, to feed on it and be devoured by it, to transform themselves through the continuous process of psychic deconstruction and reconstruction that life provides, In the case of the young Raven, his organicity was denied, as we can see when his mother “looked up and saw a young man, bright as fire, lying where the body of his son had been” (^{HYDE, 2017}); but, after becoming a voracious being, his mother recognizes, still in bed, the dead sons body, distinct from the luminous being that walks.

We can understand this passage as a mythical reference to the denial of depressive pathologizing, a melancholy defense, as it resists to mourning. that operates through the process of re-idealization, The unwanted aspect of the son, represented by the ripped intestines, returns symptomatically and compulsively, throughout voraciouness making the permanence of this figure unsustainable.

This figure is no longer the child, but the result of our primitive defenses: splitting, idealization, projection, and projective identification, the latter being particularly important, as it exerts strong power over the object of projection, as it is “a primitive defense mechanism, which invades the mind of the receiver and does not respect or considers the existence of the other in its particularities” (^{CAVALLARI, MOSCHETA, 2007}). Projective identification is like a process of “interpsychic colonization”, in which one psyche invades and establishes its mentality over another.

The unfillable emptiness of the myth also refers us to the depressive state, like a black hole that swallows creativity and from which no energy escapes (^{VILLAR, 2022}). The son’s depression is also a consequence of projective identification, which imposes a framework incompatible with his nature on the child, preventing the creative flow of psychic energy, culminating in the damming up of libido. Parental depression, on the other hand, can be directly associated with the impediment of mourning through the melancholy defense that resists de-idealization. Without sufficient psychic resources, hampered by the depressive state, parents and children are more vulnerable, subject to the exhaustion that is channeled by the unattainable pursuit of the ideal.

In the case of the atypical person idealized under the angelic mantle, this identity will bring difficulties to the development of the autistic person’s autonomy, favoring what Ceres Araújo points out as “an abusive use of the role of child, often throughout the entire life, which removes all possibilities of the person’s autonomy” (^{ARAÚJO, [s.d.]}). Since angels do not walk but float immaterially, if a person is being made unable to walk on their own legs, someone will have to carry the body that is left over, denied, and devitalized by the projective split that affects it. This burden is borne out by the heroic speech of parents as part of the task entrusted to them by God.

The idealization of the child is related to the projection of the archetype of the divine child, and its fixation on the child makes it even more difficult for fathers and mothers to recognize their own needs and limits, as they remain exclusively identified with the roles of providers; when the parents are “fragile, dramatic and tragic events can happen” (^{GALIÁS, 2003}) due to the surpassing of their human limits.

A mother’s suicide, taking her 12-year-old autistic son’s life with it; a 19-year-old autistic young man who was burned to death and trapped alone in his family’s apartment; a 3-year-old autistic girl killed by asphyxiation by her mother: these horrific tragedies caught the attention of Cammie McGovern (apud ^{LAURENT, 2014}), herself the mother of an autistic child. What intrigued the author was how much neighbors and acquaintances defended the parents involved in the tragedies, emphasizing “their heroic love for their sick children”; McGovern highlighted these cases “so other parents wouldn’t get their hopes up so high that they might then take them to these extremes”; the exhaustion of these parents is proportional to the excessive effort, encouraged by the dominant therapeutic behaviors in the field of autism that “propose to mobilize parents and children in an intensive and restless effort, demanding the maximum investment from each one – both financial and relational, and in every moment of the day.”

Grandiose hope can be an expression of the denial of pathologizing through transcendence, which articulates an ennobled scene in which the ending is always better, bigger, more evolved, and more desired. But the paths of the life process aren’t constant, rectilinear, or ascending, but always erratic concerning normative expectations. Family exhaustion stems not only from the arduous routine of care and the socio-economic breakdown, which most families are part of, but also from the style of awareness with which parents engage in this task. The more rigid, heroic, high hopes and idealized, the greater the exhaustion, proportional to the neurotic intensity.

The fantasy of unlimited growth, pertinent to western cultural arrogance, has its foundations in the mythical uprooting that inaugurates the principles of modern rationalism (^{ZOJA, 2000}). This fantasy is the driving force behind cultural colonialism, which disregards diversity in its intrinsic value and allows the perverse annihilation of the other’s soul, as Gambini describes the catechization of the original populations of Brazil (^{GAMBINI, 2000}).

When the Raven’s father, as head of the tribe, realizes what is happening, he recognizes: “my son, it is not possible for us to support you in our village, so you must leave”. The father did not speak to his son, who was dead, untouched, and crystallized in his bed, but to the ideal of him, which had been sent by the heavens to cease the parent’s lamentation. The grieving process was not supported but interrupted by a defense mechanism that intends to stop the pain, but ends up engendering an even greater tragedy.

The one who came to rescue the parents, who were in their shadowish anguish, was the idealized image of the son, who illuminated their path and supported them with his presence. When the idealized image of the child lends itself to providing meaning and support to the parents, the child might endup imprisoned under that image. The real child will have to sustain the ideal image because the parents depend on its permanence in their defensive reorganization. So the child’s alternative is to abandon the helpless parents and inaugurate its own world. This does not necessarily mean abandoning the parents; however, those parents who idealize the child must be betrayed. Maybe, in the new world, new parents may also be reborn from their relationship with the new child.

By being in contact with his own wound, the idealized son breaks with the crystallization of his image and opens wide the insatiable emptiness that inhabits him. It is only by leaving his old world behind and going to a new world in the movement of deconstruction and recreation, that his existence becomes sustainable; that is, in that old plane, his body remains while past, now decaying, while the new being is directed to another plan to inaugurate and inhabit it, with its own and legitimate poetics (^{PALOMO, 2022}).

The guardian angel

For centuries we have been looking for the right term for this ‘call’. The Romans called it genius, the Greeks called it daemon, the Christians called it guardian angel (^{HILLMAN, 1997, p. 18}).

Just like the Raven’s parents, we may not endure the pain of deidealizationeven with the support of the outside community. In this case, we will need non-human support from the “inner community”. In Christian mythology, this force may come from God, the Virgin, Christ, or a saint, but they all seem too distant. To be by our side constantly, accompanying our every step, the Christian mythologyoffers us the figure of the angel. The guardian angel accompanies us from birth as a loyal figure to our destiny and core. We can imagine that such an intimate and familiar figure is easily projected on someone in our society, as it sometimes occurs with mothers or grandmothers. However, “No person is a genius or can be a genius, because the genius or daimon or angel is an invisible nonhuman escort, not the person with whom the genius lives” (^{HILLMAN, 1997, p. 40}). The angel I need and seek is not in my son or in anyone around me, but resides beyond the literal mentality, it is in psychic interiority.

One day, I was quite distressed by a new question that had arisen regarding my son: how would his social development be when it comes to friendshipsand affective relationships? The anguish emerged after I heard the news that a child wasbeated a few times at our school, besides the news of the suicide of a pre-adolescent autistic kid. At the height of my anguish it ocurred to me an active imagination as a way of elaborating the conflict: I visualized a being perched in the window above my bed. This being was all naked, and it was neither male nor female, but androgen. From where it was perched he stared into my eyes with immense sweetness and pain. The being shared and validated my pain, and I wished I could extend that moment forever, but the alarm clock soon rang. I got up with the feeling of having been visited by my angel, my daemon, and of release from my deep anguish, which was now transformed into a reflective sadness.

The valleys of anguish can be extensive in in atypical fatherhood. Sometimes it’s more than one person can handle. We needangels to embrace us, daemons to guide and us, like that imaginal visitor. But in our dispirited literalism, we project the deified figure over the neurodivergent child by transforming it into an angel, genius, or example of overcoming. As parents, it is our function to work psychically to remove from our children the projection of the saving figure. We need to be attentive and open to our own angel, who is the one that can whisper to us what is being requested by reality in assimilation.

Like my unexpected visitor, such figures “are metaphors for fantasy cores of the psyche”, but “in a monotheistic culture like ours, these metaphors lose their force due to the repression of their images”. Despite the mythical uprooting and imaginal devaluation of our times, “these same images remain in the deep mud” (^{BARCELLOS, 2019}) of the psyche and come to meet us if we are capable of a style of consciousness that allows their emergence.

Final considerations: diversity, singularity, and destiny

Fantasies about the measure of normality are archetypal and will always occur to us; however, defining people concretely from these fantasies is something that we can leave in disuse. Overcoming the abnormal vs. normal separation gives us the opportunity to approach differences by appreciating diversity and uniqueness.

If, as a father, I feel that my vocation involves the arrival of an atypical child, either because of the need to get rid of a narcissism, either to deconstruct a moralism and open myself to the unusual, getting rid of prejudices, I must accept the meaning of this experience from my existence: “my atypical fatherhood taught, provided meor opened me to such and such a thing”; that differs greatly from saying that my son himself came into the world to teach me, open me up, or provide me with anything. My son came into the world to exist as a being, as the protagonist of his own story, not as a supporting actor in mine. To align my son’s existence to a need of mine is to vampirize his being.

Atypical fatherhood is opportune for transformations because it continually calls for a radical openness to the unpredictable, for undressing hypocritical vanities, and for adopting a subversive perspective on life in contrast to old morals. However, none of this should become an assumption that the child has a higher consciousness or a mission of enlightenment. Indeed, our children are not better for being autistic as much as they are not worse for their neurodivergence – they just are who they are.

By presenting us with the neurodivergence of a child, life pulls the rug out from under us through the trickster hands (^{VILLAR, 2022}). The emptiness that forms from the breaking of the idealizations that we have made of our children becomes unbearable; the vacuum resulting from the impossibility of accessing a meaning tuned to our unique calling, vocation, and fate sucks us into this generalist and typified mentality, then sustains a new idealization that disguises our pain and disappointment with angelic and elevated colors; we seek to give a positive meaning to the poorly digested drama. This discourse is superficially comforting, but its benefit is fleeting, and its harm is lasting because it is deeply dissonant with what the soul reveals through the numerous systemic symptoms that settle little by little in the family.

In the Raven becomes voracious myth, the protected son dies too soon. Metaphorically, we can understand that the death of the protected child is the revelation that he no longer corresponds to the image we had of him. The son can no longer be protected, untouched, immaculate, or eternal; some change in that image has occurred, and the parents will have to deal with the death. The conservation instinct that runs through us as protectors resists the change that is imposed. That instinct must be achieved and balanced by the instinct of transformation, also pertinent to parenthood, which wants to see the child become its next own version.

There are many battles and missions related to autism, but atypical fatherhood is not just about those. It is necessary to let the hero die so that the identification with him is overcome and so that other metaphors can emerge polytheistically. In addition to fighting in the trenches of atypical fatherhood, we also love, play, wander, and other endless psychic possibilities that cross us and can be welcome.

The dialogue with the imaginal, in openness to what angels and daemons whisper to me, makes it possible to glimpse new paths to follow. For this, it is necessary to embrace the perspective that we are not alone as a conscious phenomenon. Psychically, we are driven, guided, or diverted by archetypal forces beyond our subjectivity.

Atypical fatherhood calls for an openness to the external and internal worlds, with all their authentic and singular abnormality. The living personifications of the unconscious cross the present towards the future; it is in the deep bowels of the psyche that life, in its intrinsic creativity, scribbles our destiny. Let us be attentive so that we escape the traps of enclosing defenses and find every day a pulsating, creative, and soulful life, worthwhile with all its immense complexity. ■