사회생물학적 관점에서 본 부모의 욕구

Parent’s Desire from a Socio-biological Point of View

Many modern parent-theories tacitly premise norms that parent-child relationship should be full of love, understanding, encouraging, and comforting. Even though they regard the conflicts between parent and child as their subject of the study, it is very difficult to find their basic questions such as why and from where the conflicts begins. Besides, even though they present how to be good parents, they do not show radical skepticism about ‘what is the real parent-child relationship’. In fact, parental love for child, on which parental authority and responsibility are based, has been accepted as indemonstrable theme so far. But we need to ascertain the realities or facts before discussing about parental sacrifice, love, authority, and responsibility. This article focuses on the parent’s desires among many facts which explain parent-child relationship. Because parent’s desires based on his/her power cannot avoid the conflict with child’s independent freedom, it becomes the key reason that causes complications between parent and child. As the first step of philosophical thinking about parent-child relationship, with priority given to parent’s desires, I tried to infer parent’s biological desires from some sociobiological researches which analyze the cause of altruistic instinct. The most of relationships that we can find purely altruistic instinct are the ones between parent and child. Sociobiology finds the reason from gene, which has the nature of self-reproduction as the only survival principle. Through the child who inherits his/her gene, parent feels the life which survives transcending the limits of generations. On the other hand, parent has the desire to recreate him/herself through his/her child because of the self-centered and out-intentional consciousness. But child is not an extension of parent him/herself but an extension of the immortal life in parent. Child is another independent existence and the fate of parent is to help child become wholly independent from parent.