JK Rowling on CBC Newsworld tonight

[Tonks]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at yahoogroups.com, "susanmcgee48176" 
<Schlobin at ...> wrote:
> Thanks for the explanation and I also read where you stated that 
this is universal for women except for lesbians. 
> Could you tell me what school of theory this is from?  
> I must be misunderstanding it. When you say that 
> "Since usually a young girl's father is a love object for her"
> do you mean she has sexual feelings for him? Is this a Freudian 
> analysis?
> (wait can't be, you said later it's not about sex)
> If she had a bad relationship with her real father, wouldn't it be 
> more likely she would transfer feelings of love for another older 
man? Why would a father substitute be "out of bounds?"
> 
> Then you say:
> Althought she may have had some 
> > difficulty in relationships with other men in her life before 
her current husband, because a girl's relationship with her father 
will have an effect on all other relationships with men after his.
> >  
> Well, my guess is a girl's relationship with her mother and her 
> siblings will have an effect on all other relationships with men.
> 
> We all know that JKR's first marriage did not work out, but you 
seem to be contradicting yourself when you say it will have an 
effect on "all other relationships with men" after this. After all, 
her current relationship seems to be fine.
> 
> Still confused. 
> And how does this theory affect bisexual women?


Tonks:
Gosh.. I didn't mean to start all of this. Yes it is mostly 
Freudian. The  psycho-social-sexual phases of development. I don't 
know how it goes for bisexual women, we never studied that, or gays 
either for that matter.

First when I say that it isn't sexual, I mean the physical aspect, 
she is not lusting for her father, in other words. It is an Eros 
type of Love, not Venus, to use C.S. Lewis' word.

I was originally making reference to the Electra stage of 
psychological development, which is the female counterpart to the 
Oedipus phase in boys. Briefly, (in people who grow up to be 
heterosexual) both sexes start out having as their primary 
identification and love their mothers. Later the boy changes his 
identification to his father and keeps the mother as the love 
object. A girl keeps her identification with her mother, and changes 
her love object to her father.

How this translates in her adult live is that if a girl had a bad 
relationship with her father, saw him as distant and unloving, she 
might later see all men that way. She might also set up 
relationships to mimic the one that she had with her father. Not on 
a conscious level, but on an unconscious level.  If the father were 
physically abusive, she might marry an abusive man, for example.

It is not unusual for people who believe in a God figure to project 
onto that figure the experiences that they had with their parents. 
This is why people who had very strict parents often see God as 
strict and judgmental instead of kind and loving. Since in 
Christianity God is depicted as male, many women who have had a bad 
relationship with their fathers find it difficult to have a positive 
relationship with God because of the whole God/male thing. 

As to Rowling and her current husband, I would expect with all of 
the money that she made, she probably had some therapy, or maybe 
somehow just learned from the past. I don't know. And they haven't 
been married that long yet, so we really don't know do we? Or care, 
for that matter. ;-)

Tonks_op