All Traumatised Children
In families, the Kantian asymmetry isn’t an exception but the rule. Children are structurally compelled to treat their parents as subjects, beings with inner lives, intentions, and purposes. This is not optional; survival depends on attributing subjectivity to the caretaker. The infant cannot see the mother as “just an object” delivering food. It must imagine her as a whole interior agent, capable of love, care, and attention. The “as if” of subjecthood is exaggerated upwards.
Parents, by contrast, are structurally free to do the opposite. Because they hold the power of survival, they can treat the child functionally as noise to be silenced, as labor to be trained, as lineage to be extended. Even when love is present, objectification easily creeps in; the child becomes “my son, my daughter, my project, my burden.” Subjectivity collapses into role. This is not necessarily cruelty; it is the economy of survival playing itself out.
The friction is most brutal where the asymmetry becomes visible. A child, wired to over-ascribe subjectivity, eventually discovers that much of what the parent saw was objecthood, a resource, an extension, a mirror. The betrayal cuts deep because the child had staked its whole survival on believing in reciprocity of subjecthood. The parent rarely feels the same betrayal insteadthey were never compelled to overextend in the first place.
Thus family life carries an unavoidable trauma. Love may soften it, but the default flow remains in form of upward subjectification, downward objectification.
