Module: Philosophy, Psychology and Society
Lawrence’s ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’ is centred on the cause and effect of
how parents’ anxieties can trickle down to affect their children’s unconsciously.
a) Psychoanalysis
Paul’s parents’ main concern is their constant lack of money to ensure that
their “style was always kept up”. The trauma of her failure at “find(ing) anything
successful” and from her relationship with husband that “turned to dust” is transferred
to her children by the manifestation of Hester’s superiority complex, her coping
mechanism for living the “bonny” life she wanted. Hester compensates by being “all
the more gentle and anxious for her children, as if she loved them very much”. Her
inability to gain satisfaction from her husband has her spending the money belonging
to him who was supposed to provide her love on material things that give her the
satisfaction of superiority. But it’s not enough, and the “house came to be haunted by
the unspoken phrase: There must be more money”.
Hester then adopts, at the same time, a martyr complex, where she victimises
herself to avoid the responsibility of being a mother, partial breadwinner, and head of
the household (with her husband gone to town most days). She calls her own family
the “poorer members of the (extended) family”, and projects the blame for her relative
poverty from her overspending self to her husband and his unluckiness. This
projection is due to the retroactive interference (McLeod, 2008) in her memory of her
current state of marriage overwriting her past love, before it turned sour. Hester
rationalises her predicament by illogically concluding that she “can’t be, if (she)
married an unlucky husband”.
Hester’s influence as an authority figure tells Paul that luck “always gets more
money”. Freud’s theory is that the Oedipus complex is subconscious (Wilson, 2009),
which implies that Paul’s want for his mother’s love is from the Oedipus complex.
We see him claiming his status as a “lucky person” to his mother without knowing his
own agenda for doing so.. Hester’s two daughters are not “rocking-horse winners”
because the Oedipus complex only affects mother-son relationships, and their father is
not present for them to develop the Electra complex.
Aforementioned, Paul’s parents’ anxieties over money, style, and superiority
manifest via the “whispering” of the house. The home is supposed to symbolize a
refuge from the evils of the world, but because Hester’s wants are brought into the
house, the children would “stop playing” “to listen” to the whispers of “There must
be more money!”
The anxieties Paul has are amplified and catalysed into action by the Oedipus
complex. Paul associates his mother’s want for money as directly proportional to
luck. Because he wants his mother’s love, Paul sets his goal to obtain money via luck
on his rocking horse. The financial nature of the problem is beyond his years. Paul
copes with the sudden jump from the Phallic stage (his rightful developmental stage)
to the Genital stage (adulthood). Paul copes with this unnatural jump via regression
by bringing his rocking horse from his nursery years into his bedroom. Paul
“mount(s)” his rocking horse with a “strange, heavy, and yet not loud noise”, like
“something huge, in violent, hushed motion” “plunging to and fro”. The premature
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jump might have disrupted Paul’s psychosexual development and Lawrence portrays
that by adding in the oddball symbolism of Paul masturbating as a result of the lack of
resolution to this conflict (Phallic stage) (McLeod, 2008). In a regular person, the
process of identification would occur and the Oedipus complex will cease. However,
because it involves the same sex parent, Paul’s Oedipus complex in left unresolved
(McLeod, 2008), causing his sexual desires for his mother to continue.
Like his father, Paul’s “prospects never materialised”. He was sent to Eton on
Hester’s expenditure, but Paul’s parents’ anxiety of failure transferred to him, and he
never got to live past his early teens while being plagued by his parent-inflicted
financial concerns. Lawrence shows the extent that parent-child anxieties can result
in: death.
Paul has a hero complex to want to be his mother’s knight in shining armour.
He wants to rescue Hester from her relative poverty, but fears failure (being
considered unlucky) as his mother’s abandonment of her husband was because he was
“unlucky”. Although it was a win to be proud of, Paul still tested the waters by asking
if she had “anything nice in the post”, because he had a mix of separation anxiety
(WebMD, n.d.) (experienced by children, because of his nurse’s abandonment of him)
and fear of abandonment of Hester as a lover.
Paul’s absent father could have contributed to Paul’s anxiety (Kruk, 2012),
and his lack of a father meant that he looked up to father figures Uncle Oscar and
Bassett, who served as Paul’s (albeit lacking) fathers. Their influence on him was
pivotal in his tragic downfall, as Oscar was mostly concerned with Hester’s “eighty-
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odd thousand to the good” at Paul’s deathbed, and said that Paul, the “poor devil”,
was “best gone out of a life where he rides his rocking horse to find a winner”.
Oscar’s greed for money strengthened Paul’s belief that money was the solution to
gaining love from his mother. Bassett’s “secret, religious voice” and tone while he
speaks about horseracing and gambling influenced Paul to too believe in horseracing
and have great faith that it will deliver his family from poverty.
b) Literature review:
Towards the end of Paul’s tragic death we see for once that Paul’s worries
begin to worry Hester. The rocking horse represents Paul in “arrested prance”, and
Hester felt “sudden anxiety about him (Paul) that was almost anguish”. Later on,
Hester stands with the same “arrested “ muscles worrying for him, albeit being too
late, because despite all the hard work, Paul’s predicament was stationary, and he
never gained his mother’s love.
Paul’s parents’ anxieties (especially Hester’s) did indeed transfer onto him,
and vice versa. Uncle Oscar, who is Paul’s father figure, has concerns over money
and Bassett, Paul’s other father figure, has an almost religious-like attitude toward
horseracing. The influence amplified greatly Paul’s concerns over money and
horseracing, and both become big parts to play for Paul’s death in madness at the end.
According to the American Journal of Psychiatry, children’s observation or
overhearing of their parents’ anxieties may lead them to take on the same concerns.
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Because Paul sees the stylish furnishing and notices his mother going to town to
work, Paul too takes on the common concern of money. Another cause is possibly
“negative parenting behaviors”, which include overprotection of the child from what
the parent fears. Paul is neglected rather than overprotected, but both methods still
result in a child that doesn’t know danger.
On the opposite side of the spectrum, parents may perpetuate anxiety by
allowing a child’s existing anxieties to influence their parenting decisions to help their
child avoid anxious experiences. “A child’s anxiety could even be causing the
parent’s anxiety.” Hester’s anxiety over money turns to Paul’s anxiety over money to
the extent that he cares not for the dangers of his “frenzy”, and later deflects back to
Hester as anxiety over Paul’s life.
The study states that “the right thing to do is to help the child have
opportunities to take on challenges and tasks appropriate to their age and level of
fear”, “so they have the opportunity to learn that they can actually cope with this
situation after all.”
Past research has shown that children of anxious parents have a higher chance
of being anxious, and that therapy to help anxious parents identify and alter specific
behaviors can make minimal the effect of that anxiety on their children (Eley et al.,
2015).
(1276 words)
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References
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Anxiety: A Children-of-Twins Study: American Journal of Psychiatry: Vol 172, No 7.
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Moore, K., Kinghorn, A. and Bandy, T. (2011). [online] Available at:
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