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Parents and children can drive each other mad. At one moment, a parent may be encouraging and affectionate toward the child; in the next, the parent may be sending the child to his or her bedroom. Similarly, a child who seems helpful and cooperative can suddenly turn belligerent. Parents and children may partly resolve the mixture of negative and positive feelings they experience in such situations by remembering their basic love for each other. Nevertheless, the conflicting sentiments will be stored in the memory of both parties, contributing to a long-lasting melange of conflicting beliefs, feelings, and behaviors. What are the psychological consequences of this state of affairs in relationships?

Although ambivalence is a common experience in family relations, the conceptualization of these relations has been focused on solidarity, closeness, and attraction on one hand, and on stress, distance, disruption, and abuse on the other. Ambivalence has not often been considered systematically for the analysis of intergenerational relations. Measurement instruments are not widely available for this purpose, because they tend to focus on one dimension at a time (Berscheid, 1983, pp. 115–116).

Understood as the simultaneous experience of necessarily conflicting attitudes, wishes, feelings, or intentions, the concept of ambivalence has a complex history in psychological and social analysis. Lüscher (2000) reviewed the history of this concept, initially used in the study of abnormal states, and then generalized to the realm of the usual and expectable in social life. It should be noted at the outset that the term “ambivalence” presents two problems for social analysis: adoption of a term initially intended to portray abnormal states for the expectable course of adult life, and the extension of a concept founded on the study of personal states to social analysis. Consistent with Bleuler’s (Riklin, 1910/1911) initial discussion of the term ambivalence,¹ Freud (1909, 1912, 1912–1913, 1914) attempted to resolve the first problem by showing that ambivalence – as the experience of mixed and conflicting sentiments regarding those who are particularly important in one’s own life – inevitably emerges out of the child’s effort to resolve the tension between social reality and his or her own desire focused on the parents of early childhood. At the same time, Freud compounded the second problem by regarding the realm of the social as the personal writ large.

Intergenerational relations imply dealing with ambivalences. This thesis is what the contributions to this volume have in common. Yet, critics may claim that it is not a new insight. Among them are those who recall that some of the greatest sagas in Greek mythology depicted what we now refer to as ambivalence. Others may argue that the experience of ambivalence pervades everyday life. Adult children, for example, feel ambivalent about placing their elderly father or mother in a nursing home. Parents have mixed feelings about their child’s living with a partner without an intention to marry and have children. A son’s or a daughter’s “coming out” as gay or lesbian is fraught with ambivalence on both sides.

There is a long history of interest in the concept of ambivalence, as the contributions to the present volume show. It is therefore somewhat remarkable that until very recently, ambivalence has not been explicitly employed in research on intergenerational relations in later life. Given the popular acceptance of contradictory feelings about parents (Cohler, 1983) and the frequent portrayal of such contradictions in cultural products (Reinharz, 1986), this may be a major gap in research. However, the question remains: Is some degree of ambivalence in fact characteristic of parent-child relationships in later life? If so, do participants in these relationships identify ambivalence when it occurs? Further, is intergenerational ambivalence related to other variables of interest? This chapter presents results from a study that addressed the issue of ambivalence in older parent-adult child relations. Measures of intergenerational ambivalence were developed and employed in a sample of 189 older women.

A cursory look at the contemporary social scientific literature shows that the concept of ambivalence has gained prominence in analyses of contemporary societies and identities, and in analyses of interpersonal relationships and interactions. With respect to societal analyses, for example, Bauman has argued that the postmodern habitat “is a territory subjected to rival and contradictory meaning-bestowing claims and hence perpetually ambivalent” (Bauman, 1992, p. 193). “To live with ambivalence,” Varga suggests (Varga, 2001), is the postmodern pronouncement. By using ambivalence as an “interpretive category” rather than as a “research construct” (Lüscher, this volume Chaps 2 and 7), however, sociologists often leave unspecified whether this way of living entails different things for different social actors.

This chapter looks at the past, present and future of international cannabis control required by the UN drug control conventions in the post-2016 United Nations General Assembly Special Session era with an eye on the next High Level Ministerial Segment (HLMS) at the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs in 2019, and beyond. From a policy analysis perspective, the author meanders through the increasing tendency to legally regulate recreational cannabis markets notwithstanding the obligation enshrined in the UN drug control conventions to limit cannabis exclusively for ‘medical and scientific’ purposes. Taking into account relevant national and international developments, the chapter describes how the growing discomfort with the status of cannabis and the prohibitive and punitive approach stemming from the international drug control regime went through a process from soft to hard defections of the treaty obligations. The case of the Netherlands demonstrates the difficulty faced by reform-minded states in reconciling their wish for a different cannabis control mechanism with their obligations under international law, resulting in an incomplete regulation of its coffee-shop system, where small amounts of cannabis are tolerated for sale, but where the illicit supply to the shops remained unregulated. Subsequent more wide-ranging reforms to regulate cannabis from seed to sale in Uruguay, several US States and – in 2018 – in Canada, are clearly violating the obligations of the UN drug control conventions. Nevertheless, the HLMS will likely leave the elephant in the room untouched. The emerging paradigm shift regarding cannabis shows that a modernisation of the UN drug control regime is long overdue. This chapter discusses some of the options available.