Perhaps more than any other essay, Montaigne's “De l'affection des Peres aux enfans” (11, 8) delineates a myth concerning the origins of the creative act and strikingly prefigures Freud's 1909 essay “Family Romances.” In that paper Freud discusses the “works of fiction” that the child creates to free himself from the authority of his parents; he constructs a fictive genealogy in which the biological parents are replaced by imaginary figures of “higher birth.” To be sure, the enactment of the family romance does not stem exclusively from estrangement from one's parents; it is the phantasmatic fulfillment of wishes as a correction or antidote to the infelicities of actual life. If, as Freud claims, these fantasies are enacted at a time when “one doubts the incomparable and unique qualities” attributed to one's parents, it is in an attempt to salvage the theoretical fiction of parental perfection and omnipotence through the imaginative activity associated with pre-oedipal bliss.

What is striking about Montaigne's family romance is its inverted structure. The narrative does not recount the child's fantasy about his parents, but rather the parental fantasy about the engendering of the child. Although Freud does not discuss a genre of family romance emanating from the parental perspective, such a genre does, however, seem appropriate for a writer whose linguistic apprenticeship produces a scriptural offspring that is a self-projection.