In it he describes various phases a child experiences as he or she must confront the fact that the parents are not wholly emotionally available.
More broadly, the term can be used to cover the whole range of instinctual ties between siblings, and parents and children.
[1] Freud published a short piece on the Family Romance in Otto Rank's The Myth of the Birth of the Hero (1908) – the study later appearing separately in print both in German and in English.
[2] Freud had anticipated the theme in the 1890s, in a private reflection on Conrad Ferdinand Meyer.
[3] In his article, Freud argued for the widespread existence among neurotics of a fable in which the present-day parents were imposters, replacing a real and more aristocratic pair; but also that in repudiating the parents of today, the child is merely "turning away from the father whom he knows today to the father in whom he believed in the earliest years of his childhood".