Therapy and the Rearrangement of Domestic Life

Reading through the turbulent changes in family dynamics Dr. Fuchsman detailed, I began thinking about psychotherapy’s role in those changes. There has been a critique of much of current therapy as individual-centered at the expense of connection and relatedness (cf. Relational-Cultural Therapy, the Jean Baker Miller Center at Wellesley College), a bias perhaps more reflected in the work of less trained therapists and in popular culture translations of therapeutic thinking.

In the psychoanalytic world, Margaret Mahler linked “individuation” with “separation” (meaning psychological differentiation). Across the country, however, families were facing geographic separation as young adults left small towns for big cities. Recognizing that in urban areas the young could find a better economic future, therapists worked to help both parents and their offspring make the best of necessity, framing separation as all for their good. There was a not-always subtle view of the reluctance to let

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go as being pathological, without giving recognition and dignity to the extended family (and non-Western) ethos that family is forever, forever here to help, forever to be cared for by you. While therapy could have been about sustained connection over distance, in practice it more often focused on letting go.

Fascination with individuation, self-discovery, self-articulation and making one’s own decisions (à la Donald Winnicott and cognitive-behavioral assertiveness) led to seeing the task of parenting as facilitating children’s discovery of their own wishes, talents, and choices, while overlooking an older focus on “what we as a family are about, what we stand for, how it is we go about life, what it is about us we’re proud of,” i.e. the transmission of values and responsibility. The new focus has blossomed into transporting children to “individuation” activities and mirroring their participation, while being too committed at work to be available as guides in the discovery of right and wrong, relationships and integrity. Paradoxically, the additional message to parents that “you as an adult have a right to individuate too” has not infrequently added to divorce the unintended consequence of leaving children under-parented if not parentified.

Marital therapy rightly focused on listening skills, but said little about the result of using those skills over time and the ways shared reflection grows spouses and lovers in wisdom, compassion, integrity and generosity over a lifetime. Marital tensions were frequently framed as negotiations by two independent agents, each pursuing their own interests and desires. The idea that attachment, devotion, generosity and a desire to help each other could be expressions of one’s genuine self was little voiced; individuation meant self, not the interweaving of selves in love, family, and life. An entire theme, offering direction and meaning to love, had gone missing. In its absence, negotiations based on individuation often failed to provide the understanding and skills needed for love to survive (cf. Terrence Real’s next generation of marital therapy thinking in The New Rules of Marriage, 2007).

This reframing of marriage and parenting was taking place amid a historical sea change in the institutional context of daily life that had been unfolding for centuries; therapy was giving little thought to that historical context or its direction. Instead of spend-

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ing much of our waking hours immersed in an extended family and its connections, modernity meant spending most of the day in non-family contexts: business, government, school, media, and healthcare facilities. The number of people in the family shrank to nuclear and sub-nuclear size, as did the hours of real contact among family members. Witnessing this outcome of civilization’s “individuation project,” psychotherapy began to rethink its understanding of “health” and reassert the value of love, intimacy, family, and parenting. The question of how we grow through loving and being loved, through thinking, reflecting, and making life with an eye to each other—not just an eye to ourselves—is considered an important therapeutic focus in a way it was not in the prior half-century. Individuation has begun to mean working out our inner emotional and mental gyroscopes through the dialogues of intimate life. Where once assertiveness was all the rage, today it is mirror neurons (cf. www.ted.com/talks/vs_ramachandran_the_neurons_that_shaped_civilization).

Enter social networking and texting, inserting the presence of informally chosen, physically absent others into almost any setting. No one need be anywhere without his/her team. Will this mean a reinsertion of family dialogue into the worlds of business, school, etc.? A further invasion of what’s left of family by peers? A shared swim in the commercially-created waters of consumerism, devoid of meaningful intimacy? How will connection in such terse and virtual form affect Generation Facebook’s understanding of attachment, in-depth connection over time, face-to-face intimacy, and the nature of helping children grow into mature adults?

Our domestic arrangements are also targets of institutional de-differentiation. Each institution—family, economy, politics, religion, military—has its own way of thinking about life, who to consider, what matters, and how to act, and so engages our neurobiology differently. The more complex the institutional life of a society’s members, the more neurobiological adaptive capacity is involved in appraising life and making choices. This does not guarantee societal wisdom, but it can help. Sometimes a society reduces the complexity of life to one institution’s take on things, e.g. when every aspect of life becomes a venue for religion, as in fundamentalist states, or for commerce, as in the U.S., where businesses

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work hard to colonize family life, parenting, sexual desire, romance and love to promote the purchasing-self. Invaded by commercial life on the one hand and calls to fundamentalism on the other, domestic arrangements in the U.S. have to find their way amid a press of messages saying all you need to know about love, sex and parenting can be found through shopping or prayer.

Professor Fuchsman has portrayed the disorganizing impact of changing historical forces on love, family and parenting with great clarity, empathic concern for the wounds being produced, and a sounding of the alarm for the “deep psychological national deficit” being created. The sub-culture of psychotherapy seems to have been responding to those changes as helpfully as possible, while in the process promoting them.

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