Family Permutations Reconsidered

The transformations in American family life since 1960 have much to do with economics and gender. As a number of the responses to my article focus on these subjects, I will begin with them. It is commonplace to connect the rise in divorce and cohabitation to the changing role of women. In dual-income and dualcareer marriages with children, parents may be split between the demands of career and domestic life. Of about 137 million Americans employed full time in December 2009, only about 7% (9.6 million) are self-employed (Bureau of Labor Statistics http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm). The rest of us at work have to answer to someone else. Whatever our own level of authority and power on the job, we are also subordinates in a hierarchy. Career advancement, as well as remaining employed, can be dependent on good relationships with those to whom we report. While self-restraint is required on the job, home may be the venue where the tensions of work get acted out. If home was ever a haven from a heartless world, it is likely less so now.

The emphasis on material consumption brings another dimension to these tensions. Don Carveth stresses “the role of advanced consumer capitalism” in what I call the “pleasure-oriented

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conception of life as the satisfaction of desires and longings.” Our hunger for objects to ease our cravings, according to Carveth, activates narcissism, envy, and greed. It makes others less real to us, as we become a “collectivity of self-seeking, competitive individuals” who “refuse restrictions upon or inhibitions of our free pursuit of gratification.” The wish to be unfettered, which consumerism unleashes, is bound up with the suppression demanded by fitting into a chain of command. We are divided souls. oedipal struggles, which may be fulfilled and/or frustrated at work, can get transferred to home with role reversals, regression, parentification, competitive narcissism, and projection onto one’s spouse and children. What Daniel Bell called the cultural contradictions of capitalism impact the bliss of domestic life (The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, 1976). As a culture, our commitment to work values and ambitions often means containing emotions in the office and unleashing them at home.

Florette Cohen says that the omission of economics leaves a “gaping hole” in my discussion of changing families. I both agree and take exception. First, the exceptions. There are a number of changes in the structure of American families that are not primarily economic. The emergence of cohabitation as a substitute for marriage probably has as much to do with a belief that an emotional commitment may not last as it does with a cost and benefit analysis. Similarly, never-married mothers and blended families have become more prominent for a multitude of reasons, only one of which is economic. Cohen mentions the feminist movement, which is as much or more political than economic. Where economics comes to the fore in families is that the marital household is a financial unit, and women’s earning power makes them less economically dependent on husbands. The increased economic equality between the sexes substantially alters what marriage is like these days. This new marital balance is one of the greatest changes in the history of family life.

Professor Cohen states that early 20^th century marriage was “an exercise in labor specialization,” as wives were financially dependent and unable to leave unhappy marriages. Cohen neglects to mention that the Progressive period was an earlier era of feminism, in which divorce was on the rise. In 1890, 4.5% of married Ameri-

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can women held paying jobs; by 1920, the rate doubled to 9.0% (James Henretta, et al, America’s History, pp. 536-538). The divorce rate climbed faster: “in 1890, the first year with data by marital status, 3.0 couples per 1,000 were divorced; this rate increased to 8.0 in 1920, 8.8 in 1940” (U.S. Department of Health Education and Welfare, “100 Years of Marriage and Divorce Statistics United States, 1867-1967,” 1973, p. 9). Divorce rose for reasons beyond finances. An economic analysis is not sufficient to understand domestic developments; other perspectives need to be incorporated. What worries me is that the rational self-interest perspective of much economics is often at odds with theories that focus on emotional and/or unconscious reasons.

Joseph Kramp wants to know if and how economic instability and personal instability are related, and makes reference to the recent recession. On the individual level, personal security may have as much to do with the attachment patterns established in families as do socio-economic factors. Personal resilience is a combination of experience and character. In a nation where economic success and personal worth are often equated, financial downturns might cause greater insecurity to those who are more other-oriented than inner-directed.

Kramp wants to legitimatize new forms of parenting. I believe that in most circumstances, two parental figures are better than one. This can be within a heterosexual marriage, a same-sex union, among single parent homes or divorced, blended, and extended families. Anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, among others, talks about “alloparenting,” where a relative other than mother or father helps care for a newborn. We often tend to underestimate the centrality of the extended family in people’s lives and overestimate the traditional nuclear family. It is also important for there to be both active adult male and female family-like models for children.

In a different vein, Jamshid Marvasti and Nina Dadlez discuss military families involved in recent American wars. Andrew Cherlin is concerned over the high degree of turbulence and disruption in American families. Certainly, American military families in a time of multiple deployments have turbulence and disruption as their middle names. In marriages with children, the soldier may be away for a year, come home, and then be sent overseas again. The

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family develops one routine when everyone is home, another when only one parent is present, readjusts upon the return of the veteran, then back and forth again. It would not be surprising if these continuing adjustments exacerbate family tensions. Add to this the possibility of traumatic brain injury or post-traumatic stress and there can be a great deal for the family to endure. The authors mention “Dear John” letters from girlfriends and spouses, which brings to mind some events from my experiences in Vietnam. One of my married Army friends in DaNang went home for a 30 day leave, only to find out that his wife was pregnant by his best friend. He was emotionally devastated, and returned to Vietnam a “different man.” The wife of another married man in my unit had stopped writing him. I returned to the States when he still had most of his tour to finish. At his request, I called his wife, who was having the most difficult time without him and did not want to make things worse for him by letting him know. I told her the obvious, that she needed to share her feelings with him. Years later, I heard they divorced not long after his return. Another dreadful factor for military families is that in 2010—for the second straight year—more American soldiers committed suicide than died in combat.

Paul Elovitz correctly characterizes families as “emotional hothouses” where children often “act out parental conflicts and disclaimed emotions.” Elovitz adds that as a psychohistorian, he prefers case studies of family life to the statistics, academic psychology, and sociology that are featured in my article. He is “frustrated” by the absence of real people from my overview. I was seeking to present a macro portrait of families, and to show some of the consequences of changing family structures on children. He favors a more micro approach. In another context, Elovitz writes: “I define psychohistory as an amalgam of psychology, history, and related social sciences” (“How Do You Define Psychohistory,” Appearance and Reality, 2009, p. 2). The big tent of psychohistory needs a balance of the macro and micro approaches, the psychodynamic, the historical, and the academic social sciences. What is absent from my relatively short piece needs to be supplemented by other approaches. Psychoanalytic case studies should address, more than they have, the diverse family structures present in contemporary American families.

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Dan Dervin has some concern about my allusion to Freud’s term “family romance” in my title. Why Freud chose the phrase family romance is puzzling. The first reference to it occurs in a May 25, 1897 letter to Fliess: “A romance of being a stranger (e.g. in the family)…is found regularly, and serves as a means of bastardizing the relatives in question …Thus a woman who will not go out by herself is asserting her mother’s unfaithfulness” (Freud, The Origins of Psychoanalysis, 1954, p. 205). In Freud’s first use of the actual phrase, on June 20, 1898, he writes to Fliess that the “socalled family romance” is both self-aggrandizing and a “defense against incest” of an affair with a sister. “If the sister is not one’s mother’s child, one is relieved of all blame” (Freud, The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1985, p. 317). Freud seems to be equating romance with fantasy and imaginings used to denigrate another family member. These examples seem to include the unromantic as much as the romantic.

In the 1909 “Family Romances,” he says the family romance is “an imaginative activity” that fulfills wishes that are “a correction of actual life” and have both “ambitious” and “erotic” aims. The child wants to be “free from the parents of whom he now has a low opinion and of replacing them by others,” usually with a father who has higher social status. A son may fantasize that his mother has secret, extra-marital “love-affairs.” The child is motivated by “revenge and retaliation” (Freud, “Family Romances,” S.E. p. IX, 1909, pp. 238-239). There is a sexual element in most of these examples, and one that fosters blame on another family member. These imaginings, too, are often unromantic. While it is true that I do not directly address the erotic and ambitious in “Family Romances,” Freud’s conception has more to do with fantasies of revenge than what is usually called romance.

As well, throughout this essay, Freud is assuming a family structure of biological mother, biological father, and their offspring. My aim is to show that this family structure is less prominent and what the consequences of these changes are. For instance, how would having a step-parent in a blended family impact the psychology of the family romance, especially if the mother did have an affair with a rich man, divorced the child’s middle-class father, and then married her affluent lover?

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I am much in agreement with Michael Britton that individuation need not be separate from intimacy, connection and commitment. We have had far too much of paranoid individualism, where others are demonized as hostile, devilish usurpers. Humanizing others and retaining the continuity between generations has value; the formation of personal identity can be a dialogue with one’s family and diverse cultural traditions. Oddly enough, these concerns about individuation harken back to what Freud wrote in his “Family Romances” essay: “The liberation of an individual, as he grows up, from the authority of his parents is one of the most necessary though one of the most painful results brought about by the course of his development…Indeed, the whole progress of society rests upon the opposition between successive generations” (Freud, “Family Romances,” p. 237). Freud backed away from aspects of this perspective after he experienced himself as the symbolically paternal target by his psychoanalytic sons. Still, the ambivalence between generations is built into the oedipal dynamic. In a rough and tumble world, where the forging of identity emerges from one’s own benevolent and hostile feelings, it is still better when it includes self-respect and deep care for the well-being of others. Then parents can adhere more to Erik Erikson’s generative stage and, amidst the mixed motivations of all family members, will keep their children’s interests front and center. This would be a counter force to the strong cultural drives that promote self vs. other, and that can be less aware of the consequences of actions for children.

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