Using Family Systems Therapy in Literary Criticism

Review of John V. Knapp and Kenneth Womack, Eds., Reading the Family Dance: Family Systems Therapy and Literary Study. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003. Hardcover. ISBN 087413823X, 333 pp., $ 55.00.

The editors have put together a very interesting collection of interdisciplinary essays dealing with a wide variety of national literatures and periods. What is particularly engaging about these essays is their stylistic clarity, their freshness in approach, and their emphasis on looking at specific texts through a fairly new lens, that of family systems therapy theory.

The collection starts with an essay by

Page 230

John Knapp that provides a much needed historical background and overview of family systems therapy that focuses on the family rather than the individual as the matrix of identity. Within this matrix, each member of the family usually fulfils a particular developmental role vis-à-vis the other characters. Of course, there is much more—families, according to this approach, have sub-systems, sibling difference, family secrets, conversational rules and the like. Knapp does a terrific job at summarizing what we could call the metapsychological issues in his opening chapter, introducing the materials and explaining the relationship of the theory to literary studies.

Family systems therapy deals with the family primarily, therefore, it lends itself well as a theoretical outlook applied to family dynamics as portrayed in realistic novels and plays. In the three parts that follow Knapp’s introduction, Reading the Family Dance examines a number of novels and two Shakespeare plays using this family therapy as its main theoretical tool. In the first part, “The Self: Family Systems Therapy and the Quest for Identity,” four essays discuss how, in various novels, characters develop a sense of self when, at the same time, the very idea of an individual self is threatened by various family dynamics. The second part deals with similar issues at the level of the community, and the third at the level of the larger culture and how it shapes family dynamics. The progression from individual to cultural dynamics works quite well, as it allows readers to see family systems therapy applied in a variety of contexts as a flexible literary-critical tool.

All in all, this is a very interesting, carefully put together, collection offering students of the humanities and the social sciences an appealing and provocative alternative to contemporary literary-theoretical approaches. Paradoxically, that is the book’s main strength as well as its main weakness. It appears necessary, for most of the contributors, to define family systems therapy as oddly and stubbornly opposed to a very idiosyncratic understanding of classical psychoanalytic criticism, an understanding that they hardly seem to care to address in any detail. Let me be more precise. In “The Enigmatic Jane Eyre: A Differentiation Story without Family in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre,” Rosemary D. Babock, in a statement that I will utilize as a paradigmatic example, uses Knapp’s ideas in order to validate her choice of family systems therapy as a helpful approach to understand the kind of questions that concern her. Babock writes “John Knapp….questions how Freudian concepts such as ‘drive reduction and primary process,’ concepts that are no longer accepted in contemporary psychology of how the mind and the brain function, can be taken as explanatory evidence useful to literary criticism.” She goes on to write that “Knapp suggests that the ‘limitations’ of an intrapsychic psychology like Freud’s—and more recently Lacan’s—have kept literary critics from a thorough analysis of ‘interpersonal difficulties’ that many literary characters experience” (p. 48).

Comments like this pervade the book to a fault. Gary Storhoff’s essay, for instance, starts by claiming that “Literary critics who employ family systems theory necessarily look beyond the psychoanalytic assumptions of the individual as an autonomous psychological entity” and instead, Storhoff’s continues, clearly privileging family systems therapy over his understanding of classical psychoanalysis, “the critic discovers the sources of an individual’s behavior within a much larger interpersonal dysfunction in the family as a whole” (p. 71). The reason why Storhoff feels this sense of privilege associated with family systems therapy is that “this kind of investigation,” as he puts it, “expands our understanding of the possibilities of character constructs, and adds another dimension to the view that literature expresses fundamental ideas about how we live” (p.71). Ideas as to “how we live” have always been within the radar screen of classical psychoanalysis. Finally, as my last example of the similar comments in practically every single one of the essays in the collection, Jerome Bump concludes an interesting enumeration of the pros of family systems therapy by claiming that it is based on “extensive practice of family therapy and empirical studies, not speculation about dreams and fantasies” (p.153).

Page 231

On first reading the book, I was obviously struck by some of these comments. I initially imagined that, consonant with Knapp’s metaphor of calling family systems therapy the “new kid on the literary criticism block” (p.13), these comments were simply rhetorically oriented, intended to help family systems therapy theory define itself as somewhat opposed to other modes of literary criticism, such as psychoanalysis. The reason I was struck was that family systems therapy theory depends on some of the same Freudian principles the authors denigrates when family systems therapy is portrayed as a kid trying to take the place of the father.

Regardless, I find the whole tendency unnecessary, since, as Knapp himself claims, family systems therapy has already generated “much interest,” in the academic world. (I think it is important to say also that Knapp wrote a groundbreaking book on the subject and, with Womack, also co-edited a special edition of the journal Style devoted specifically to the topic.) There is also an added, more serious, problem, one more detrimental to the book as a whole: nowhere in the text do any of the authors validate their comments that a particular set of Freudian principles are either no longer useful or based on either intellectualization or speculation. In fact, a more careful investigation into the current clinical literature dealing with the Freudian concepts the authors here claim are either outdated and useless, will reveal how this is simply not so and, further, how these same concepts are indeed essential in everyday psychoanalytic practice. Also, psychoanalytic-oriented literary criticism often focuses on the same issues the authors are interested in; i.e. family dynamics, sibling rivalry, aggression, etc. I am sure, to give just one example, that all of the authors are familiar with the burgeoning interest among psychoanalysts on what has come to be known as the “interpersonal or interrelational psychoanalytic” school of thought, a school which, as its name indicates, focuses not on the individual as a unit but as inevitably related to others and, more specifically, to familial others. This is, by the way, not a new idea, having its origins as far back—according to some—as the work of Sandor Ferenczi. (I am again focusing on a single psychoanalytic concept whose treatment I find lacking and problematic, to indicate a larger concern with the same issue. The same thing is true in the way this text discusses such concepts as aggression, the drives, etc.) It is a bit puzzling, as a result, to understand the motivation behind this particular area aspect of the book.

Barring the reservations I have expressed above, I feel this is a terrific book, one whose overall strength lies in its making available one more lens from which to look at things. Let me make a classical psychoanalytic point that is also embraced by family systems therapy theory. It is time for the “new kid” to go out and thrive on her own without constant definition through an imagined, denigrated parent.

Page 232