Until the latter part of the 19th century, science did not dare look at the family. Witness the laws on child-beating. Society acted 100 odd years ago to prevent cruelty to animals – one had best not beat or mistreat them – but struggled to assure a similar protection for children.
There was a logical reason for this glaring oversight. The family and its individual integrity were sanctioned by religion and tradition. The home was, and is, in the final analysis, the last bastion of individuality – a mans home is his castle. This was certainly a necessary position to maintain against onslaughts of hostile forces through the ages. Obviously, such bulwarks impeded the influence of positive forces as well. As already mentioned, protection of children from their own parents and, perhaps depending on ones own individual conscience, the struggle for civil rights laws affecting individual residences are examples of such positive forces that have been impeded.
The individual family’s singular importance and the tremendous need for its idealization rest on the fact that every society is founded on family structure, and its very survival is dependent on the family being the carrier and transmitter of the culture.
The father-husband became stereotyped not according to the reality of the situation, but the fantasy of what was needed. Similarly, the mother-wife was invested with attributes of only loving goodness and care for her husband and children. Yet one need only look at the classic writings through the ages to glimpse, behind the façade, what was going on. The Greek tragedies clearly showed… what evil lurks in the hearts of men. Writers have always enjoyed a certain freedom in expressing what really goes on because people can dismiss the tale as being only fantasy. Only when an exposure threatened to topple the existing framework and security of the system has suppression been deemed essential. And so we have had, in graphic detail, in the enduring Greek tragedies, in Shakespeare, in Dostoevsky, and in others, a glimpse of other than sociologically idealized family interactions.
And, then, along came not a writer, or poet, or storyteller who could be easily dismissed or comfortably accepted as a contributor only to an already extensive body of human mythology, but a medical doctor – a doctor who, purely on the basis of clinical material presented by his patients, put in medical terms the truths known intuitively to the great writers. One could predict, on the basis of history alone, what sort of reception such direct, open, naked truth would have.
Sigmund Freud transgressed the rigid boundaries protecting the sanctity of the family and described the interactions within a family of one member with another and the influences of such interactions in the formation of an individuals personality. Can there be a so-called oedipal situation without a mother-father-child – in other words, without a family? Indeed, Freud introduced the descriptive term, The Family Romance, and pointed out that it is the individuals ability to liberate himself from the family and the authority of the parents that is decisive in his maturation. In this the neurotic fails, and his subsequent marriage and family are based on unconscious relations. The marriage neurosis and the neurotic family are constructed on the repetition without resolution of these conflicts.
Freud stated in 1905:
It follows from the nature of the facts which form the material of psychoanalysis that we are obliged to pay as much attention in our case histories to the purely human and social circumstances of our patients, as to the somatic data and the symptoms of the disorder. Above all, our interest will be directed toward their family circumstances.
But Freud and other early workers followed the common medical practice of dealing only with the person who presented himself as the identified patient, excluding other members of the family. After all, one does not put a cast on sister if it is Junior who has broken his leg.
With the accumulation of greater understanding of the individual patient, it became recognized that familial interactions could cause mental illness. Historically, however, in the development of the child guidance center approach, the family was, paradoxically, viewed as an extension of the child, instead of the child being viewed an extension of the family. Initially the focus was on the mother, and she felt greatly accused and little understood. Such terms as momism, bad mothering, the schizophrenogenic mother, and others even less complimentary developed. In a semi jocular sense, therapists were regarded as mother killers. It was not until a decade or so that Lidz and others studied the fathers of severely disturbed youngsters and found them to be far from roses in a weed patch. Indeed, the fathers were frequently disturbed and empathy began to develop for the wives of such men, the same wives who had been so maligned as bad mothers.
In August 1954, the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry, GAP, issued a report that focused on the family as a total organism. The most basic conclusion of that report was that, whereas a psychiatrist previously could not afford to consider the family, now he could not afford to neglect the family. The family is a living organism, possessing, in a real sense, a body, mind, and soul. It has a heart; it throbs with the pulse of life. It has, as does any individual, both depth and surface, an inner face and an outer façade.
We came full circle – back to the beginnings of psychoanalysis, to feelings, feeding, toilet training, sex and all the other shockers of Victorian morality, in short, back to the family, back to emphasizing, understanding, and, more importantly, doing something about the familial environment of an individual. Troubled children come from troubled families.
