Christopher Lasch
Haven in a Heartless World
(1977)

Christopher Lasch Haven in a Heartless World (1977)

[xv] Anyone who insists on the historical importance of human actions, and who sees history not as an abstract social "process" but as the product of concrete struggles for power, finds himself at odds with the main tradition of the social sciences, which affirms the contrary principle that society runs according to laws of its own. The claim to have discovered these laws is the overriding mystification of social science, which bears the same relation to later stages of the industrial revolution that the science of political economy bore to the earlier stages. In the eigthteenth and nineteenth centuries, the classical economists interpreted industrial capitalism but also provided it with an elaborate apology, which disguised the social relations peculiar to capitalism as universal principles of economics. Whereas these social relations represented the end product of a particular line of historical development in western Europe, political economy mistook them for natural laws, disguised exploitation as the natural order of things, and thus gave class rule an aura of inevitability. Both
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in capitalist practice and in the theory in which it was mirrored, the relations between men now assumed "the fantastic shape," as Marx put it, "of relations between things."

In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the expansion of the managerial function and the growth of bureaucracy brought into being a new branch of knowledge, social science, which attempted to explain the increasingly dense, opaque network of interpersonal relations so characteristic of advanced societies. Although the social sciences' attack on the commonplace illusion of individual autonomy represented an intellectual advance, their insistence that man is wholly the product of society vitiated this advance and led to new forms of confusion. According the social science,

the principle of "interdependence" governs all of modern society. Every part of society is connected to every other part; each part must be understood in relation to the others; the relations among men form a seamless web that defies "monocausal" explanations and sometimes seems to defy explanation of any kind. If political economy failed to see modern market relations as the outcome of a specific historical process...social science equally fails to see that "interdependence" merely reflects changing modes of class rule: the extension and solidification of capitalist control through the agency of management, bureaucracy and professionalization.

[xvii] Most of the writing on the modern family takes for granted the "isolation" of the nuclear family not only from the kinship system but from the world of work. It assumes that this isolation makes the family impervious to outside influences. In reality, the modern world intrudes at every point and obliterates its privacy. The sanctity of the home is a sham in a world dominated by giant corporations and by the apparatus of mass promotion. Bourgeois society has always held out the promise that private satisfactions will compensate for the reduction of work to a routine, but at the same time it undermines this compromise by organizing leisure itself as an industry. Increasingly the same forces that have impoverished work and civic life invade the private realm and its last stronghold, the family. The tension between the family and the economic and political order, which in an earlier stage of bourgeois society protected children and adolescents from the full impact of the market, gradually abates. The family, drained of the emotional intensity that formerly characterized domestic relations, socializes the young into the easygoing, low-keyed encounters that predominate in the outside world as well.

[23] Social science owed its very existence to the rise of new modes of social control. In former times, power surrounded itself with elaborate apologetics, philosophical defenses of the status quo. As religion gave way to law as the principle source of social cohesion, and law to social therapy, the governing classes no longer attempted to mediate their pretensions with appeals to legitimacy. They appealed only to the unmediated authority of the fact. They asked not that the citizen or worker submit to legitimate authority but that he submit to reality itself. Those who wielded power now discouraged inquiries into the principle of its origins. Hence the decay of philosophy and the rise of social science.

The new forms of control sought to ground themselves not in the superego—the internalized compulsion to obey—but in the ego's sense of reality. As religion and politics gave way to a new antireligion of mental health, authority identified itself not with what ought to be but with what is. Not the superego's harsh command but the "reality-testing" routintely conducted by the ego was to assure the individual that resistance had become, not unprincipled, but "unrealistic."

The science of society did not fully establish itself as the successor to philosophy and the humanities, in the American university, until the 1940s and 1950s. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, it had already formulated its overriding assumptions: that man is wholly the product of society and culture; that society consists of a network of interpersonal relationships; that social development creates more and more intricate patterns of interdependence; and that this interdependnce reveals itself above all in the division and subdivision of labor and the "differentiation" of social functions. In rejecting the idealist illusion that man is the autonomous creator of his own destiny, social science also rejected the truth precariously preserved within the idealist tradition of philosophy—that society represents the collective creation of human intelligence and will, and that for this very reason men retain the collective capacity to understand their own work and even to rise above its historical limitations. Men are both the products of society (more accurately, of the conflict between instinctual drives and the social pressures that seek to repress them) and the creators of society. Men's increasing alien-
[24]
ation from their own works, however, obscures the second of these conditions and creates the illusion that society obeys laws of its own and acts like an autonomous organism, totally independent of human will.

Men's increasing alienation from their own works

the illusion that society obeys laws of its own...totally independent of human will,

opaque,

defying "monocausal" explanations and sometimes seeming to defy explanation of any kind,

obeying laws of its own,

the collective capacity to understand our own work.

Social science intellectualized this popular illusion. Just as political economy described capitalism as the product not of historical development but of natural laws, social science described the surface of modern society without penetrating its inner, historical principles.

In modern society, relations among men appear to form a seamless web existing independent not only of human volition but of any recognizable principle of causality. In reality, this "interdependence" merely reflects changing modes of domination. Whereas the lord's domination of the serf was direct and unmediated...in modern society, where labor is "free," a complex network of civil institutions mediates the domination of one class by the other. Indeed, it was the emergence of a "civil society" as something distinct from the state, and the need to understand how it operates, that gave rise to modern social thought in the first place. As the rule of force gave way to the rule of law, social relations became increasingly mysterious and opaque. Political economy and later social science claimed to have unlocked the secret principle of modern society; but the sociological theory of the social order as an organism with a life of its own and as something more than the sum of its parts, in Durkheim's phrase, merely gave scientific standing to an illusion more insidious, in its way, than the commonsense perception of individual autonomy—a perception which, in any case, could not survive the substitution of abstract relations for face-to-face relations of dominance and submission.

[32] The positivist conception of society, it has rightly been said, tends to minimize the importance of conflict in human affairs. In the interpretation of Spencer's "moving equilibrium," the "stress in practice seems regularly to fall on the equilibrium and not on the movement." By giving so much weight to sympathy, positivist sociology correspondingly diminishes the importance of interest. By defining
[33]
the individual as almost entirely a product of socialization, it rules out in advance the possibility of irreconcilable conflicts between the individual and society. Finally, the proposition that mind is largely social has the interesting corollary that society is largely mental. Society consists of interpersonal relations, but "persons" are merely the ideas associated with their roles, conveyed to others and then reflected by others back to the self. Society is a mirror, and the "images" it projects, as an early exponent of role theory insisted, are the images "of the social suggestion that has surrounded" a given set of roles. Such a conception of society is completely at variance not only with materialist conceptions but with dialectical views of human growth and development, according to which growth results from conflict; but American sociology has modeled itself, for better or worse, on positivist rather than dialectical theories of society. Even Talcott Parsons, who rejected much of positivism, stressed the importance of sentiment and sympathy—of shared beliefs and the interplay of roles—in holding society together.

[60] Another group of studies attacked [Willard] Waller for relying on his own observations instead of on those of the participants. According to this line of argument, dating, like any other social arrangement, has to be seen as it appears to those directly concerned with it, not as it appears to an outsider. The participants themselves, it seems, do not see dating as Waller sees it. They do not see themselves, when asked, as engaged in a form of controlled competition, status-seeking, and exploitation. Instead, their answers to certain leading questions place "small emphasis on reasons which are . . . of the competitive-prestige type." It is not difficult to see that this type of reasoning can be used to refute almost any critical judgment on human actions. Only if the participants themselves agree that they are engaged in exploitation can the sociologist describe their actions as such! But in any case, Waller did make use of student informants, and the charge that he was indifferent to student perceptions of the rating and dating complex is absurd on its face. Some of the most scathing commentaries on the dating system came not from Waller but from his students. Here, as in his other work, Waller showed that he understood the value of carefully conducted interviews in probing beneath the bland surface of American sociability.
[61]
He had no confidence, however, in statistical surveys, believing that "intensive study of a few cases" usually proves more enlightening than "collecting facts about many,"

and that "no generalization can be so clearly buttressed by facts as one which is definitely supported by one or two well-understood cases." When Waller's critics accused him of ignoring student opinion, what they really found unforgivable was his refusal to submit the whole question of rating and dating to a majority vote.

In many ways, the most interesting feature of the literature on dating is what it says about the issue of free choice. In itself, Waller's attack on the illusion of individual choice was not acceptable to other sociologists. Sociology, after all, contains a built-in determinism; it hesitates to regard any social phenomenon as arbitrary. Most sociologists did not object to a search for the hidden determinants underlying the "choice" of marriage partners, but they never advanced beyond the most generalized and banal characterization of those determinants: racial, religious, and class endogamy; homogamy in general (similarity of habits and temperaments); and psychological determinants such as "the influence of parent-images on martial choice." The commonplace criticism of sociology—that it tells us in bad English things that we knew already—applies with particular force to the study of mate selection. Wallers' studies, on the other hand, laid bare the specific mechanisms through which abstract determinants like class, race, and ethnicity translate themselves into social action, in a system that has banished the direct intervention of parents. They showed that activities ostensibly undertaken for pure pleasure had been invaded by the same machinery of organized domination from which pleasure and "fun" were intended to provide relief.

[74] By centering her criticism of the American family on Momism and adolescence, Mead singled out familiar features of domestic life that were already passing from the scene. The mother's influence in the middle-class American family has increased only in relation to that of the father. The decline of paternal authority has weakened the influence of both parents and undermined the affective identification of the younger generation with the older. Recent evidence suggests that American children, far from becoming overly dependent on their mothers, form strong attachments to neither parent, acquiring instead, at an early stage in their lives, a cool, detached, and realistic outlook on the world.

Adolescence, formerly the tumultuous transition from childhood dependence to the responsibilities of adulthood, has become almost obsolete.

The growing importance of the peer group, which at first sight appears to reflect the growing importance of adolescence—the "prolongation of adolescence" in a society that requires more and more training for the most adult roles—actually coincides with the decline of adolescence. "Development has ceased to exist," wrote Max Horkheimer as early as 1941 [in "The End of Reason"]. "The child is grown up as soon as he can walk. During the heyday of the family the father represented the authority of society to the child, and puberty was the inevitable conflict between these two. Today, however, the child stands face to face with society at once, and the conflict is decided even before it
[75]
arises." As Mead herself noted two years later [And Keep Your Powder Dry], "the child's eyes are focused upon the outside world." He masters that world more easily than his parents and learns to survive by getting along with his peers. He rejects the family not as the intermediary through which social demands are transmitted out but, on the contrary, as an institution itself out of step with those demands. He throws off the older generation not because it upholds the reality principle but because it appears out-of-date, old-fashioned, ineffectual, superfluous. In Horkheimer's striking phrase, "The child, not the father, stands for reality."

Under these conditions, the traditional turmoil of adolescence subsides. Instead of withdrawing into himself or trying to overcome his loneliness through passionate friendships and love affairs, the adolescent now prefers the casual, easygoing sociability of his peers. Confronted from early childhood with demands for adaptability, flexibility, and "considered acquiescence in the demands of group living," the adolescent, historically the quintessential rebel, "abandons the task of defining himself in dialectical combat with society and becomes its captive and its emissary." [Friedenberg, The Vanishing Adolescent]

Margaret Mead's analysis of the American family belongs to the category of social criticism which attacks arrangements already on the wane, disguising as independent, somewhat cantakerous and unpopular judgments what in many ways amounts to an apology for the emerging order. Such criticism boldly defends views that have already become acceptable to everyone except the most hardened reactionaries. Mead's attack on jealousy and passion gave support to one of the strongest currents in modern society. Her plea for sexual realism—for what has recently been referred to as "cool sex"—represented not so much a demand for change as the description of a change in attitudes that had already come into being. As for her indictment of Momism and of the excessive influence of parents, the collapse of parental influence has rendered such "criticism" innocuous—indeed, has created a considerable demand for it in a country where defense of an emerging status quo usually takes the form of urgent calls for sweeping reform.

[90] Reich, Fromm, and the Frankfurt school analyzed the authori-
[91]
tarian family at the moment of its demise. They showed how the family instills the "capacity for suffering"—for experiencing injustice as religious guilt—at the historical moment when guilt, as a means of social control, became obsolete. Once again, Minerva's owl flew out at dusk.

[115] The Parsonians, with considerable ingenuity, thus devised a logical proof of the universality of the nuclear family. Their work appeared to give scientific support to the "cult of domesticity" in the fifties; and it is on these grounds that their work has been recently attacked by those pseudo-radicals who confuse the individual's emancipation from the family with social and cultural progress. As usual, spokesmen for the "cultural revolution" challenge forms of authority, such as the "patriarchal family," which already lie in ruins. This keeps them from understanding the real significance of the Parsonian theory of the family: that it upholds the family's indispens-
[116]
ability while at the same time providing a rationale for the continued invasion of the family by experts in the art of social and psychic healing.

On the one hand, Parsons argued that "isolation" of the nuclear family from other kinship units, together with the loss of many of its functions, enables it to serve more effectively as an agency of "pattern-maintenance" and "tension-management." Specialization of functions always increases efficiency, according to Parsons. The "transfer of functions," or in Parsonian terminology the process of structural and functional differentiation, relieves the family of its educative, economic, and protective functions in order that it may specialize in child rearing and emotional solace. The conjugal family becomes a haven of intense feeling in a world where competition rules other relations. In Parsons's terms, the family stands preeminently as the institution in which relations are determined by "ascription" rather than by achievement. The child receives love and admiration simply because he is the child of particular parents; elsewhere, he has to earn respect and affection by means of his objective achievements. To state the point less abstractly, the occupational system demands patterns of behavior that "run counter to many of the most deep-seated of human needs," such as loyalty, love ("sentimental attachment to persons as such"), and security. These needs can be satisfied only by the family.

Having provided the usual sociological justification of the family's importance, Parsons undercut it with another line of argument about the rationalization of human relations and the "professionalization" of parenthood. In the book on the family that he wrote with Bales, Slater, and Zelditch, Parsons referred to "the enormous vogue of treating 'human' problems from the point of view of mental health and in various respects of psychology." In American society, he noted, "technological-organizational developments closely related to science have taken over on a very wide front." It is "the American method" to solve problems "by calling in scientifically expert aid."

In industry we take this for granted. In human relations it is just coming to the fore. The immense vogue of psychiatry, of clinical psychology and such phenomena are, we suggest, an index of the importance of strain in the area of personality and the human relations in which persons are

[117]

placed. In the nature of our society much of this strain relates to family and marriage relations.

In plain English, psychiatrists and other experts in human relations have begun to apply to the family techniques already perfected in industrial management. The isolation of the nuclear family intensifies the emotional climate of the family and creates "strains" that only experts know how to ease. Because parents depend more and more heavily on expert advice, the care of children has become a profession, especially for women, who take chief responsibility for it. The "professionalization of the mother role" implicates women "in the attempt to rationalize these areas of human relations." Women represent the principal constituency to which the psychiatric profession offers advice and spiritual consolation; and "women do not act only in the role of patient to the psychiatrist, but often the psychiatrist is also a woman.

We see now more clearly why the Parsonians drew so heavily on small-group theory when they turned to the study of the family. Not only did it imply a functional explanation of the sexual division of labor and a method by which psychoanalytic concepts could be operationalized, in the jargon of the social sciences; it also showed how experts could rationalize the management of domestic relations along industrial lines. The first studies of small groups had the practical objective of organizing personnel management on a scientific basis. When they took industrial sociology as the model for study of the family, the Parsonians attempted, in effect, to bring sociological theory into line with the historical development which had extended managerial control from the factory into every other area of the worker's life. Scientific study of the family thus ratified the social process which simultaneously brought the family and other forms of life under public, scientific control.

[121] In his long discussion of the "transition from oral to love-dependency," Parsons takes note of Freud's well-known argument that feces, penis, and baby are closely linked in the child's conscious thoughts. Then he proceeds to distort the argument out of all resemblance to the original. He misrepresents the symbolism by which feces, penis, and baby are equated, in a way that allows him to maintain that in the phallic phase, as in the pre-Oedipal phase generally, the child "internalizes" the mother's role rather than the father's. "The famous symbolic equation of 'feces-child' seems very plausible," Parsons says, "in view of the reciprocity of the role pattern between mother and child. Just as mother gives birth to child, so the child also 'gives birth' to an object, he hereby in some sense is able to identify himself with his mother, symbolically to take her role." The suspicion the we are reading a heavily censored version of Freud's thought deepens when we note that Parsons has neglected to mention the third component, the third "member" in Freud's equation. But only the equation of feces with a penis as well as a baby makes the equation intelligible: it is not that the child wishes to
[122]
imitate the mother in "giving birth to an object," but that he wishes to present the mother with a baby—her own baby—through the instrumentality of his penis, associated in turn with feces because both are associated with gifts presented by the child to his parents. According to Freud's interpretation of the symbolism in question, it is not the mother's role the child plans to "assume"—usurp—but the father's.

Parsons's bowdlerization of this material, which is so crucial to an understanding of the psychoanalytic theory of sex, not only renders sex passive but identifies it exclusively with the "expressive" role—not, as in Freud, with the child's need to master his environment. These distortions in turn lead to the conclusion, elaborated in Parsons's later work, that parents serve their offspring best when they provide each child with an undemanding emotional security in his early years and then give him a high degree of independence: the personal freedom, designed to ease the child's break with the family, that strikes many foreigners as an "incredible leeway." Parents serve their children best, in other words, when they seek consciously to diminish the emotional intensity of family life.

Repeatedly in his writings on socialization, Parsons struggles to explain why the child's emotional involvement with his parents does not incapacitate him for the harsh realities of adult life, for a career of "achievement." Having rejected the psychoanalytic explanation—that sexuality itself is closely bound up with the urge to master the world, and that repression or sublimation of sexuality forces this urge for mastery to seek objects beyond the family—Parsons finds it impossible to explain why the family, which keeps the child in a state of prolonged dependency, simultaneously fosters an "achievement orientation." The main features of his analysis—an analysis which stresses the professionalization of parenthood,

refers to the father as "chairman of the board" and the mother as "personnel manager," repeatedly warns of the danger that the child may "seduce" his mother, and returns again and again to the importance of parental solidarity in the face of the child's emotional demands—all seem to suggest, though Parsons himself does not draw this conclusion, that most problems of family life could be easily avoided by substituting professional experts for parents. The "rationalization" of child rearing in the home, which greatly diminishes the intensity of the
[123]
parent-child relationship, already represents an important step in this direction. On the strength of Parsons's own reasoning, the rise of the "helping professions" has already made most of the traditional functions of parenthood obsolete; all that remains is to "transfer" the remaining functions to those best qualified to carry them out.

By renouncing Freud's "biological determinism," Parsons deprived himself of the best argument for the indispensability of the family: that children grow up best under the very conditions of "intense emotional involvement" which Parsons thought it wise to avoid in therapy, and, by implication, in the family itself. Without struggling with the ambivalent emotions aroused by the union of love and discipline in his parents, the child never masters his inner rage or his fear of authority. It is for this reason that children need parents, not professional nurses and counselors.

The confusion of parents dependent on professional theories of child rearing, their reluctance to exercise authority or to assume responsibility for the child's development, and the delegation of discipline to various outside agencies, have already diluted the quality of child care, but Parsons's censorship of psychoanalysis makes it impossible to understand the most important element in this process—the weakening of the psychic mechanism whereby the young internalize their parents. The father's withdrawal into the world of work has not only deprived his sons of a "role model"; it has also deprived them of a superego, or to speak more precisely, it has transformed the contents of the superego so that archaic, instinctual, death-seeking elements increasingly predominate. In societies where the family still serves as a center of production or at least hands down useful knowledge to its offspring, sons learn from their fathers more than techniques and "roles." The deeper psychological significance of paternal training lies in its capacity to temper the child's fantasies with practical experience, softening the early impression of an omnipotent, wrathful, and punitive father. If the son is to overcome his jealous hatred of the father, the terrifying figure of the father has to be reduced by daily contact, in the course of which the father establishes himself in his son's affections by his mastery of the skills and techniques the son also needs to master. The modern father finds it difficult to provide this information. Such skills as he
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possesses become technologically obsolete in his own lifetime, and there would be little point in transmitting them to his children even if he had a chance to do so.

The weakening of paternal care makes it easier than it used to be for sons to break away from their fathers, but precisely because it has eliminated overt conflict between fathers and sons, it has made it more difficult than ever for the child to become an autonomous adult. Such autonomy as we manage to attain, according to Freud, comes after terrific struggles to overcome inferiority and dependence, and lapses into infantilism remain an ever-present possibility. Autonomy, in the Freudian view, rests on intense emotional identification with parents, not on literal imitation of them, as Parsonian sociology would have it. The essence of the Oedipus complex and its resolution is that the son transforms the wish to get rid of the father into the wish to succeed him. Without by any means overcoming his original longing for the mother and hatred of the father, he tranfers the maternal longing to another woman, while redirecting many of his aggressive impulses against himself—against his own failure to live up to his father's example and standards. The decline of the father's participation in family life makes this identification difficult or impossible. The child no longer wishes to succeed the father. Instead, he wishes merely to enjoy life without his interference—without the interference of any authorities at all.

[129] As for the argument that a heightened dependence in childhood furnishes the basis of increased autonomy in adulthood, it does not explain why personal autonomy seems more difficult than ever to achieve or sustain. Nor does it explain why so many signs of cultural and psychological regression should appear just at the historical moment when, according to Parsons, the family has emerged from a period of "crisis" and has "now begun at least to be stabilized." It is precisely the instability of the family that strikes us wherever we turn. Youth culture itself has made the family a prime target—not just something to "rebel" against but a corrupt and decadent institution to be overthrown. That the new youth culture represents more than adolescent rebellion is suggested by the way its attack on the family reverberates, appealing to a great variety of other groups—
[130]
feminists, advocates of the rights of homosexuals, cultural and political reformers of all kinds. Hostility to the family has survived the demise of the political radicalism of the sixties and flourishes amid the conservatism of the seventies. Even the pillars of society show no great inclination to defend the family, historically regarded as the basis of their whole way of life. Meanwhile, the divorce rate continues to rise, young people avoid or at least postpone marriage, and social life organizes itself around "swinging singles." None of these developments bears out the thesis that "loss of functions" made the family stronger than ever by allowing it to specialize in the work it does best. On the contrary, no other institution seems to work so badly, to judge from the volume of abuse directed against it and the growing wish to experiment with other forms.

When a theory is open to so many empirical objections, we begin to suspect that there is something wrong with the theory itself. Parsons's theory of the family rests on an unwarranted assumption which he took from his immediate predecessors and never subjected to critical analysis: that some of the family's functions can be surrendered without weakening the others. In fact, the so-called functions of the family form an integrated system. It is inaccurate to speak of a variety of functions, some of which decline while others take on added importance. The only function of the family that matters is socialization; and when protection, work, and instruction in work have all been removed from the home, the child no longer identifies with his parents or internalizes their authority in the same way as before, if indeed he internalizes their authority at all.

[135] The news media—biased, as always, not in favor of any particular program or point of view but simply in favor of novelty—gave as much publicity to feminism, cultural radicalism, and denigration of the family as they had once given to "togetherness," the slogan put forward by McCall's in 1954 to evoke and apologize for the retreat to familial pleasures.

[137] According to theorists of "future shock," the family can no longer transmit values in an age of accelerated change, impermanence, mobility, and expanding options ("overchoice"). If industrialism demanded that the family be stripped down from its extended to its nuclear form, then superindustrialism, as Toffler calls it, requires a further "streamlining"—a reduction of the family to marriage. Parenthood, too important to be left to amateurs and dilettantes, will be professionalized by assigning children to special clinics or, if that seems too cold and impersonal, to couples specially trained and certified for parenthood (a solution advanced by Margaret Mead), or even

to communes or other kinds of extended families.

The rest of the population, freed from the burdens of child rearing, will find spiritual enrichment in the intensive exploration of one-to-one relationships.

[140] As long as authority was internalized in the form of conscience, people either complied with it because it appeared reasonable or resisted in the name of a higher authority. Today, however, authority appears as something altogether alien, sometimes contemptible, sometimes truly terrible, more often merely as an inconvenience, in the person of a nagging mother, teacher, or employer. It is not so mich arbitrary force—the traditional enemy of bourgeois liberalism—that arouses resistance today as the attempt to hold someone up to a given set of standards. The narcissist resents being judged more than he fears being punished. He submits to punishment even when he rejects its rightness, as an arbitrary exercise of superior force in an arbitrary world, but he does not like to be asked to live up to expectations. This is why the ideology of nonbinding commitments and open-ended relationships—an ideology that registers so faithfully the psychic needs of the late twentieth century—condemns all expectations, standards, and codes of conduct as "unrealistic." It condemns the attempt to live up to expectations on the grounds that "role-playing" subverts psychic stability and health. The therapeutic community insists that only equals can enter into
[141]
satisfactory interpersonal relations ("peer-bonding"); but equality in this connection means simply an absence of demands. Equals are "peers" not by virtue of common attainments but by generational default (hence the prominence of the generational theme in modern sociology, radical politics, advertising, propaganda, and promotion). Equals ask nothing, understand everything, forgive everything. The idealized comradeship of siblings, united not by undying passion or even mutual respect but merely by a common resentment of adult authority, becomes the model of the perfect marriage, the perfect affair, the perfect "one-to-one relationship," or for that matter the commune or extended family—the distinctions have become increasingly immaterial.

[149] revisionist sociology has finally got rid of the "oversocialized concept of man," according to Mrs. [Arlene] Skolnick ["The Family Revisited" (1975) (??)]. The accusation that Parsonian sociology adhered to such a concept, unlike her other accusations, is fair enough; indeed, the "oversocialized concept of man" runs through almost all modern sociology. But why is it objectionable? Because it minimizes the human potential for creativity and "innovation," or because, on the contrary, it obscures the ever-present danger of a return of the repressed? What should have been the occasion for reasserting one of the most important psychoanalytic insights—the fragility of any form of socialization in the face of the determinism of unconscious mental life—becomes in the hands of "radical" sociologists an occasion for celebrating the new awareness of "mind, consciousness, and thought." The Freudian theory of socialization, according to Mrs. Skolnick, leaves "no room for autonomy, innovation, legitimate dissent, or even the exercise of competence." Fortunately, the work of
[150]
Piaget and Chomsky has "granted the individual some autonomy from the determining grasp of family and society." These and other writers have shown that the child learns to walk and talk "without explicit adult instruction" and that socialization, moreover, does not necessarily make the child a conformist. In this way they challenge "traditional over-pessimism.

Mrs. Skolnick's language betrays the impulse behind revisionist sociology: to refute pessimism and the "grant" individuals the autonomy that social conditions make it increasingly difficult for them to achieve. In this respect, recent sociology harks back to the culture and personality theorists, much of whose work grew out of the same need to confer autonomy on the individual, to abrogate the conflict between nature and culture, to repudiate Freudian determinism, and to make room for human "creativity." Like their predecessors, the new critics of Freud, claiming to have revised him, have regressed to a prepsychoanalytic view of human nature, one that tries to restore the illusion of psychic freedom and choice.

the historical importance of human actions

against

the overriding mystification of social science

per which

man is wholly the product of society

[155] Sociocultural studies of schizophrenia share another kind of insight with The Authoritarian Personality: that the illusion of intimacy, not a cloying "togetherness" brought about by the "privatization" of domestic life, is the family pattern that gives rise to pathological results. In Bateson's theory, it is the mother's fabricated warmth—not the overly solicitous attention conventionally de-
[156]
plored in the myth of the "Jewish mother"—that drives her son crazy. Lyman Wynne has shown that pseudo-mutuality, not mutuality itself, underlies the dynamics of schizophrenic families—a desperate effort to hold things together by a show of solidarity. In The Authoritarian Personality, Adorno and his collaborators found that although many of their subjects made conventional protestations of family feeling, coldness and stifled rage governed their domestic relations. All these studies, then, suggest that domestic ties have frayed to the breaking point. All of them implicitly undermine the conventional glorification of the family as a "therapeutic community," an institution specializing in affection and companionship, a haven in a heartless world; but they also undermine the equally conventional criticism of the family as an institution flawed by its members' retreat into "privatism.

In order to make full use of these discoveries, we need to disregard some of the preoccupations with which they have hitherto been accompanied: the preoccupation with authoritarianism, the insistence on the nuclear family's "isolation," the attempt to substitute role theory and communication theory for analysis of unconscious mental life. The narcissist, not the authoritarian, is the prevalent personality type. Not the family's isolation but its inability to protect its members from external dangers has eroded domestic ties.

[169] Bourgeois domesticity did not simply evolve. It was imposed on society by the forces of organized virtue, led by feminists, temperance advocates, educational reformers, liberal ministers, penologists, doctors, and bureaucrats.

[170] The therapeutic conception of insanity, disease, and crime repudiated theological assumptions of their inevitability and relieved the patient of responsibility for his actions, insisting that he was neither possessed nor willfully sinning, but sick. The new conception of the family as an asylum similarly repudiated fatalism and the assumption of original sin, insisting on the child's innocence and plasticity. The medical profession saw itself as the successor to the church, just as theorists of bourgeois domesticity for a long time upheld marriage as the successor to monasticism. Whereas the church, in attempting to stamp out sex, had merely made it an obsession, these theorists maintained, marriage put sex at the service of procreation and encouraged a healthy acceptance of the body. This affirmation of the physical side of life had demonstrably better effects on the health of the individual and the community, according to bourgeois moralists, than the church's denial of the body.

***feminization of society***
From the beginning, a medical view of reality thus underlay attempts to remodel private life. The struggle between the new remissions and the old proscriptions, between personal fulfillment and
[171]
self-sacrifice, between the ideology of work and the ideology of creative leisure, began in the nineteenth century. Liberal clergymen themselves participated in the campaign to transform religion into moral and mental hygiene. They allied themselves with a nascent feminism and with the campaign to feminize society by extending the domesticating influence of women to institutions beyond the home. The religion of health had a special appeal to women because of its concern with personal relations, its attempt to substitute domestic enjoyments for the rough and brutal camaraderie of males, and its glorification of the child and of maternal influence on the child's development. The conflict between the work ethic and the therapeutic point of view, which became sharper as the century wore on, also presented itself as a conflict between masculine and feminine "spheres"—the split between business and "culture," the practical and the aesthetic,

so characteristic of bourgeois society and of American society in particular. As late as the 1950s, John R. Seeley and his associates found the same division in the suburbs of Toronto, where women joined with mental health experts in combating the competitive, work-oriented values of their husbands. Middle-class Canadian men valued material objects and their production, while their wives concerned themselves with the management of personal relations. Men valued achievement; women, happiness and well-being.

[174] Relations within the family have come to resemble relations in the rest of society. Parents refrain from arbitrarily imposing their wishes on the child, thereby making it clear that authority deserves to be regarded as valid only insofar as it conforms to reason. Yet in the family as elsewhere, "universalistic" standards prove on examination to be illusory. In American society, most rules exist only to be broken, in the words of a popular axiom. Custom has reestablished itself as in many ways the superior of reason. The administration of justice gives way, in a therapeutic society, to a complicated process of negotiation. Just as prices in the neocapitalist economy, allegedly determined by the impersonal laws of supply and demand, are really fixed by negotiations among corporations, unions, and government (with the corporations taking the leading role), so justice is fixed by means of similar bargains among interested parties. In learning to live by the law, therefore, the child actually learns how to get around the law, in the first place by getting around his parents.

***competitiveness***
[182] The students recently interviewed by Herbert Hendin, both those suffering from severe psychic disturbances and those whom psychiatry would consider healthy and normal, all seek to repress their aggressive impulses for fear that those impulses, once unleashed, will destroy everything in sight. These young people can "conceive of no competition that [does] not result in someone's annihilation." The flight from competition in all areas of life, so striking a feature of the youth culture of the sixties and seventies and so often justified in the name of principle, originates in a murderous rage.

[185] In a study of the American high school, Edgar Z. Friedenberg found that high school students regard social control as "a technical problem, to be referred to the right expert for solution." In response to a series of hypothetical problems in social control, Friedenberg's subjects rejected both libertarian and openly authoritaran solutions, justifying their preference for social engineering on pragmatic rather than moral grounds. Thus if a teacher finds an unruly student smoking in the washroom, he should neither "beat him coolly and with emotional restraint" or publicly humiliate him, on the one hand, nor ignore the offense, on the other hand, as a minor infraction that should not add to the student's reputation as a troublemaker. Having rejected authoritarian solutions for reasons that were "cautiously bureaucratic rather than indignantly humane," the students voted overwhelmingly that the offender should be sent to the school psychiatrist. Beating him would make him more unmanageable than ever, whereas the psychiatric solution, in effect, would enlist his own cooperation in the school's attempt to control him.

...

[187] Friedenberg's students "believe that enforcement of regulations, rather than any internal stability or homeostasis, is what keeps society from breaking down into disorder." They regard law not as a body of authoritative commandments but as "an indispensible technique for controlling behavior." This distinction goes to the root of the contemporary situation; it explains the growing devotion to "law and order" in a permissive society. The demand for law and order, which at first sight appears to attempt a restoration of moral standards, actually acknowledges and acquiesces in their collapse. Law enforcement comes to be seen as the only effective deterrent in a society that no longer knows the difference between right and wrong. The campaign to empty law of moral content—to banish the ideas of right and wrong and to replace them with an ethic of human relations—has had an unintended consequence. Divorced from the concept of justice, the law becomes nothing more than an instrument by means of which authorities enforce obedience. In former times, men regarded law as the moral consensus of the community—a means of "setting up categories," in Friedenberg's words, "under which society could subsume and isolate those whom it defined as miscreant." Today they see law merely as a means for controlling behavior. "Neglect law enforcement and the social structure decays.

The prevalence of this view does not mean, however, that subjects and citizens regard authorities as "essentially benign" or hesistate "to discuss the possibility," in Friedenberg's words, "that a social institution . . . might be hostile or destructive in its purpose." On the contrary, official protestations of benevolence elicit contempt or cynical indifference. "Apathy," widely deplored by political scientists and other observers of the political scene, greets all public statements in a society saturated with public lies. The official pretense that officials only want to "help" is rightly regarded as the biggest lie of all. People submit to the rules of social life, then, because submission usually represents the line of least resistance, not because they believe in the justice of the rules or the good intentions of those who promulgate them. The public takes it for granted that power corrupts those who wield it, but it regards this fact not with indignation but with a resigned sense of its inevitability. Dis-
[188]
belief in official pretensions, which formerly might have aroused resistance to the state, becomes another form of obedience, another acknowledgement of the way things are. Men submit not to authority but to reality.

If submission rests not on loyalty to a moral consensus but simply on a belief in the need for law enforcement, it rests on a shaky foundation. Men break the rules whenever the opportunity presents itself, not only because infractions of the rules so often go undetected, but also because authorities themselves conspire with offenders to overlook such violations. The contmept for authority, which leads to rising rates of crime and to the "legitimation of the ripoff," originates in part in the ease with which authorities can be corrupted. Yet the corruptibility of authority serves in a curious way to strengthen the hand of those who wield power. The official who winks at an offense puts the offender in his debt. Moreover, he exposes the offender to blackmail. He keeps people in line precisely by overlooking their transgressions, a technique of control that closely resembles the "flattery of the lie," by means of which industrial supervisors assert power over subordinates by tolerating falsehood and inefficiency. Lawbreaking contributes to law enforcement. The complicity between the criminal and the crime fighter, the subordinate and the superior, the violators of rules and the enforcers of rules, contributes to the maintenance of order by keeping troublemakers in a state of chronic uneasiness.