The Politics of the Family and Other Essays

R. D. Laing

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351054065
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy
• Index: Psychology

Originally published in 1969, based on the talks R. D. Laing gave in 1967 and 68, this book was intended by the author to evoke questions rather than provide answers. Using concepts of schizophrenia, R.D. Laing demonstrates that we tend to invalidate the subjective and experiential and accept the proper societal view of what should occur within the family.

Part I
Essays

The Family and the ‘Family’¹

We speak of families as though we all knew what families are. We identify, as families, networks of people who live together over periods of time, who have ties of marriage and kinship to one another. The more one studies family dynamics, the more unclear one becomes as to the ways family dynamics compare and contrast with the dynamics of other groups not called families, let alone the ways families themselves differ. As with dynamics, so with structure (patterns, more stable and enduring than others): again, comparisons and generalizations must be very tentative.

The dynamics and structures found in those groups called families in our society may not be evident in those groups called families in other places and times. The relevance of the dynamics and structure of the family to the formation of personality is unlikely to be constant in different societies, or even in our own.

The family here discussed is the family of origin transformed by internalization, partitioning, and other operations, into the ‘family’² and mapped back onto the family and elsewhere. It is to the relation between the observable structures of the family and the structures that endure as part of the ‘family’ as a set of relations and operations between them that this chapter is addressed.

THE FAMILY AS FANTASY

The family as a system is internalized. Relations and operations between elements and sets of elements are internalized, not elements in isolation. Elements may be persons, things, or part-objects. Parents are internalized as close or apart, together or separate, near or distant, loving, fighting, etc., each other and self. Mother and father may be merged as a sort of fused parental matrix, or be broken down into segments that transect the usual personal partitions. Their sexual relation as envisaged by the child holds a sort of nuclear position in every internal ‘family’. Members of the family may feel more or less in or out of any part or whole of the family, according as they feel themselves to have the family inside themselves and to be inside the set of relations characterizing the internal family of other members of the family.

The family as internalized is a space–time system. What is internalized as ‘near’ or ‘far’, ‘together’ or ‘divorced’, are not only spatial relations, A temporal sequence is always present.

If I think of others as together with me, and yet others as not together with me, I have undertaken two acts of synthesis, resulting in we and them. The family is a common we, in contrast to them outside the family. But, in addition, there are the subgroups within the family, we, me, you, them, we parents, those children, we children, mother-and-child we, and father as him, and so on. When I identify myself as one of us, I expect you to do likewise. When there are three, you and he or she and me, each becomes one of us. In such a family we, each of us, recognize(s) not only his or her own family synthesis, but expects a comparable family synthesis to exist in you, him, or her also. My ‘family’ comprises his or hers, is his and mine, hers and mine. The ‘family’ is no simple social object, shared by its members. The ‘family’ to each of its members is no objective set of relations. It exists in each of the elements in it, and nowhere else.

As Sartre would say, the family is united by the reciprocal internalization by each (whose token of membership is precisely this interiorized¹ family) of each other’s internalization. The unity of the family is in the interior of each synthesis and each synthesis is bound by reciprocal interiority with each other’s internalization of each other’s interiorization…

Unification by co-inherence occurs in the Christian experience of being one ‘in’ Christ. Co-inherence pervaded the Nazi mystique of the Country and the Party. We feel ourselves to be One in so far as each of us has inside himself a presence common to all brothers and sisters in Christ, in the Party, or in the family.²

What function has ‘the family’ in terms of the relationship of members of the family?

The ‘family’, the family as a fantasy structure, entails a type of relationship between family members of a different order from the relationships of those who do not share that ‘family’ inside each other.

The ‘family’ is not an introjected object, but an introjected set of relations.

The ‘family’, as an internal system one is inside, may not be clearly differentiated from other such systems, to which one can give only such very inadequate names as ‘womb’, ‘breast’, ‘mother’s body’, and so forth. It may be felt to be alive, dying or dead, an animal, a machine, often a human protective or destructive container like the facehouse–bodies children draw. This is a set of elements with partitions the self is in, together with others who have it in them.

The family may be imagined as a web, a flower, a tomb, a prison, a castle. Self may be more aware of an image of the family than of the family itself, and map the images onto the family.

‘Family’ space and time is akin to mythic space and time, in that it tends to be ordered round a centre and runs on repeating cycles. Who, what, where, is the centre of the family?

According to one description:

‘My family was like a flower. Mother was the centre and we were the petals. When I broke away, mother felt that she had lost an arm. They (sibs) still meet round her like that. Father never really comes into the family in that sense.’

This family is represented by an image of an object, the function of which is to convey the experience of being part of a vegetative structure.

INTERNALIZATION

‘Internalization’ means to map ‘outer’ onto ‘inner’. It entails the transference of a group of relations constituting a set (with a number of operations within the set between elements of the set, products remaining in the set) from one modality of experience to others: namely from perception to imagination, memory, dreams.

We perceive something in our waking life; we remember it; then we forget it; we dream of something with different content but similar structure; we remember the dream but not the original perception. From this and other kinds of internalization, some patterns recur in our reveries, dreams, imagination, fantasy. Counter-patterns may be set up in imagination against those in fantasy. Scenarios of dramatic sequences of space–time relations between elements undergo transformation (e.g. towards wish-fulfilling or catastrophic outcomes) as they recur in the different modalities. We may try to act upon our wish- or fear-fulfilling imagination of which we become aware only by suffering the effects of such action.

Dostoevsky depicts Raskolnikov’s family in the interplay of his memories, dreams, unconscious fantasy, imagination, and in his actions in relation to actual others. While trying to be what he imagines, he enacts instead his fantasy pattern of his ‘family’, traceable through his dreams, memories, reveries, and physical experiences from which the ‘he’ that is doing things in this world is largely dissociated.¹

Thus many processes are subsumed under the one word ‘internalization.’ These all entail transition or modulation from one mode to another.

To summarize: what is internalized are not objects as such but patterns of relationship by internal operations upon which a person develops an incarnate group structure.

TRANSFORMATION AND EXTERNALIZATION (PROJECTION)

This internal group may condition, more or less, a person’s relationship to himself. Triadic relationships are collapsed into self-self relations. An adult feels like a child trying to reconcile two ‘sides’ of himself, pulling him in opposite directions, experienced perhaps as good or bad, as male or female, even physically, on right and left sides of the body: he tries to put ideas together, but an internal third party intervenes, and so on.

These internal self-self relations are as varied as actual family systems. Even when the ‘family’ does not become a major means of relating or not relating to one’s ‘self’, one is oneself changed to some extent through having such a group inside. Some seem so to depend on such group operations to structure their space and time that, without them, they feel they would not be able to keep themselves together.

A young man feels his life has come to a stop. He is preoccupied by the conflict between East and West, the cold war, the balance of terror, techniques of deterrence, one world, the impossibility of divorce, the need for coexistence, the apparent impossibility of coexistence. He has a mission to find a solution, but he feels hopeless, and paralysed. He does nothing, but feels crushed by his responsibility for the destruction he feels is inevitable.

The structural elements of his preoccupations – conflict, the cold war, emotional divorce, balance of terror, need for coexistence – resemble those in the relationship between his parents.

But he does not see these resemblances. He insists that his preoccupation with the world situation is not only entirely justified by objective facts but entirely based on them. The world situation is a fact and thousands of people come from families like his, therefore there is no connection.

A married woman dreams her husband makes flagrant love to a younger woman in front of her while she is terrified to show any jealousy. If she shows she is jealous she may be punished. She links this to her concern about a current affair of her husband. But she does not see any connections between an early weaning situation, seeing mother–father making love, mother (to whom she likens husband) and younger sister together, and a taboo in the family against any ‘bad’ feelings ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Haft Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Part I
• Part II The Politics of the Family
• Bibliography
• Index