The Psychosocial Interior of the Family

Gerald Handel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351328463
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Drawing upon findings from many disciplines including sociology, communication, family studies, human development, psychology and anthropology-this book provides the first composite study of the whole family and of the complex interplay between self and collectivity in family life. It departs sharply from the traditional two-person, cause-effect models used in conventional studies, and attempts to delineate a social psychology of the family.

This book undertakes to define and understand the nature of families, to point out ways of discerning different family characters, and to comprehend the processes by which these characters are established and maintained; by so doing, it introduces a new dimension into the study of family behavior and provides a framework within which meaningful investigations and practical applications can be pursued.

This long-awaited fourth edition continues the goal of preceding editions: to understand families in terms of the kinds of interaction through which family life is constructed. Contributors drawn from a wide variety of disciplines sociology; communication; family studies; human development; psychology; anthropology; and social work - provide a range of authoritative and up-to-date sources on the family and interpersonal relations, including newly emergent forms of family organization. In providing a new framework for fruitful investigation and practical application, this volume contains the best available interdisciplinary work on the social psychology of the family.

I

Orientation: Constructing Meaning

Introduction

The selections in part I provide orientation to the volume because they lay out the book’s fundamental premise: that a family creates and maintains itself through its interaction. That is, through social interaction both inside and outside the family, family members define their relationships to one another, and to the world beyond the family, as they establish individual identities as well as a collective family identity.

This theoretical worldview has its origins in the argument advanced by psychologist William James in the late 19th century that humans act not only upon information they encounter, but also upon the social reality they construct (James, 1890), a position that influenced the early 20th-century Chicago school of symbolic interaction. That is, human systems do not act on any “objective” reality, but behave according to their collective definitional process, or meaning that something has for them (Whitchurch & Constantine, 1993).

Ernest Burgess was the first to define the family from this perspective. As he observed in his 1926 essay on the family as “a unity of interacting personalities”:

Nine years ago [i.e., in 1917] I gave for the first time a course on the family. There was even then an enormous literature in this field. But among all the volumes upon the family—ethnological, historical, psychological, ethical, social, economic, statistical, radically realist, or radically idealist—there was to be found not a single work that even pretended to study the modern family as behavior or as a social phenomenon. It has been studied as a legal institution but it had not been studied as a subject of natural science, (p. 3; punctuation modified slightly)

Burgess’s definition of the family was to become, and remain, highly influential in many disciplines concerned with studying families, but it was not until a quarter-century later that his definition was tested empirically. As described in the editors’ introduction to the present volume, the research team of Gerald Handel and Robert Hess conceptualized the family as a unit, a system formed by its members—not merely the aggregation of its component dyadic relationships. The opening chapter to their resultant book, Family Worlds, is placed first in Part I of the present volume to provide orientation to the parts that follow. The authors of the second selection in Part I, Peter Berger and Hansfried Kellner, have for three decades been the foremost proponents of the position that the primary process of marriage is to negotiate symbolically a reality shared by both spouses. Berger and Kellner focus on the processes through which reality is constructed in marriage, building the argument that marriage serves to protect individual spouses from anomie¹ through a nomos-building process. To be sure, they are referring to the two-parent, paternal-wage-earner marriages of the period following World War II, a position taken in the third essay in Part I, Norbert Wiley’s essay about how marriage is constructed in contemporary times. Even so, one possible interpretation of Berger and Kellner’s argument is that their reasoning also applies to other kinds of committed couples, such as cohabiting couples and same-sex couples, who are successful in negotiating a shared worldview.

Note

1. The term anomie was used by Emile Durkheim in his 1897 classic Suicide to refer to a sense of “normlessness,” or lack of social standards. Noting that suicide rates rose during times of social upheaval and change, Durkheim hypothesized that feelings of anomie in the population led to confusion, anxiety, and eventually self-destructive behavior in the form of suicide. Thus, Berger and Kellner are suggesting that marriage and the couple’s shared social construction of reality builds nomos—social order—which is the opposite of anomie.

References

Burgess, E. W. (1926). The family as a unity of interacting personalities. Family, 7, 3–9.

Durkheim, E. ([1897] 1951). Suicide: A Study in Sociology, translated by John A. Spaulding and George Simpson. New York: Free Press.

James, W. (1890). Principles of psychology. New York: Dover.

Whitchurch, G. G., & Constantine, L. L. (1993). Systems theory. In P. Boss, W. Doherty, R. LaRossa, W. Schumm, and S. Steinmetz (Eds.), Sourcebook of family theories and methods: A contextual approach (pp. 325–352). New York: Plenum.

1

The Family as a Psychosocial Organization

ROBERT D. HESS and GERALD HANDEL

However its life spreads into the wider community, there is a sense in which a family is a bounded universe. The members of a family—parents and their young children—inhabit a world of their own making, a community of feeling and fantasy, action and precept. Even before their infant’s birth, the expectant couple make plans for his family membership, and they prepare not only a bassinet but a prospect of what he will be to them. He brings his own surprises, but in time there is acquaintance, then familiarity, as daily the family members compose their interconnection through the touch and tone by which they learn to know one another. Each one comes to have a private transcript of their common life, recorded through his own emotions and individual experiences.

From Family Worlds by Robert D. Hess and Gerald Handel. Copyright © 1959, 1974 by The University of Chicago, pp. 1-19. Reprinted by permission of The University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved.

In their mutual interaction, the family members develop more or less adequate understanding of one another, collaborating in the effort to establish consensus and to negotiate uncertainty. The family’s life together is an endless process of movement in and around consensual understanding, from attachment to conflict to withdrawal—and over again. Separateness and connectedness are the underlying conditions of a family’s life, and its common task is to give form to both.

[Family Worlds] describes how five families have each, in distinctive ways, dealt with this and other tasks. The way in which a family is a unit and the ways it provides for being a separate person are, in one sense, what every family’s life is about. The psychosocial portraits which we have sketched are intended to convey something of the particularity of American family worlds. These are American families, but the wider culture was not our primary interest. Rather, we tried first to find the family’s boundaries, then to explore its psychosocial dimensions. When we looked at the culture, it was in order to take the point of view of a family looking out at it. The reader will recognize in these analytic sketches versions of middle and lower class cultural themes; again, our aim has been to illustrate what this feels like to actual individuals who shape a life in an intimate group. The case study is the method of choice for this purpose, and its aim is to amplify the richness of perception of American family life.

Depiction is not our sole aim, however. We are concerned with developing a framework for understanding the nuclear family as a group. Within the family, events occur in far from random fashion; even uncertainty is given a customary place in a family’s scheme of things. While illustrating distinctness, we work toward a systematic view of the family as a psychosocial organization. How may one describe a family, taking account of all its members? The multiplicity of household events takes place in a round robin of interaction which is a shapeless swirl only to the casual observer. There are nodes of connection, points at which feeling is concentrated and significance declared. There are tracks to which the interaction returns again and again. A family has discernible pattern and form.

We set ourselves the task of searching out the elements that give shape to a family’s life. In so doing, we examined the personalities of the individual members, the relationships between pairs and in triangles, and the integration of these individual psychodynamic features and multiple relationships in the psychosocial structure of the group. We tried to comprehend in one view the supporting convergences and the intrinsic disruptions of a family, seen as a set of individual personalities, a system of interpersonal relations, and a local culture.

It is imperative to relate the nature of individuality to the form of the particular family group in which it occurs and to examine the participation of family psychological modes of interaction in the personalities of individual members. As a guiding principle we are proposing that the intrapsychic organization of each member is part of the psychosocial structure of his family; the structure of a family includes the intrapsychic organization of its individual members. For example, if separateness and connectedness constitute one of the most fundamental problems which a family must solve, then it is necessary first to adopt a standpoint from which one can see both tendencies as parts of the same solution and second to view this solution both as an extension of individual needs into the group interaction and as a significant determinant of individual personality.

An understanding of the relationship between individual dynamics and family interactional matrix may be furthered by a second principle: in his relationship in the family an individual member strives toward predictability of preferred experience, attempting to discover or create circumstances which fit his image of what the world around him should be—how it should respond to him and provide opportunity for expression of his own preferences. This principle indicates how one might examine the fashion in which individual uniqueness is transformed into family uniqueness as a result of his own and others’ experience. It attends also to the impact upon the individual member of his success, or lack of it, in obtaining the emotional atmosphere he desires. Neither the ties that bind the members to one another nor the barriers that separate them are adequately indicated by overt social behavior alone. Connection to others is outward and inward in infinite variety. In the study of ordinary people, as in this book, the inner connections and the inner enclaves must command attention no less than the external encounters and the occasions for social privacy. Taking for granted, then, that the members of a nuclear family have personalities of their own, that each has a psychobiological individuality, and that each is guided by cultural role expectations, how shall we understand how they fashion a life together?

It is the purpose of this introductory chapter [to Family Worlds] to indicate some concepts which are useful in understanding and describing in non-pathological terms the complexities of ordinary family interaction. The major processes described here give shape to the flux of family life, coherence to the extended array of events, perceptions, emotions, actions, learnings, and changes which the members experience or undertake. The essential processes discussed below are these:

1. Establishing a pattern of separateness and connectedness.
2. Establishing a satisfactory congruence of images through the exchange of suitable testimony.
3. Evolving modes of interaction into central family concerns or themes.
4. Establishing the boundaries of the family’s world of experience.
5. Dealing with significant biosocial issues of family life, as in the family’s disposition to evolve definitions of male and female and of older and younger.

The Effort to Achieve a Satisfactory Pattern of Separateness and Connectedness

Two conditions characterize the nuclear family. Its members are connected to one another, and they are also separate from one another. Every family gives shape to these conditions in its own way. Its life may show greater emphasis on the one or the other; yet both are constitutive of family life. The infant is born from the womb into the limits of his own skin, with individual properties of sensitivity and activity. He possesses an irreducible psychobiological individuality that no amount or kind of intense socialization can abolish. His parents, too, remain individual persons no matter how deep their love, how passionate their desire for one another or how diffuse their individual identities. Through the wishes and capacities of its members, the family defines and gives shape to separateness so that it looms large or small in family affairs, gives rise to pleasure or unhappiness. The range of possibilities is wide. The autistic child or the psychotic parent represents the pathological extreme of separateness. The benign extremes are more diverse—emotional richness, ego autonomy, individual creativity. Perhaps Erikson’s concept of a clearly delineated ego identity best conveys the benign meaning of separateness.¹

Yet connectedness of family members is equally basic. No human infant survives without ties. Connectedness can range from physical proximity and rudimentary child care to an intensity of mutual involvement which all but excludes all other interests. Separateness remains always, yet it can be transcended. Love and passion do unite family members and can make separateness seem infinitesimal—or comfortable. The signs of being connected to one another that the members of a family seek differ greatly even within the middle range. In one family intense emotional exchange is sought; the members need to relax defenses and public fagade, and they respond freely. In other families such confrontation is threatening, though the wish to feel themselves together in binding ties may be great. A family of this kind may be able to approach its desire only through much formalized or ritualized action, such as giving gifts, celebrating birthdays and holidays, making joint excursions.

This fundamental duality of family life is of considerable significance, for the individual’s efforts to take his own kind of interest in the world, to become his own kind of person, proceed apace with his efforts to find gratifying connection to the other members. At the same time, the other members are engaged in taking their kinds of interest in him, and in themselves. This is the matrix of interaction in which a family develops its life. The family tries to cast itself in a form that satisfies the ways in which its members want to be together and apart. The pattern it reaches is a resultant of these diverse contributions. This dual condition of inevitable individuality and inescapable psychosocial connection is a dynamic condition; it requires a family to make some kind of life together, lest the family dissolve. The family and its members must meet these two conditions in some way. The investigator’s effort to understand family life is facilitated insofar as he asks constantly, In what way does this event or tendency or action bring the members together or keep them apart?

Congruence of Images

It is useful to regard life in a family as the family’s effort to attain a satisfactory congruence of individual and family images through the exchange of suitable testimony. This view initially directs attention to the family as a group of members. Family research must somehow face up to this very obvious fact. All the members of the nuclear household must be taken into account if we are to understand the family’s life. Data must be obtained from each member. We do not understand a family if we know the spouses’ roles as mates and as parents but nothing of their children, nor is our foundation adequate if we have firsthand materials from a mother and child in therapy but see the father and other children only through their eyes. Thus, this first implication is methodological. It says something of the range of data to be collected.

Living together, the individuals in a family each develop an image of what the other members are like. This image comprises the emotional meaning and significance which the other has for the member holding it. The concept of image is a mediating concept. Its reference extends into the personality and out into the interpersonal relationship. Referring to one person’s emotionalized conception of another, an image is shaped by the personality both of the holder and of the object. The image emerges from the holder’s past and bears the imprint of his experience, delimiting what versions of others are possible for him. It says something about him as a person. But it is also a cast into the future, providing the holder with direction in relating to and interacting with the object. While it represents the holder’s needs and wishes, it also represents the object as a source of fulfilment.

Each family member has some kind of image of every other member and of himself in relati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Introduction to the Fourth Edition
• Introduction to the First Edition, 1967
• Part I. Orientation: Constructing Meaning
• Part II. Research Methods
• PART III. The Meanings of Family Boundaries
• Part IV. Families and Culture
• Part V. The Family as a Universe of Communication
• Part VI. Love, Work, Power, Gender, and Making a Home Life
• Part VII. Patterning Separateness and Connectedness
• Part VIII. Stress, Crisis, and Separateness/Connectedness
• Epilogue
• Index