Lasch—Minerva's Owl and the End of Adolescence

Christopher Lasch
Haven in a Heartless World
(1977)

[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.

That's just...terrible?

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
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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 He throws off the older generation not because it upholds the reality principle but because it appears out-of-date, old-fashioned, ineffectual, superfluous.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-
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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-
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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

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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 that 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
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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.

It would be worth tracking the subsequent trajectory of this latter thesis, as well as that of the emotionally intense family also studied by the young Richard Sennett. As a comparatively impoverished observer, both intellectually and experientially, all the same I must confess that the intensity does look to me, first of all, like it has never really gone away, and secondly, like the root cause of a whole lot of bullpucky.

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,

...think about this phrase in the context of Lasch's whole oeuvre, then think about the various arguments for implementing some kind of pay for Socially Valuable Work (a euphemism for child-rearing, since there is much essential work which no one would dare make those same arguments about, most especially because the value is seldom assured or even imaginable from the beginning, and if the value is so foreseeable as to seem inevitable this is probably a delusion...all of which actually IMHO is absolutely true of child-rearing too, it's just really, extremely, impossibly rude to say so quite so baldly, and it's quite polite to say the exact opposite as freely and repeatedly as you wish)...

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
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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.

More questions than answers follow from this. First off, on this general issue, what we desperately could use today is a well-designed sociology of, variously, victimry, fragility (white and otherwise), referral to therapy, etc., which tracks/sorts/analyzes each of these things specifically in relation to the emotional intensity (as rendered here by Lasch and by Sennett in the Chicago study, e.g.) of early family life. Second, though Lasch is convincing on these points as long as they remain suitably abstract, even a phrase as specific as nurses and counselors gives one pause here, i.e. because it is not at all clear how or why the involvement of these agents, in and of itself, could be either necessary or sufficient to undermine any particular union of love and discipline, other than, I suppose, preempting it from the very start as part and parcel of the intervention. This seems more like some kind of bitter backlash than a reasoned argument. The hidden premise, it seems, is that parental authority must be more or less exclusive in order for the love-discipline synthesis to be possible. If so, Lasch undermines himself in having previously insisted that this intense, nuclear, post-Victorian family is of recent origin.

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 transfers 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.

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[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—
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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.

...

[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

*GASP*

to communes or other kinds of extended families.

This last proposal is of a totally different nature than the preceding ones! It does not in itself entail a tyranny of experts; it is based, ostensibly, on voluntary association; and it is thought to have already had a fairly successful run, though no one really knows this for sure.

This equation of village-style parenting with the special clinics of dystopian sci-fi repute again has the character of a cornered animal more so than a wise owl.

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.

Well, I can't help but be sympathetic to this ideal, though the devil as always is in the details. Lasch has a tendency to use loaded caricatures like spiritual enrichment the same way Hanna Rosin used "creative pursuits," that is, with a barely-concealed contempt. This is not too helpful. The mock-ideal touched on above is more compelling stated obversely: the various enrichments people seek through romantic relationships are themselves quite the burden on child rearing, which suffers tremdously at the hands of such pretensions. Keeping in mind the same disclaimer as before, I still cannot help but think I see this pretty much everywhere I look.

Lasch himself would later write that we expect too much out of our relationship partners and not enough out of ourselves. If "true love" or intensive exploration are unrealistic expectations, then surely adding great parenting to it intensifies rather than eases the burden.

[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-
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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."

Highlighting above especially for those who have read only the cover and not the contents of the book, as Lasch himself held was evident in many cases.

That minor service performed, let's just say he doesn't seem to leave us much of anywhere to go from here, does he?

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.