Written with a strong historical matrix and considerable outreach,
this complex, provoking work firmly respects the family as a
socializing force and scrutinizes its 20th-century interpreters,
who most often relegated this function to the sidelines or ignored
it altogether. "As the chief agency of socialization, the family
reproduces cultural patterns in the individual," and it is this
crucial task, long undervalued and lately entrusted to experts,
which is examined - in writings from the past and in contemporary
practice. Lasch analyzes influential theories about the family by
psychiatrists (Freud, Sullivan, Fromm, Horney), anthropologists
(Malinowski, Benedict, Mead), and sociologists (the Chicago school,
Parsons), pointing out original observations but also offering
numerous examples of distortion, professional bias, or conceptual
flaw. Early misinterpretations of Freud have been compounded in
recent years and Lasch, more sympathetic, tries to set the record
straight for he finds in the application of such misconstructions
serious threats to individual development - and implications for
society in general. And contrary to parsons' assumption, he
contends that family functions are an integrated system: abandoning
some (such as overt conflicts between father and son) significantly
weakens others, endangering personality formation instead of
facilitating it. Today's counterculture adherents reflect this
masked distress and self-help no-fault philosophies are further
evidence of a basically fearful orientation - an argument Lasch
skillfully propounded in the New York Review of Books last year.
Modulated by psychoanalytic precepts, cautionary rather than
prescriptive, this looks responsibly at the loosening of family
ties and its long-term consequences. (Kirkus Reviews)
One of the earliest and sharpest cultural commentators to
investigate the twentieth-century American family, Christopher
Lasch argues in this book that as social science "experts" intrude
more and more into our lives, the family's vital role as the moral
and social cornerstone of society disintegrates and, left
unchecked, so does our political and personal freedom. Mr. Lasch
combines an analytic overview of the psychological and sociological
literature on the American family with his own trenchant analysis
of where the problem lies. "
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