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The Death of the Family1 David Cooper
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By playing with Greek etymology one may extend this idea.
The eknoid state at the left of the diagram is the normal state of the well-conditioned, endlessly obedient citizen. This is a state of being in which one is so estranged from every aspect of one's own experience, from every spontaneous impulse to action, from every bit of awareness of one's body for oneself, rather than one's body as an object for inspection by others in the world, from all the carefully refused possibilities of awakening change, that one might truly and without metaphorical sleight-of-hand regard this normal person as being out of his mind. Most people in the first world submit to this chronic murder of their selves with only faintly murmured, fast forgotten dissent. The pay-off for losing one's mind in this sense is of course considerable: one may become affluent, comfortable at least; one may lead a great corporation or a great state or one may even revel in the ecological devastation of major areas of the earth's surface in the interest of normal values. In fact, on reflection, there's nothing like as good as being out of one's mind. Nor anything like the loss entailed. By serial metanoias one may move out of the eknoid position. Metanoia means change from the depths of oneself upward into the superficies of one's social appearance. It includes much of the Pauline sense of conversion and repentance, and, particularly at the second level of metanoia (µ2), generates the 'signs' of depression and mourning. Through the first metanoia one enters a region of 'paranoia', of being besides one's self. If eknoia means being out of one's mind, in paranoia one is at least next to one's mind. Paranoia is about a neighbourliness of self that might become affectionate. If eknoia is a state of being, a conglomerate of essences that are finally the passive product of social conditioning initiated in the family, paranoia is the beginning of active existence with the possibility of life for new projects. There is certainly confusion between persecutory fantasies and persecutory realities. With the former one projectively explores social reality through the unknowing, but later half-knowing, super-imposition of past experiential structures on the present. If this exploration is radical enough in the context of one's most significant relationships one begins to develop an objective sense of persecutory reality that is transpersonal and beyond our super-impositions although indirectly it has been mediated to us by our primary family experience in the first year of life which conditions the persecutory fantasies. The second metanoia represents work on one's self in the sense of total work (subsuming the psycho-analytic notion of 'working-through') that leads us into a selfconsistency, being in our own minds, separate as a person from any other person in unlonely aloneness that is open to the world. Here one encourages one's self, puts a new heart into one's self by invention rather than by transplantation, and one makes a wager to deal with any new experience in the self-containment of one's self-relation so that one is free to allow a generous issuing of one's self into the world (the noic movement). At this point one is ready for the abandonment of the self sense, of the restriction to a finite ego. The final metanoia is the fluent movement between the actively autonomous self and self-and world - transcendence (anoia) - moving through the cancelling-out of self-preformation in a moment of anti-noia. There is then, finally, no longer any question of 'states of being' and the illusory security represented by such 'states'. There is of course much room for confusion of location between these stages, one of the most disastrous being the attempt to move from eknoia and paranoia to anoia without the requisite attainment of self-containing autonomy. The unguided use of psychedelic drugs and abortive, panicky forms of what seems to be 'psychotic breakdown' are such attempts. When this happens people are still very much in the net of the internal family (and often the external family too) and compulsively search for rather less restricting replica family systems. The family is not only an abstraction, that is a false existence, an essence, but also exists as a challenge to go beyond all the conditioning one has undergone in it. The way one effects this 'going beyond' seems always to be blocked, however. There are numerous taboos in the family system that reach much farther than the incest taboo and taboos against greed and messiness. One of these taboos is the implicit prohibition against experiencing one's aloneness in the world. There seem to be very few mothers indeed who can keep their hands off their child long enough to allow the capacity to be alone to develop. There is always a need to try to arrest the wailing desperation of the other - for one's own sake if not for theirs. This leads to a violation of the temporalization, that is to say the personal time-making as distinct from time-keeping, of the other so that the mother's need - time system (more or less passively mediating the need-time system of the wider society) gets imposed on the infant's. The infant may need in her or his time to experience frustration, desperation and finally a full-scale experience of depression. In my experience any respect for the time of the other or the time the other needs to take in their relationship to oneself is very rare indeed. One of the main, perhaps the most important, contribution of Freudian psycho-analytic technique has been the systematic and disciplined development in the analyst of this sort of respect for the natural unfolding of the interplay of temporalizations - without interference but with total attentiveness. In this sense the psycho-analytic situation can, ideally, become a sort of anti-family - a family that one can enter by choice and leave by choice when one has done what one has to do in it. The analytic situation is not a family transference situation in which one, in some sort of unknowing simplism, converts the other into bits of one's totality of impressions of past family experience. This is only 'by the way', although it is a voie galachque that one has to traverse. That sort of milk is already spilled and there is no good in crying over it. So one goes through all this with a proleptic impulse that penetrates one's self with past intimations of the self that that self would penetrate itself by. What one has to do in it is to discover a fluent dialectic that moves all the time on the shifting antithesis between being-alone and being-with-the-other. It is this antithesis that we must examine further if we are to discover how a person, deprived of the life-blood of his solitude in the first year of his life, later, in a moment of great anguish, invents his separateness in the world. A boy called Philip at the age of six years lived with his parents in a hotel owned by relatives. All his life he had been assiduously cared for by them. He had never been left alone for a moment. But then one day, playing in the gardens, he rested his hands on a white-washed bird-bath and looked into the mossy water reflecting the sky. With a shock he looked up at the sky seeing it for the first time as if initiated into awareness of its reality by its reflection. Then he realized in a moment of suffocation, that was also a moment of liberation, his total contingency and aloneness in the world. He knew that from that moment onward he could call to no one and that no one could call to him in any way that would deflect the trajectory of his life project, which he now knew he had already chosen - although of course the details would have to be filled in. His mother called out that supper was ready. He went in to eat but for the first time he knew that he was no longer his mother's child but was in fact his own person. The point is that Philip could not say one word about his experience to anyone else in his family that would not be contorted into their terms or into some joke about their boy. If one does not discover one's autonomy in one's first year of life and if one does not discover it by this anguished moment in later childhood, one is either driven mad in late adolescence, or one gives up the ghost and becomes a normal citizen, or one battles one's way through to a freedom in the working-out of subsequent relationships whether these be spontaneously originated or planned analytic relationships. In any case one has to leave home one day. Maybe the sooner the better. This is all about communication and the failure of reception of communication that characterizes the family system. Take a very ordinary situation between parent and child. Parent walks down the high street holding his child's hand. At a certain point there is a necessary break down of reciprocity - the parent holds the child's hand but the child no longer holds the parent's hand. By a subtle kinesic alteration in hand pressure the child of three or four years indicates to the parent that she wants to make her own way down the high street in her own time. The parent either tightens his grip or takes what he has been taught to experience as a fearful risk - to let his child leave him not in his time or in socially prescribed time but in the child's time. How do we learn to mind our own business - as did the Japanese Haiku poet Basho? In his journal The Narrow Road to the Deep North Basho describes how, shortly after setting out, he saw on the other side of a river an abandoned child, small, desolate and weeping. He could have gone back to the child and found some sort of home for it in a near-by village, but he chose to continue his elected solitary voyage. Basho's compassion was fully expressed in verse but his voyage had to come first - he knew he could do nothing for the child until he knew what he had to do for himself. The main task to be accomplished if we are to liberate ourselves from the family in both the external sense (the family 'out there') and the internal sense (the family in our heads) is to see through it. To make this phenomenologically real one might meditate on this visualization - the visualization of a family queue. Imagine one looks through a series of veils - the first veil may bear an image of one's mother in a certain mood that one spontaneously remembers; the second veil bears the imprint of one's father in a similar characteristic mood; then one sees through successive veils including siblings, grandparents and all other significant persons in one's life until, at the end of the queue, one sees a veil with one's own image. All one has to do then, having seen through the family, is to see through oneself into a nothingness that returns one to oneself in so far as this nothingness is the particular nothingness of one's being. After a sufficient view through this nothing the entailed terror rings with an incidental note only. To put it another way, the superego (our internalized parents, primitive loved and hated bits and pieces of their bodies, fragments of minatory utterances and confusing life-or-death injunctions that ring through our mental ears from the first year to the last of our lives) has to be transformed from a theoretical abstraction, which we can merely understand, into a phenomenal reality. The superego is nothing (the theoretical abstraction) but a series of sensory impressions, images that must be seen, heard, smelled, tasted and touched in our consciousness. For reasons that we may explore later I shall condense all these sensory modalities into vision, into seeing and seeing through. The object I think must be to concretize the superego into real phenomenal components so that one can use it as a sort of social shield, burglar alarm and submachine gun - rather than be used and possibly destroyed by it. The techniques which one may find or invent to do this are multifarious. Apart from interpretations in therapy one can recall stories and myths and, more importantly, conjure up one's own personal mythology. Lots of us, for instance, talk about the Golem myth. Let us remember the original Kabbalistic story. Jewish households erected an effigy of clay and on its brow wrote the word Emeth, meaning 'Truth'. This monster could be used as a servant doing all manner of household tasks until it became incompetent or disobedient or simply too big. Then the householder had to reach up to the brow of the Golem and erase the first 'E' from Emeth - this left the word Meth, which meant 'dying'. The monster would then die and be swept away. One householder, however, let the Golem grow so big that he could no longer reach the brow of the obstreperous creature, so he thought a bit and then, knowing that all Golems or Superegos are essentially obedient, he ordered the creature to bend down and pick up some dirt. As the Golem obeyed him he erased the 'E' from Emeth - but forgetting the size of the creature he was suffocated to death by the mass of original mud that fell on to him. It's all like dying prematurely of coronary thrombosis or cancer or getting shot up by riot police. So how do we befriend our Golems - which is all 'they' probably want anyhow. Then again, to illustrate the power of the internal family, the family that one can separate from over thousands of miles and yet still remain in its clutches and be strangled by those clutches. Someone I saw was trying desperately to free himself from a complex family situation that seemed to invade every move he made in relation to his work and his relationship with his wife and child. Then one day his mother told him a well-known Jewish story. It was about a young man who fell in love with a beautiful princess in the next town, several miles away. He wanted to marry her but she made the condition that he would have to cut out the heart of his mother and bring it to her. He went home and while his mother was sleeping he cut out her heart. Joyously (but secretly only joyfully) he ran back over the fields to the princess but at one point he stumbled and fell. The heart fell out of his pocket. As he lay there the heart spoke and asked him, 'Have you hurt yourself, my darling son?' By being too obedient to the internal mother, projected in one form into the princess, he became totally enslaved by this internal mother whose omnipresent immortal love he could never escape again. Recently a child who had been diagnosed schizophrenic, in 'autistic withdrawal', was brought to see me. This beautiful boy of eight was brought into my room by his mother and father and he wore a badge saying 'It's wrong to eat people.' He grimaced and gesticulated and could not (or perhaps more relevantly, did not want to) sit in one place and take part in the discussion. His mother, obviously engaged in some sort of over-eating spree, was consuming the child in terms of an orientation of her whole 'mind' and 'body' to his 'welfare' - protecting him from rough friends at school, from an overly punitive headmaster who smelled out a 'wrong one', but she was doing this because she was being starved in terms beyond the sexual by her husband, who taught at a university west of London. He was starving her because he was being starved of any sort of real intercourse with others by the academic bureaucracy which mediated to him the first world famine situation that seems to be hardly recognized by university administrators but which is increasingly protested against by radical students - with increasing effect. After a few sessions in therapy in which she got a good feed (talking out in the mode of drinking in) she tended to 'eat up' her son less and less. He went back to school and formed his first friendships with other boys. A month later I saw him again and this time he bore none of the psychiatric stigmata - this time he wore a badge saying 'Eat me up I'm delicious.' The 'clinical problem' was resolved. Beyond that there is only politics. A Tibetan monk engaged in a long, solitary, meditative withdrawal began to hallucinate a spider. Every day the spider appeared, growing larger each time, until finally it was as big as the man himself and appeared very threatening. At this point the monk asked his guru for advice and obtained the following: 'Next time the spider comes draw a cross on its belly and then, with due reflection, take a knife and plunge it into the middle of the cross.' The next day the monk saw the spider, drew the cross and then reflected. Just as he was about to plunge the knife into the spider's belly he looked down and in amazement saw the mark chalked across his own umbilicus. It is evident that to distinguish between the inner and the outer adversary is literally a matter of life or death. Families are about the inner and the outer. Families are about life or death or ignominious flight. One very obvious manifestation of the operation of unseen or insufficiently seen internalized family structures is in political demonstrations where the organizing group is lacking in vision of this sort of reality in themselves. So we find demonstrators getting unnecessarily hurt because they unknowingly project bits of their parents in their negative, punishing, powerful aspect on to the police. This leads to an attack 'from the rear' in so far as they are not only defending themselves against the attack from the police 'out there' but also against the internal attack from the family policeman in their heads. The people most vulnerable to this two-fold attack are significantly smelled out by the police and the magistrates, and it is significant that those demonstrators who, dutifully, get beaten up most severely, also get the heaviest sentences in the courts. The revolutionary objective is, needless to say, forgotten. If we are to regard paranoia as a morbid state of existence in any sense any more; I think the only place in which we find this as a social problem is in the minds of policemen, administrators of the law, and the consensus politicians of the imperialist countries. These unfortunate people embody the projected superegos of the rest of us to such an extent that their internalizations of the self-punitive bits of our minds squeeze them out of any sort of human existence of their own. Any compassion that we achieve in relation to them, however, need not stultify the effective force of our anger against the real persecution unknowingly embodied by them - against both the third world that is distributed in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and the unrecognized and self-unrecognizing third world that resides in the heart of the first world. I shall define this secret third world later - for the moment suffice it to say that it is black (whatever one's literal colour), hippy, orientated to local seizure of power in factories, universities, schools. It's deprived not of education but by education, it breaks the cannabis laws and more often than not gets away with it, and it knows how to burn cars and make bombs that sometimes work. It gets put down as suffering, for instance, from 'infantile omnipotence', as one psychiatric colleague suggested the Red Guards in the Cultural Revolution did. The emerging question, however, is whether this socalled 'psycho-pathological' category may now elude the amateur diagnostics of the family and some of their psychiatric colleagues, all of whom are so imbued with the frightened archaeo-ideology of the bourgeois watch dog that in terror would evade its reality as a lap dog. Having eluded this invalidatory possibility the people so stigmatized may find a social revolutionary use for the 'aberrations' instead of letting them sink into a private neurosis which always confirms 'the System' and plays endless, joyless games with it. Through considerations of this sort one begins to sense a rumbling, deep-toned possibility asserting itself, perhaps fearfully, certainly terrorizing in its intent: the possibility of a de-structuring of the family on the basis of a full realization of the destructiveness of that institution. A de-structuring that will be so radical, precisely because of the lucidity that finally points the way to it, that it demands a revolution in the whole society. All the time now we have to differentiate between pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary forms and possibilities. In concrete terms all we can do in a pre-revolutionary context is to lay down certain isolated prototypes that may be developed on a mass social scale in a post-revolutionary context. Let us sum up on some of the factors that operate within the family, often with lethal but always with humanly stultifying consequences. Later we shall explore the possibilities of reversing them. Firstly there is the glueing together of people based on the sense of one's own incompleteness. To take one classical form of this, let us consider the mother who feels incomplete as a person (for a complex set of reasons that usually includes with centrality her relationship with her mother and the general suppression of extra-familial social effectiveness in women). So in the whole colloidal system of the family she glues, say, her son on to herself to be that bit of her self that she feels to be missing (the bit her mother 'taught' her was missing) and the bit that actually is missing (the factor of objective social suppression). The son, even if he 'succeeds' in leaving home and getting married, may never become more personally complete than her because he has experienced himself during the most critical years of his 'formation' as an appendage to her body (her penis) and to her mind, her mind-penis or socially prescribed effectiveness. In the most extreme form of this symbiosis his only exit might be by a series of acts that lead him to be designated schizophrenic (about one per cent of the population are hospitalized at some point in their lives with this label) and transferred to the replica family of the mental hospital. Probably the only way that people, glued to each other in the family and in the replica families of social institutions, can unglue themselves, is by using the warmth of love. The irony here is that love only gets warm enough to accomplish this unglueing if it traverses a region - usually experienced as arctic - the region of total respect for one's own autonomy and that of each other person one knows. Secondly, the family specializes in the formation of roles for its members rather than laying down the conditions for the free assumption of identity. I do not mean identity in the congealed essentialist sense but rather a freely changing, wondering, but highly active sense of who one is. Characteristically in a family a child is indoctrinated with the desired desire to become a certain sort of son or daughter (then husband, wife, father, mother) with a totally enjoined, minutely prescribed 'freedom' to move within the narrow interstices of a rigid lattice of relationship. Instead of the feared possibility of acting from the chosen and self-invented centre of oneself, being self-centred in a good sense, one is taught to submit, or else to live in an eccentric way of being in the world. Here 'eccentric' means being normal or located in the normal way off the centre of oneself, which becomes a forgotten region from which only our dream voices address us in a language that we have equally forgotten. Most of our conscious use of language amounts to little more than a pale, squeaking facsimile of the strange deeper-resonating tongues of our dreams and prereflective modes of awareness ('Unconscious'). Being a well-brought-up eccentric normal person means that one lives all the time relatively to others, and this is how the falsely splitting system originates in family indoctrination so that one functions all the time in social groups in later life as one side or other of a duality. Essentially this is collusion on the parameter refusal/ acceptance of one's freedom. One refuses certain possibilities of one's own and deposits these refused possibilities in the other, who in turn deposits his possibilities of an opposite sort in oneself. In the family there is the built-in antithesis of the bringer-up (parents) and the brought-up (children). All possibilities of children 'bringing up' their parents are relegated. The socially imposed 'duty' of parents suppresses finally any joy that might shatter the division of roles. This obligation structure is then transported into every other institutional system the person brought up in the family subsequently enters (I include of course adoptive families and orphanages, which follow the same model). One of the saddest scenes I know is when a child of six or seven plays school with desks and lessons arranged, under the parents' view, in precisely the same form that exists in the primary school. How might we reverse this abdication and stop stopping the child teaching her or his secret wisdom that we make them forget because we forget that we have forgotten it? Thirdly, the family in its function as primary socializer of the child instills social controls in its children that are patently more than the child needs to navigate his way through the obstacle race laid down by the extra-familial agents of the bourgeois state, whether these be police, university administrators, psychiatrists, social workers or his 'own' family that passively re-creates his parents' family model - although the television programmes these days are a bit different, of course. The child in fact is primarily taught not how to survive in society but how to submit to it. Surface rituals like etiquette, organized games, mechanical learning operations at school, replace deep experiences of spontaneous creativity, inventive play, freely developing fantasies and dreams. These forms of life have to be systematically suppressed and forgotten and replaced by the surface rituals. It may take therapy in the best sense to re-evaluate one's experience highly enough to register one's dreams properly and to sequentially develop one's dreams beyond the point of dream stagnation that most people reach before the age of ten. If this happens on a wide enough scale therapy becomes dangerous to the bourgeois state and highly subversive because radically new forms of social life are indicated. Suffice it to say for the moment, however, that every child, before family indoctrination passes a certain point and primary school indoctrination begins, is, germinally at least, an artist, a visionary and a revolutionary. How do we recover this lost potential, how do we start stepping backward on the inexorable march from the truly ludic, joyful play that invents its autonomous discipline, to the ludicrous - that is normal, games-playing, social behaviour? Fourthly - and this again we shall explore in subsequent chapters - there is an elaborate system of taboos that is instilled in each child by its family. This, like the teaching of social controls more generally, is achieved by the implantation of guilt - the sword of Damocles that will descend on the head of anyone who prefers their own choices and their own experiences to those enjoined on them by the family and the wider society. If one loses one's head enough to openly disobey these injunctive systems one is, poetically enough, decapitated! The 'castration complex', far from being morbid, is a social necessity for bourgeois society, and it is when they are in danger of losing it that many people in perplexity search for therapy - or a new form of revolution. The taboo system that the family teaches extends well beyond the obvious incest taboos. There is a restriction of the sensory modalities of communication between people to the audio-visual with quite marked taboos against people in the family touching, smelling or tasting each other. Children may romp with their parents but demarcation lines are very firmly drawn around the erotogenic zones on both sides. There has to be a very carefully measured obliquity and stiltedness in, say, the way that growing-up sons have to kiss their mothers. Transsexual hugging and holding are rapidly precipitated, in the minds of family members, into a zone of 'dangerous' sexuality. Above all there is the taboo on tenderness that Ian Suttie (in Origins of Love and Hate) wrote so well about. Tenderness in families may be felt, certainly, but not expressed unless it is formalized almost out of existence. One is reminded of the young man, quoted by Grace Stuart,* who, on seeing his father in his coffin, bent over him and kissed his brow saying, 'There, father, I never dared do that while you were alive!' Perhaps if we realized how dead 'alive' people are we might be prepared, goaded by despair, to take more of a risk. Throughout this chapter I have perforce used a language that I find archaic, essentially reactionary and certainly discrepant with my thinking. 'Family words' like mother, father, child (in the sense of 'their' child), superego. The connotation of 'mother' takes in a number of biological functions, primary protector functions, a socially over-defined role, and a certain legal 'reality'. In fact the maternal function can be diffused into other people beyond the mother - the father, siblings and, above all, other people outside the biologically grouped family. We don't need mother and father any more. We only need mothering and fathering. There seems to me to be no sense in reducing complex but intelligible social relationships to purely contingent and circumstantial biological facts that are mere facts, facts that precede acts which initiate a true sociality. I remember a conjoint session with a mother and her daughter. At one point the mother, with deep sadness and not a little courage, said that she had begun to feel a tremendous and decisive sense of loss and envy on realizing that the therapist was now her daughter's mother far more than she was. The boundary between 'transference' relationship and 'real' relationship can never, and I believe never should be, all that clear. It's a matter of living a necessary ambiguity with a requisite sense of difference between the projected (altering) image and the unaltered perception of the other. Anyhow, with this grumble against the language one has to use, I shall not suggest a new language now but simply underline the fatuity and danger of the fetish of consanguinity. Blood is thicker than water only in the sense of being the vitalizing stream of a certain social stupidity. The family, for want of a capacity for providing holy Idiots, becomes moronic. |
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References *Grace Stuart, Narcissus, A Psychological Study of Self Love, George Allen & Unwin, London, 1956. |
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"The Death of the Family"
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