Family Matters

The origin of the human armor against pleasure is a puzzle. Many modern thinkers have believed that the origin of human ills must somehow be in family structure. One of the most articulate proponents of this view was Engels. Marxist sociology, which strongly influences modern sociology, has made fashionable Engels's view that after a period of primitive communism came a period of matriarchy in which a loose kind of marriage occurred, followed by a period of patriarchy (lasting to the present) in which marriage was based on protection of property, including children, secured by the domination of the woman by the man. This view, based on the nineteenth century pseudo-anthropology of Bachofen and Morgan, has now been shown to be a historical fantasy. There is no evidence for, and much against, the concept that primitive tribes are communist or that societies have ever been matriarchal (although in the most civilized of ancient societies, such as that of Minoan Crete, there was a tendency toward Goddess worship and the reverence of women). Nor is there any evidence for the psychoanalytic view, fantasized by Freud in Totem and Taboo, of a primitive "horde" ruled by a Big Daddy figure. There is, though, ample evidence from anthropological fieldword by Malinowski, Elwin, et al. that in societies where there is little control from the authority of tribal elders, kings, or men in a patriarchal rule over women, a situation of approximate sexual self-guidance exists.

Here I am using the term "self-guidance" in preference to Reich's well-known term "self-regulation." Self-regulation is a contradiction in terms since it literally implies the imposition of rules on the self by the self, but is meant to imply the absence of rules. It is in fact a bad translation of Reich's original German selbststeurung which means "self-guidance" and implies that one is allowed to learn through experience.

In a society which permits self-guidance, children's sexuality is respected; adolescents practice serial monogamy, though not promiscuity, at a fairly rapid rate of change (this is no different from the ideal of modern North American adolescents, as reported by Sorenson, 1973); and adults find a partner with whom they settle down in some form of natural marriage and have children. In these societies, pleasure anxiety is low, and armor against emotion seems to be light. Elwin's book on the Muria of India, where boys and girls cohabited by custom, contains scores of photographs of adolescents whose faces radiate life and whose bodies are flexible in work and play.

Self-guidance in a society such as this operates from birth. Men and women have approximately equal levels of responsibility and power. This is so even though lip service may be paid to an ideology, imposed from a distance or by superstitious custom, which ostensibly promotes male power: the reality of natural marriage is a balance of power. The role of social superstructure (church or state) is minimal. Usually there is a family based economy. This is not a tribal society, in the sense of Karl Popper's "closed society" in which only norms prevail, with no critical assessment of new knowledge. What Helmut Schoeck calls the "envy barrier," communal pressure against individual originality or advancement, prevails in a tribal society. A high level of individual freedom and selfguidance is more possible in an unorganized, family-based society, than in a tribal- or state-centered one.

In an authoritarian society the norm is regulation by church, state, tribal elders, or fathers with tribal or state backing. (Patriarchy within the family cannot exist without either the consent of women and children or, more usually the case, the backing of outside male authority). Sexuality becomes mixed with considerations of power, property, and ideology; and it is suppressed by every imaginable means, from mutilation and torture, through enforced celibacy or compulsive monogamy, to enforced communal living in which the individual or couple have no power of decision-making.

The brutality of authoritarian society is clear, and it is probably safe to say that the more brutal the repression, starting with childhood, the more armored the individual has to be. In modern Western democracies, we have taken some steps, at least, to liberate the individual from this brutality. It is sometimes more difficult to identify the subtle forms of social control, though perusal of Reich's The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Schoeck's Envy, and Popper's The Open Society and its Enemies can help.

Why, then, did authoritarian society, which seems to be a secondary development from a family-based economy, ever arise? Why did the earlier economy change? We may never have an adequate answer since archeology can only describe action and nothing of the thought or feelings of ancient peoples. We can, however, look at the origins of armoring within the modern natural family. This is important because perhaps if we are lucky enough to survive at all, our technology will help us rediscover an economy in which the only social units are families formed by people of their own free will. There may, with modern communications, be less and less need for authoritarian control, despite there being more equipment which can be used in imposing it. If we are going to assert our own human needs against totalitarian power, we surely have to know our own weaknesses and the intrinsic problems in the way of life we choose.

This may seem an odd approach to a brief discussion of the problems of the family. Besides, we surely know them all too well: alcoholism, wife-battering, child-abuse, infidelity, ad nauseam. But these, I believe, are mainly the problems of the compulsive family or of the natural family in the grip of the state. There are actually less dramatic problems which may explain why some people have broken out (not necessarily broken free) of family structure in order to become political or religious leaders with the aim of welding all society into one big happy non-family.

The basic problem of the natural family seems to be this:

A man and a woman marry and after a while, as an extension of their joy in each other, they have a child. If the child is born naturally, it will seek to nurse at the breast and the mother will seek to respond to this need. This creates a special relationship between mother and child, and for a while the father is excluded. Basically, this is a sexual exclusion: a nursing mother has less interest in sex because she is in constant contact with a baby and much of her energy is discharged in nursing. Having a baby thus threatens the couple: it is a deadly paradox that the couple who love each other enough to have a child and love that child enough to grant its needs, are creating a situation which will temporarily withdraw some energy and intensity from the sexual relationship—the very relationship which produced the child in the first place and maintained the couple's love.

I believe that most social problems are, in the last analysis, based on this one. Just look at a few possible outcomes of this situation:

1. The mother, if she is to have any energy to maintain her sexual relationship with the father, becomes dependent on outside help—from the extended family or the tribe, both of which tend to exact payment for this help. The payment may take the form of control over the way in which the child is brought up or of financial or other help from the couple at a later stage, etc. In this version the family unit can no longer be self-reliant.

2. The mother gains power over her husband because her sexual need is less than his; his greater need makes him dependent on her. In the worst case she ends up dominating and controlling him through her power of denial or gratification. At best, the basic power balance of the marriage is disturbed by the disparity of needs—the woman may, for instance, trade sexual favors for love and protection. In any case the bond of sexual synchronization has been broken.

3. The child is deprived, its needs not met. In modern society this is fairly easily achieved by "technocratic childbirth" in which drugs are used: the baby is born in a non-alert state, its contact with the mother impaired and its needs easily blocked or diverted; it is bottle-fed, not nursed, and early sent to day care centers, not brought up within the family. Here the couple can preserve their sexual relationship (such as it can be in a couple who would go so far in this frustration of a child's needs). The result is a very armored child, destined to repeat the social armoring in the next generation by finding deprivation of its own children in the same manner easy.

4. Sometimes the father seeks sexual solace elsewhere. A temporary open marriage, however, is not much different emotionally from a permanent one. Here the mother can be imagined sitting at home with baby and a pail of diapers while the man makes love with some understanding (or unknowing) girl-friend who perhaps has not the capacity to commit herself to marriage and having children.

5. Sometimes the father masturbates. Result: damaged self-esteem, irritability, resentment, alienation from the wife (it would be too painful to make her the object of masturbation fantasies, but a consistent concentration on images of other women or images from pornographic sources will redirect the sexual desire outside the relationship), and difficulty in taking up the sexual relationship again when it becomes possible.

6. The father adapts. This may seem the best alternative but it can go too far. A man who biologically and emotionally needs to make love several times a week may be restricted to weekly or less frequent release, often during a potent period of his life. The built-up resentment can be overwhelming, and the marriage, including the child, will suffer.

7. The couple adapt. The father learns to live for a time with less frequent sexual intercourse but with the knowledge that this is temporary, that the lovemaking is as intense as ever, and that there are now the pleasures of having a joyful child in the house. The mother learns how to handle her postnatal asexual feeling; how to manage her energy so that she can reconnect and be open to her husband because of her own erotic needs; and how, at other times, to open herself sexually for emotional rather than sexual reasons.

Clearly, the last alternative is best. Some ways of adapting to the transition from couple to family can be discussed here. But the point must be made: this problem is the crucial one for the family, and possibly for any society which is healthy. It is not easy.