The

Family:

The Developmental Setting

Theodore Lidz
 e-Book 2015 International Psychotherapy Institute

From American Handbook of Psychiatry: Volume 1 edited by Silvano Arieti

Copyright © 1974 by Basic Books

All Rights Reserved

Created in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Importance of the Family

The Family’s Primary Functions

The Purposes of Marriage

The Family as a Small Group

The Parental Requisites

Conclusions

Bibliography
 The Family:
The Developmental Setting
Studies of personality development and maldevelopment have been seriously

impeded by a dearth of understanding of the central role of the family in

directing the developmental process. The critical early stages of the life cycle,
upon which all later development and the stability of the personality rest,

take place in the nidus of the family. The stability and satisfaction of the lives

of most adults depend greatly upon their marital and parental transactions

within their families of procreation. A very large proportion of the work in

any dynamic psychotherapy is concerned with the reevaluation of parental

influences and the reorganization of patient’s reactions to them, so he can be

freed from deleterious internalizations and transferences that interfere with

his interpersonal relationships and his own evaluation of himself. The various

childhood phases of the life cycle unroll favorably or unfavorably not so much
be cause of innate characteristics as because of the manner in which the

parental figures and the intrafamilial transactions guide the child through the
phase. Attempts to study the young child’s development independently of the

family setting distort even more than they simplify, for they leave out
essential factors of the process.

American Handbook of Psychiatry 5

Importance of the Family

Because the family is ubiquitous it has, like the air that we breathe, been

very much taken for granted and many of the vital functions it subserves have
been overlooked. Indeed the human being is so constructed that the family is

an essential correlate of his biological makeup. It is the basic institution that

permits his survival and his development into an integrated person by

augmenting his inborn adaptive capacities. Man, after all, is virtually unique

among animals in depending upon two endowments: he has both a genetic

inheritance and a cultural heritage. His genetic endowment transmits his

physical structure and his physiological makeup, which, as in all other

animals, permits survival within a relatively narrow range of environmental

conditions. Many of his critical adaptive techniques are not inborn; he is born

with a unique brain that permits him to acquire language and thereby to
acquire from those who raise him the instrumentalities that his society has

developed for coping with the environment and for living with one another.

This permits him to develop a personality suited to that specific society in

which he grows up. The human mechanisms for survival and adaptation are

vastly different from those possessed by any other organism, and we can

never understand human development and functioning properly unless we

take full cognizance of man’s dual heritage.

Everywhere the family must meet two requisites: the biological nature

The Family: The Developmental Setting 6

and needs of man, and the requirements of the particular society in which it
exists and which it subserves by preparing children to live in it. Thus,

wherever families exist they will have certain essential features in common

even while handling similar problems in differing ways in accordance with

the needs of a specific society. In this chapter, I shall seek to designate the

essential functions of the family, particularly for childrearing, and the

requisites for carrying them out.

The family is an essential correlate of man’s biological endowment, for it

is the basic social system that mediates between the child’s genetic and

cultural endowments, provides for his physical needs while instilling societal

techniques, and stands between the individual and society, offering a shelter

against the remainder of society. Because the child must remain dependent
on others for many years, it is important that he be raised by persons to

whom his well-being is as important as their own. His dependency upon them

and his prolonged attachment to them provide major motivations and

directives for his development. As the family forms the earliest and most

pervasive influence that encompasses the still unformed infant and small
child, the family’s ways are the ways of life for the child, the only ones he

knows. All subsequent interpersonal experiences are perceived, consciously

and unconsciously understood, and reacted to according to patterns laid

down within the family. These family patterns and the child’s reactions to

them become so thoroughly incorporated in the child that they are difficult to

American Handbook of Psychiatry 7

differentiate from genetically determined factors with which they interrelate.

This difficulty greatly complicates the study of the child’s physical and

personality development. Later influences will modify those of the family, but

they can never undo nor fully reshape these early core experiences.

The Family: The Developmental Setting 8

The Family’s Primary Functions

The family is usually considered essential because of its childrearing

functions, but we cannot properly understand either why the family is

omnipresent or how it rears children unless we appreciate that it also

subserves essential needs of the spouses and of the society. It not only fills a

vital societal need by carrying out the basic enculturation of its children, but
the family also constitutes the fundamental social unit of virtually every

society: it forms a grouping of individuals that the society treats as an entity;

it helps stabilize a society by creating a network of kinship systems; it

constitutes an economic unit in all societies and a major economic unit in

some; and it provides roles, status, motivation, and incentives that affect the

relationships between individuals and the society. In addition, the nuclear

family completes and stabilizes the lives of the spouses who formed it. These
three sets of functions of the family—for the society, for the parents, and for

the children—are interrelated, and it is likely that no other institution could

simultaneously fill these three functions without radical change in our social
structure and probably not without grave consequences. It is even highly

probable that these functions essential to human adaptation cannot be met

separately at all except under very special circumstances, but must be fused

in the family. Nevertheless, these functions can also conflict, and some conflict
between them seems virtually inevitable. Fulfilling parental roles obviously

often conflicts with a person’s functions as a spouse, and society’s demands

American Handbook of Psychiatry 9

can obviously conflict with the needs of both the spouses and children, as

when the husband is taken from the home into military service.

The Family: The Developmental Setting 10

The Purposes of Marriage

In order properly to grasp the nature of the family setting, it seems

essential to examine briefly why people marry and form new families. Such
considerations have particular pertinence at the present juncture in history

when the value of the family is being challenged as part of the broader

questioning of existing institutions and mores. Although people marry for

many reasons—love, passion, security, status, to escape from the parental

home, to have children, to legitimize a child—marriage is a basic institution in

virtually all societies primarily because of man’s biological makeup and the

manner in which he is brought up to reach maturity.

In growing up in a family, a person forms an essential bond to those

who raise him, and he assimilates and internalizes their ways and their

attributes. However, an individual cannot achieve completion as an adult

within his family of origin. Minimally some degree of frustration must occur

because he cannot become a parent with the prerogatives of parenthood and

because sexual gratification cannot be united with his affectional

relationships. Within his natal family, however, he has enjoyed the security of

being a member of a mutually protective unit in which his welfare, at least

theoretically, has been of paramount importance to his parents. When he

leaves his family of origin, his emotional attachments to it remain unresolved,

and he has strong conscious and unconscious motivations to bring closure to

American Handbook of Psychiatry 11

these emotional imbalances that move him toward a new union with a person
who seems to fill the image of the desired complementary figure sufficiently

to be transformed into it. He hopes through marriage to regain the security

afforded by a union in which his well-being and needs are again of paramount
importance to another—and in marriage the spouses’ well-being and security

are intimately if not irrevocably interconnected.

The division of the human species into two sexes has created another

major impetus for marriage. Men and women are drawn together not only by

sexual impulsions but also because the two sexes complement one another in

many different ways. Males and females are subjected to gender-linked role

training from earliest childhood, which gives them differing skills and ways of

relating to people and regarding the world even if such differences are
instigated by anatomical, genetic, and hormonal factors. Speaking broadly,

neither a man nor a woman can be complete alone. The two sexes are raised

to divide the tasks of living and to complement and complete one another as
well as to find common purposes sexually and in raising children.

In a marriage the husband and wife can assume very differing types of

role relationships and find very diverse ways of achieving reciprocity with
one another provided they are satisfactory to both, or simply more

satisfactory than separating. The variant ways in which marital couples live
together are countless. However, when the birth of a child turns a marriage

The Family: The Developmental Setting 12

into a nuclear family, the spouses’ ways of relating to one another must not
only shift to make room for the children, but limits are also set upon how they

can relate to one another if they are also to provide a proper developmental

setting for their children.

American Handbook of Psychiatry 13

The Family as a Small Group

Even though a marriage relationship is a very complicated matter, it can

be studied and understood in terms of a dyadic interaction, including the

influence of other persons and other situations upon the two marital

partners. A family, in contrast, cannot be grasped simply in interactional

terms, for it forms a true small group with a unity of its own. The family has
the characteristics of all true small groups, of which it is the epitome: the

action of any member affects all; unless members find reciprocally

interrelating roles, conflict or the repression of one or more members

follows; to function properly the group requires unity of objectives and

leadership toward these objectives; the maintenance of group morale

requires each member to give some precedence to the needs of the group

over his own desires; it has a tendency to divide up into dyads that exclude
others from significant relationships and transactions. These and still other

characteristics of small groups are heightened in the family because of the

intense and prolonged interdependency of its members, which requires the

family, in particular, to have structure, clarity of roles, and leadership to

promote the essential unity and to minimize divisive tendencies. The family,

moreover, is a very special type of group with characteristics that are

determined both by the biological differences of its members and also by the
very special purposes it serves. A designation of these characteristics can lead

to an appreciation of why the structure of the nuclear family must meet

The Family: The Developmental Setting 14

 certain requirements.

Generational Differences

The nuclear family is composed of persons of two generations, and the

members of each have different needs, prerogatives, obligations, and

functions in the family. The parents who have grown up in two different

families seek to merge themselves and their backgrounds into a new unit that
satisfies the sexual and emotional needs of both and helps bring completion

to their personalities in a relationship that seeks to be permanent for them.

The new relationship requires the intrapsychic reorganization of each spouse

to take cognizance of an alter ego. Wishes and desires of a spouse that can be
set aside must be differentiated from needs that cannot be neglected.

Although individuals, as parents they function as a coalition, dividing the

tasks of living and childrearing. They are properly dependent on one another,

but parents cannot be dependent on immature children without distorting

the children’s development. They provide nurturance and give of themselves

so that the children can develop, serving as guides, educators, and models for

their offspring even when they are unaware of it. As objects of identification

and as basic love objects for their children, how the parents behave and how
they interrelate with one another, and not simply what they do to and for

their child, are of utmost importance to the child’s personality development.

American Handbook of Psychiatry 15

 Children, in contrast to parents, receive their primary training in group

living and in socialization within the family and are properly dependent upon

their parents for many years, forming intense bonds to them while

developing through assimilation from the parents and the introjection of their

characteristics. Yet the children must so learn to live within the family that

they can eventually emerge from it into the broader society, or at least be

capable of starting families of their own as members of the parental

generation.

Gender Differences

The nuclear family is also composed of persons of two genders with

complementary functions and role allocations as well as anatomical

differences. The primary female role derives from woman’s biological

makeup and is related to the nurturing of children and the maintenance of the
home needed for that purpose, which has led women to have a particular

interest in interpersonal relationships and the emotional harmony of family

members—an expressive-affectional role. The male role, also originally

related to physique, traditionally is concerned with the support and

protection of the family and with establishing its position within the larger

society—an instrumental-adaptive role.

Intrafamiliar Bonds

The Family: The Developmental Setting 16

 The family relationships are held firm by erotic and affectional bonds.

As the marriage is expected to be permanent, the parents are not only

permitted but expected to have sexual relationships. Conversely all direct

sexual relationships within the family are prohibited to the children; and even

the erogenous gratification from parental figures that properly accompanies

nurturant care must be progressively frustrated lest the bonds to the family

become too firm and prevent the child’s investments of interests, energy, and
affection beyond the family. The de-erotization of the child’s relationships to

other family members is a primary task of the family.

The Family as a Shelter

The family forms a physical and emotional shelter for its members

within the larger society. However, the family must reflect and transmit the

society’s techniques of adaptation to its children including the culture’s

systems of meanings and logic, its ethos and ethics, to assure that the children

will be able to function when they emerge from the family into the broader

society.

These characteristics of the nuclear family, and corollaries derived from

them, set requisites for the parents and for their marital relationship if the

family they form is to provide a suitable setting for the harmonious

development of their offspring and for directing their development into

American Handbook of Psychiatry 17

reasonably integrated adults.

The Family: The Developmental Setting 18

The Parental Requisites

In considering the family’s essential functions in regard to the

development of its children, it is of critical importance to recognize that the

child does not grow up to attain a mature, workable personality simply

through the nurturance of inborn directives and potentialities;

he does not simply develop into an integrated and adaptable person

unless fixations occur because of some innate tendency, some emotional

trauma, or some flaw in maternal nurturance during the early years of his

development. The child requires positive direction and guidance in a suitable

interpersonal environment and social system. The positive molding forces

have largely been overlooked because they have been built into the

institutions and customs of all workable societies and particularly into the

family, which has everywhere knowingly or unknowingly carried out the task
of shaping the child’s development. The family fosters and organizes the

child’s development by carrying out a number of interrelated functions,

which I shall consider under the headings of nurture, structure, and enculture.
We must examine the nature of these essential functions to understand

human personality development and its aberrations properly.

Nurture

The parental nurturant function must meet the child’s needs and

American Handbook of Psychiatry 19

supplement his immature capacities in a different manner at each phase of his
development. This is the one function of the family that has been specifically

recognized by most developmental theories. As it has been the focus of

intensive study, it does not require elaboration here. It concerns the nature of

the nurturance provided from the total care given to the newborn to how the
parents foster adolescent movement toward independence from them. It

involves filling not only the child’s physical needs but also his emotional

needs for security, consistency, and affection; and it includes furnishing

opportunities for the child to utilize new capacities as they unfold. Proper

nurturance requires the parents to have the capacities, knowledge, and

empathy to alter their ways of relating to the child in accord with his

changing needs. The capacity to nurture or to be maternal is not an entity.

Some mothers can nurture a child properly so long as he is almost completely

dependent but become apprehensive and have difficulty as soon as he

becomes a toddler and cannot be fully guarded from the dangers in his
surroundings; some have difficulties in permitting the child to form the

erotized libidinal bonds essential for the proper development of the

preoedipal child, whereas others have difficulty in frustrating the child’s

erotized attachment during the oedipal phase. However, unstable parents and

grossly incompatible parents are often disturbing influences throughout all of

the child’s developmental years, and such panphasic influences are often

more significant in establishing personality traits or disturbances in children

The Family: The Developmental Setting 20

than are fixations at a specific developmental phase. While the mother is

usually the primary nurturant figure to the child, particularly when the child

is small, and though she is usually the family expert in childrearing and child

care, her relationship with the child does not transpire in isolation but is

influenced by the total family setting. The mother’s capacity to care for her

child properly is influenced greatly by her marital interaction with her

husband, by the demands of other children, and by the relationships between

her children as well as by her husband’s relationship with each child. The

quality and nature of the nurture that a child receives profoundly influences

his emotional development. It affects his capacities to differentiate from the

mother and the emotional context of his relationships to others; it affects his
vulnerability to frustration and the anger, aggressiveness, anxiety,

hopelessness, and helplessness he experiences under various conditions. As

Erikson has emphasized, it influences the quality of the basic trust a child
develops—the trust he has in others, in himself, and in the world in which he

lives. It contributes to the child’s self-esteem as a member of the male or

female sex. It lays the foundations for trust in the reliability of collaboration
with others and in the utility of communicating verbally as a means of solving

problems. A person’s physiological functioning can be and perhaps always is

permanently influenced by the way in which the parental nurturing figures

respond to his physiological needs.

From these brief comments it is apparent why so much attention has

American Handbook of Psychiatry 21

 properly been paid to the parental nurturant activities and how profoundly

they influence the development of a person; but they are but one aspect of

what a child requires from his parents and his family.

Structure

Let us now turn to consider the relationship between the dynamic

organization of the family and the personality integration of its offspring.

Although the family organization differs from one society to another and with

social class and ethnic group within a society, it seems likely that the family

everywhere follows certain organizational principles both because of its

biological makeup and because of the specific functions it subserves. As noted

above, the family members must find reciprocally interrelating roles or

distortions in the personalities of one or more members will occur. The

division of a family into two generations and two sexes lessens role conflicts

and tends to provide an area free from conflict into which the immature child
can develop, and directs him or her to grow into the proper gender identity,

which forms the cornerstone of a stable ego identity. While all groups require

unity of leadership, the family contains two leaders—the father and the

mother—with different but interrelated functions that permit them to form

the required coalition that permits unity of leadership. We may hazard that in

order for the family to develop a structure that can properly direct the

integration of its offspring, the spouses must form a coalition as parents,

The Family: The Developmental Setting 22

 maintain the boundaries between the generations, and adhere to their

respective gender-linked roles. These requirements may sound rather simple

until we explore their ramifications.

The Parental Coalition

As has been noted, all small groups require unity of leadership, but the

family has a dual leadership. The mother, no matter how subjugated, is the
expressive-affectional leader; the out his or her cardinal functions. The

mother, father, the instrumental leader. A coalition between these leaders is

necessary not only to provide unity of direction but also to afford each parent

the support essential for carrying for example, can better delimit her erotic
investment in the small child to maternal feelings when her sexual needs are

being satisfied by her husband. The family is less likely to break up into dyads
that create rivalries and jealousies if the parents form a unity in relating to

their children; and, particularly, a child’s tendency to possess one or the other
parent for himself alone—the essence of the oedipal situation—is more

readily overcome if the parental coalition is firm and the child’s egocentric

fantasies are frustrated and redirected to the reality that requires repression

of such wishes. If the parents form a coalition both as parents and as a

married couple, then the child, who is provided with adult models that treat

one another as alter egos, each striving for the partner’s satisfaction as well as

for his own, is very likely to grow up valuing marriage as an institution that

American Handbook of Psychiatry 23

provides emotional satisfaction and security, thus gaining a long-range goal.

The child properly requires two parents: a parent of the same sex, with
whom he can identify and who forms an object of identification to follow into

adulthood, and a parent of the opposite sex, who serves as a basic love object

and whose love and approval is sought by identifying with the parent of the
same sex. However, a parent fills neither role effectively for a child if

denigrated, despised, or treated as a nonentity, or even as an enemy, by the

spouse. Parents who are irreconcilable in reality are likely to become

irreconcilable introjects in the child, causing confused and contradictory

internal directives. It is possible for parents to form a reasonable coalition for

their children despite marital discord and to some extent even despite

separation; they can agree about how children should be raised and support
their spouses to the children as worthwhile persons and as good parents even

if their ways and ideas differ.

A variety of difficulties can follow upon failures of the parental coalition.

The growing child may invest his energy and attention in supporting one or

the other parent or in seeking to bridge the gap between them, rather than

utilizing his energies for his own development. Sometimes the child becomes
a scapegoat with his problems magnified into the major source of dissent

between the parents, and he comes to feel responsible for their difficulties. A
child may willingly oblige and assume the role of villain in order to mask the

The Family: The Developmental Setting 24

 parental discord, thereby retaining the two parents he needs. The child may
also be caught in an impossible situation in which any attempt to please one

parent elicits rebuff or rejection from the other. When the parents fail to

achieve a coalition, there are many ways in which the child becomes subject
to conflicting motivations, directives, and standards that interfere with the

development of a well-integrated personality.

The Generation Boundaries

The division of the nuclear family into two generations lessens the

danger of role conflict and furnishes space free from competition with a

parent into which the child can develop. The generational division is a major

factor in providing structure to the family. The parents are the nurturing and

educating generation and provide adult models and objects of identification

for the child to emulate and internalize. The child requires the security of

dependency to be able to utilize his energies in his own development, and his
personality becomes stunted if he must emotionally support the parents he

needs for security. A different type of affectional relationship exists between

parents than between parent and child. However, the situation is complicated

because of the intense relationship heightened by erogenous feelings that

properly exists between the mother and each preoedipal child and by the

slow differentiation of the child from his original symbiotic union with his

mother. The generational division aids both mother and child to overcome

American Handbook of Psychiatry 25

the bond, as is essential to enable the child to find a proper place as a boy or

girl member of the family and then to invest his energies in peer groups and

schooling, as well as in gaining his own identity. The generation boundaries

can be breached by the parents in various ways, such as by the mother failing
to establish boundaries between herself and a son; by the parent using a child

to fill needs unsatisfied by a spouse; by the parent acting as a rival to a child;

by the father seeking to be more of a child than a spouse. Incestuous and near
incestuous relationships in which a parent overtly or covertly gains erotic

gratification from a child form the most obvious disruptions of generation

lines. When the child is used by one parent to fill needs unsatisfied by the

other, the child can seek to widen the gap between his parents and insert

himself into it; and by finding an essential place in completing a parent’s life

he need not—and perhaps cannot—turn to the extrafamilial world for self-

completion. The resolution of the oedipal situation thus depends for its

proper completion upon having a family in which the parents are primarily
reliant upon one another or at least upon other adults. Further, if a parent

feels excluded by a child, the child’s fears of retribution and retaliation may
not be simply projections of his own wishes to be rid of a parent, but may

derive from the reality of having a jealous and hostile parent.

Confusions of the generation boundaries within the nuclear family

together with the ensuing role conflicts can distort the child’s development in

a variety of ways, some of which have already been indicated. The child’s

The Family: The Developmental Setting 26

 proper place within the family is invaded; rivalry with parents absorbs

energies and fosters internalized conflicts; a parent’s dependency upon a

child occupies and preoccupies a child prematurely with problems of

completing the life of another rather than with his own development.
Aggressive and libidinal impulses directed toward the parents become

heightened, rather than undergoing repression and gradual resolution, and

are controlled only through strongly invested defensive mechanisms.

The Sex-Linked Roles

Security of gender identity is a cardinal factor in the achievement of a

stable ego identity; and of all factors entering into the formation of
personality characteristics, the child’s sex is probably the most decisive.

Confusions concerning sexual identity and dissatisfactions with one’s sex can
contribute to the etiology of many neuroses and character disorders as well

as to perversions; and probably all schizophrenic patients are seriously

confused concerning their sexual identity. A child does not attain proper sex-

linked attributes simply by being born a boy or girl, but through gender role

allocation that starts at birth and then develops through role assumptions

and identifications as he grows older. The maintenance of appropriate

gender-linked roles by the parents is one of the most significant factors in

guiding the child’s proper development as a boy or girl. Clear-cut reversals in

the parents’ sex-linked roles obviously distort the child’s development, either

American Handbook of Psychiatry 27

when they are in the sexual sphere, as when a parent is overtly homosexual,

or when they concern the divisions of tasks in maintaining the family. While it

is clear that a child whose father performs the mothering functions, both

tangibly and emotionally, while the mother supports the family will usually
gain a distorted image of masculinity and femininity, the common problem is

usually more subtle: the inability of the mother to fill an expressive-

affectional role or of the father to provide instrumental leadership for the

family. As Parsons and Bales have pointed out, a cold and unyielding mother

is more deleterious than a cold and unyielding father, whereas a weak and

ineffectual father is more damaging than a weak and ineffectual mother." Still

more explicitly, a cold and aloof mother may be more detrimental to a

daughter who requires experience in childhood with a nurturant mother in

order to attain feminine and maternal characteristics, whereas an ineffectual

father may be more deleterious to a son who must overcome his initial

identification with his mother, as well as his early dependency upon her, to
gain security in his ability to provide for a wife and family. Although the

sharing of role tasks has become a necessity in most contemporary families,

which leads to some blurring of the parental roles, there is still a need for the

parents to maintain their primary gender-linked roles and to support one

another in them.

The child’s identification with the parent of the same sex is likely to be

seriously impeded when this parent is unacceptable to the other whose love

The Family: The Developmental Setting 28

the child seeks, a difficulty that can be heightened by the homosexual

tendencies of a parent. The mother may be basically unacceptable to a father

with homosexual proclivities simply because she is a woman; and the

daughter may respond by seeking to be boyish, by gaining the father’s

affection by being intellectual, or through some other means that do not

threaten him by feminine appeal. If a mother, on the other hand, is

consciously or unconsciously rivalrous with all men, her son may readily
learn that masculinity will evoke rebuff from her, and fears of engulfment or

castration by the mother become more realistic sources of anxiety than fears

of retaliatory rejection or castration by the father.

Of course, other problems can create difficulties for a child in gaining a

secure gender identity, such as when parents convey the wish that the boy
had been born a girl or vice versa, or the need to avoid incestuous

involvements; still, when parents adequately fill their own gender-linked

roles and accept and support the spouse in his or her role, a general
assurance of a proper outcome is provided.

The relationship between the family structure and the integration of the

offspring’s ego development is a topic that is only beginning to be studied.

Still, a little consideration leads us to realize that the provision of proper

models for identification, motivation toward the proper identification,

security of sexual identity, the transition through the oedipal phase, the

American Handbook of Psychiatry 29

 repression of incestuous tendencies before adolescence, and many other such
matters are profoundly affected by the family’s organization. Unless the

parents can form an adequate coalition, maintain proper boundaries between

the generations, and provide appropriate gender role models by their

behavior, conflicts and role distortions will interfere with the proper

channeling of the child’s drives, energies, and role learning.

The Family and Enculturation

The proper enculturation of the child within the family may be more

properly divided into the process of socialization and the process of

enculturation. Under socialization we may somewhat arbitrarily subsume

how the child learns basic roles and institutions through interactions

between family members; and enculturation concerns that which is

transmitted symbolically from generation to generation rather than through

societal transactions. However, there is considerable overlap, and the two

functions cannot always be clearly distinguished.

The form and function of the family evolves with the culture and

subserves the needs of the society of which it is a subsystem. The family is the

first social system that the child knows, and simply by living in it he properly

gains familiarity with the basic roles as they are carried out in the society in
which he happens to live: the roles of parents and child, of boy and girl, of

The Family: The Developmental Setting 30

man and woman, of husband and wife. He also learns how these roles of the
family members interact with the broader society. Whereas roles are

properly considered units of the social system rather than of the personality,

they also are important in personality development through directing

behavior to fit into roles and by giving cohesion to the personality

functioning. Individuals generally do not learn patterns of living entirely on

their own, but in many situations learn roles and then modify them to their

specific individual needs.

The child also learns from his intrafamilial experiences about a variety

of basic institutions and their values, such as the institutions of family,

marriage, economic exchange, and so forth; and societal values are inculcated

by identification with parents, superego formation, teaching, example, and

interaction. The wish to participate in or avoid participating in an institution

—such as marriage—can be a major motivating force in personality

development. It is the function of the family to transmit to the offspring the

prescribed, permitted, and proscribed values of the society and the

acceptable and unacceptable means of achieving such goals. Within the family
the child is involved in a multiplicity of social phenomena that permanently

influence his development, such as the value of belonging to a mutually

protective unit; the rewards of renouncing one’s own wishes for the welfare

of a collectivity; the acceptance of hierarchies of authority and the

relationship between authority and responsibility. The family value systems,

American Handbook of Psychiatry 31

role definitions, and patterns of interrelationship enter into the child through

the family behavior far more than through what he is taught or even what the

parents consciously appreciate.

The process of enculturation concerns the acquisition of the major

techniques of adaptation that are not inherited genetically but that are
assimilated as part of the cultural heritage that is a filtrate of the collective

experiences of man’s forebears. In a complex industrial and scientific society

such as ours, the family obviously can transmit only the basic adaptive

techniques to its offspring and must rely upon schools and other specialized
institutions to teach many of the other instrumentalities of the culture.

The cultural heritage includes such tangible matters as agricultural

techniques and food preferences, modes of housing and transportation, arts

and games, as well as many less tangible matters such as status hierarchies,

religious beliefs, ethical values and behavior that are accepted as divine

commands or axiomatically as the only proper way of doing things and are
defended by various taboos. The transmission of language is a primary factor

in the inculcation of both techniques and values because the totality of the

enculturation process depends so greatly upon it. After the first year of life
the acquisition of almost all other instrumental techniques depends to a

greater or lesser extent upon language; and the collaborative interaction with
others, which is so critical to human adaptation, depends upon the use of a

The Family: The Developmental Setting 32

shared system of meanings. Indeed, the capacity to direct the self, to have any
ego functioning at all, depends upon having verbal symbols with which one

constructs and internalizes a symbolic version of the world that one can

manipulate in imaginative trial and error before committing oneself to

irrevocable action. As virtually all intact children learn to speak, we are apt to

overlook the complexities of the process of learning language as well as its

central importance to ego functioning. It required the linguistic

anthropological studies of Sapir and Whorf to illuminate how profoundly the

specific language that a person utilizes influences how he perceives, thinks,

and experiences. The studies of schizophrenic patients and their parents

illustrated how greatly faulty and distorted language usage can affect
personality development and functioning. The inculcation of a solid

foundation in the language of the culture is among the most crucial tasks

carried out by the family.

Speaking very broadly, the child learns language through attempting to

solve problems. Meanings are established rapidly or slowly, with clarity or

vagueness, in accord with how effectively and consistently the proper usage
of words gains objectives for the child. The process depends upon reciprocal

interaction between the child and his tutors, the consistency among his
teachers, the cues they provide, the words to which they respond or remain

oblivious, the meanings that they reward consistently or sporadically, or that

they indicate are useless, ineffectual, undesirable, repugnant, or punishable.

American Handbook of Psychiatry 33

Many other factors are also involved in the child’s attainment of language, but

it is clear that the family plays a very important part in the process. The

categorizing of experiences through the abstraction of common attributes, the

labeling of categories by words, and the sharpening of the meaning of words

by grasping the critical attributes designated by the word are essential for

both ego development and proper ego functioning.

In contrast to the commonly accepted dictum expressed by Hartmann,

the infant is not born adapted to survive in an average, expectable

environment. The range of environments in which he is physiologically

capable of surviving are relatively limited, but every viable society develops a

set of instrumental techniques and institutions that take the infant’s essential

needs into account and modify the environment to the child’s capacities.
Then, very largely through the use of language, the child learns the culture’s

techniques of adaptation more or less adequately, and gains an ability to

delay the gratification of basic drives, to internalize parental attributes,

directives, and teachings, and to be motivated by future security as well as by

drive impulsions. Further, the world in which he lives, the behavior of others,

and his own needs gain some degree of order and predictability through the

categories provided by the language.

Upon consideration it seems apparent that the parental styles of

behaving, thinking, and communicating, as well as their specific patterns of

The Family: The Developmental Setting 34

defenses, are critical factors in the development of various personality traits
in their children, both through direct example and the internalization of such

traits by the children as well as through the reactions that such styles produce

in the child. When Bateson and Jackson formulated their double-bind

hypothesis of schizophrenia; when Lidz, Fleck, et al. noted how schizophrenic

patients had been taught to misperceive, to deny the obvious, to be suspicious

of outsiders; and when Wynne and Singer documented that virtually all

schizophrenic patients have parents who have either amorphous or

fragmented styles of communicating, a new dimension was added to the

study of personality development as well as to the study of psychopathology.

In the study of the obsessional character, for example, instead of focusing

primarily upon what occurred in the patient’s “anal” phase of development,

we begin to note that the parents of such persons are usually obsessional

themselves, unable to tolerate direct expressions of hostility in themselves or

in their children. They are very likely to teach the use of isolation, undoing,
and reaction formation as a defense against the expression of hostility both

through their own example and through what they approve and disapprove in
their children.

Such obsessional parents are likely to use rigid bowel training and to
limit the young child’s autonomy and thus foster ambivalence, stubbornness,

shame, and undoing defenses in many ways other than simply through the

way they direct the child’s bowel training.

American Handbook of Psychiatry 35

Conclusions

Personality development cannot be properly studied or understood

abstracted from the family matrix in which it takes place. The major foci of
attention—the childrearing techniques and the emotional quality of the

nurturant care provided the child—while clearly very important do not

encompass the topic. The child’s development into an integrated individual is

guided by the dynamic organization of his family, which channels his drives

and directs him into proper gender and generation roles. The child must grow

into and internalize the institutions and roles of the society as well as identify

with persons who themselves have assimilated the culture. The child acquires
characteristics through identification but also by reactions to parental figures

and through finding reciprocal roles with them. His appreciation of the worth

and meaning of both social roles and institutions is markedly affected by the
manner in which his parents fill their roles, relate to one another, and behave

in other contexts. The perceived reliability of the verbal tools that are

necessary for collaboration with others and for thinking and self-direction
depend greatly upon the tutelage within the family and on the parents’ styles

of communicating. In the study of personality development and in our search

for proper guidelines to help provide stable emotional development, the

emphasis upon what parents should or should not do to the child, for the
child, and with the child in each phase of his development has often led to

neglect of other more significant familial influences. Who the parents are;

The Family: The Developmental Setting 36

how they behave and communicate; how they relate to one another as well as

to the child; and what sort of family they create including that intangible

factor, the atmosphere of the home, are of paramount importance. Numerous

sources of deviant personality development open before us when we consider

the implications of the approach to personality development presented in this

chapter.

American Handbook of Psychiatry 37

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American Handbook of Psychiatry 39