Interactionism & The Family

Interactionists try to analyse the family from the point of view of the family members and concentrate on family interaction i.e. the subjective meanings and experience that the family has for the individual. How do social actors construct their social world

Pahl believes that the family is a source of many tensions …Think about how this is so? Many issues have to be nogotiated in family life? RAY PAHL

Think about your own ‘family’… Imagine an ‘annoying’ cousin comes to your door out of the blue. Will you help them out? House them for a while? You will probably feel ‘obliged’ to help them as there is a moral obligation due to family commitments

Pahl believes that we should move away from seeing the family merely as an INSTITUTION – but that we should see it more as a PROCESS, producing a ‘self’ and ‘self-identity’ Ray Pahl

R D Laing and David Cooper Both are phenomenological psychiatrists who condemn the family as an institution and offer a radical alternative to the Functionalist notion of the family. R D Laing and David Cooper

R D Laing – The Politics of the Family For him, ‘madness’ is not a personal deficiency but must be interpreted as a way of making sense of experience. Laing spoke of schizophrenic families rather than schizophrenic individuals R D Laing – The Politics of the Family

More explicitly, the family is like a ‘nexus’ or ‘prison’ with its function of conformity on the individual and therefore the family interferes with the individual’s development of ‘self’.

DAVID COOPER The Death of the Family

Cooper wants to abolish the nuclear family – he believes the family in bourgeois society has a peculiarly limiting and constraining role on the individual self:

“The child, in fact, is taught primarily not how to survive in society but how to submit to it. Surface rituals like etiquette, organised games, mechanical learning operations at school replace deep experience of spontaneous creativity, inventive play, freely developing fantasies and dreams.”

Cooper’s Marxist background shows when he argues that the family operates “as a ideological conditioning device (agent of social control) in an exploitative society – COOPER

Edmund Leach– A Runaway World?

Edmund Leach presents a pessimistic (negative) view of the family in society.

“In the past kinsfolk and neighbours gave the individual continuous moral support throughout his life. Today the domestic household is isolated. The family looks inward towards itself; there is an intensification of emotional stresses between the husband and wife and parents and children. The strain is greater than most of us can bear.” nuclear family becomes like an overloaded electric circuit.