Haven in a Heartless World

Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged by Christopher Lasch, 189 pages

In Lasch's analysis, what is now considered the "traditional family" is the bourgeois ideal of the nuclear family as the only arena for the free expression of emotion and a private sanctuary from a public world ruled by impersonal - indeed, incomprehensible - forces.  Against conventional wisdom, Lasch identifies this concept as only having emerged as industrialization made work - already displaced from the home into the marketplace - less meaningful, but had begun to decline as early as the end of the nineteenth century, as the state increasingly took over the duties of child-rearing and the health industry medicalized virtually every aspect of private life.

Much of Haven in a Heartless World is taken up with a history of psychological and sociological thinking as it relates to the family.  Lasch claims that, from the very outset, social scientists viewed their role as not merely descriptive but prescriptive, leading inexorably towards a worldview in which individuals are wholly incapable of forming or sustaining healthy relationships without the mediation of experts.  The final effect of this is the interruption of the individual's maturation at a dependent, infantile stage, perfectly captured by the '60s youth culture and its repudiation "of the desirability of growing up at all."

It is Lasch's central thesis that the sociological and psychiatric mainstream have fatally neglected Freud's insights into the unconscious and the mechanics of repression.  With the mother and father increasingly distanced from a child supervised by the health industry and enculturated by his peer group, the primal tensions of early childhood are never satisfactorily resolved, producing a narcissistic adult who fears intimacy and regards law as the mere application of power.  The result is universal hedonism, mass cynicism, the collapse of any concept of legitimate authority, and the impossibility of community.