Family Studies and Changing Concepts of Personality Development

Abstract

Summary Many of the most significant changes in concepts of personality development and maldevelopment derive simply from belated appreciation that the child grows up in a family; and that the child requires considerable positive input from those who raise him to grow into a reasonably integrated person. Only recently have psychiatrists and psychoanalysts begun to focus on the influence of the family transactions throughout the formative years. The paper briefly presents the requisites a family must provide to assure the integrated development of its offspring and groups them under four headings: the parental nurturant functions that change with each phase of the offspring's development; the influence of the dynamic organization of the family on the offspring's intrapsychic structure, affecting self-boundaries, gender identity, superego directives, and so forth; conveying through family transactions the basic social roles and societal institutions to the child; transmitting the instrumental techniques of the culture, and particularly its language with its system of meanings and logic upon which virtually all ego functioning depends. The paper considers the evidence that the “choice of the neurosis” — or more correctly, the choice of the psychiatric syndrome — does not depend only upon fixation at various phases of pre-genital development, but also, and perhaps primarily, upon the panphasic influence of the intrafamilial environment. It is of particular importance to recognize that there is a very direct relationship between the family transactions, the separation-individuation process, boundary formation, the attainment of various degrees of object constancy, problems of splitting, superego directives, and what can be conscious and what need be repressed into the unconscious. The failure to recognize the import of the family has interfered with the formation of an integrated developmental theory that can unite various aspects of the developmental process that have remained more or less isolated from one another — drive theory, object relations, ego psychology, separation-individuation, and cognitive development. Finally the question is raised if in providing guidance to parents we have been amiss in not focusing on such matters as who the parents are, how they relate to one another as well as to the child, the values they communicate by their behaviour — matters that are fundamental and to which almost all else is secondary, but about which relatively little has been said or taught.