Robert Boyers
THE LAINGIAN FAMILY
The attack on the nuclear family will probably turn out to be
the most important development of our period, a phenomenon beside
which other militancies, of whatever character, will eventually seem
ephemeral and even somewhat parochial. What we confront is the general
loss of faith in the efficacy of the family unit to nurture the kind of
people most of us apparently think we ought to be. With this particular
erosion a whole variety of alternate faiths have been intermittently
promoted -- faith in the extended family, in the communal mode, faith
in the necessary breakdown of sex-role distinctions and the consequent
emergence of unisexual experience, faith in life without children -- the
list can be indefinitely extended. Most of these alternate faiths have been
promoted, bought, and largely forgotten in a spirit of casual abandon the
likes of which many of us could not have imagined. Especially where the
front men qnd promoters have been professional intellectuals and
psychoanalysts we have been struck by a specious commitment to
change for its own sake and to liberations on behalf of liberation which
we would not readily have identified with cultivated and thoughtful
people.
Obviously, we had no right to be surprised, for the prospect of over–
coming everything that may conceivably be overcome has seemed to
most intellectuals a delightful prospect at least since the time of Nietz–
sche, and those who have found much to be stimulated by in
Zarathustra
might certainly have seen where all of it would lead. The spiritual timbre
of the counterculture is not often Nietzschean, of course, but the roots
are clear enough. Perhaps a more appropriate, and less distant fore–
runner, is Wilhelm Reich, whose assaults on the family and other estab–
lished cultural institutions are decidedly more pointed and programmatic–
than Nietzsche's, if no less eccentric. Reich, to be sure, identified himself
with a whole range of liberation to which Nietzsche could not have been
