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PARTISAN REVIEW
alien contingencies. Once freed from the world, the family will appear
to
~
a disclosure of pure psychological experience. The lessons of such experience
will then be taken out beyond the family circle, and psychological trans–
actions in the world will be judged in terms of familial categories, which
seem like pure types.
Let me give some concrete examples. Patterns of friendship among
adults at work today follow a course unlike those which obtained four gene–
rations ago. The more a friendship between adults at work grows, the more
attempts are made to integrate the adults into the respective family circles,
and to form friendships between the families. American middle-class
workers open the gates
to
the home rather readily to their friends,
the
French bourgeoisie rather reluctantly, but the path of friendship is the same.
One of my students has done a comparative study of friendships between
middle-class adults in London and Paris in the 1870s, as these are portrayed
in the pulp fiction of the time, and found something entirely different from
this modern pattern. Among males, a friend became someone with whom
you could engage in escape from the rigors of the family ; a friend was
some–
one to take out rather than invite in. Among females, friendship also in–
volved progressive dissociation from family relations; a friend was someone
who could become a confidante for grievances against both one's children
and one's spouse. Because women were incarcerated in the house, female re–
lationships appeared familial, but in fact friends in the house provided a
chance to rail against the tyrannies of the home . A century ago, then,
friendship for both sexes meant escape from family ties; today it involves a
reinforcement of them.
Taken even something so apparently opposed to the mores of the bour–
geois family as the hippie commune. A study of communes in the 1960s
found them to be insistently concerned with reliving old family issues and
relationships in order
to
create a higher kind of family . A common problem
for the collective family arose whenever psychological needs were asserted
against the whole, such as the need for psychological experience outside
the
commune. When these needs could not be made consonant with the com–
mune's life, then the commune was threatened . For example, if you are
sleeping with someone not part of the commune, why is it you don't ask
him or her to come live in the commune? The refusal to familize these rela–
tions was taken as a betrayal.
The most profound indicator of the family as an image of a purely psy–
chological and morally dominant condition comes from the realm of
ideology. Today our concept of psychological emancipation involves libera–
tion of the self rather than liberation from the self. In ordinary speech we
