12
PARTISAN REVIEW
On the contrary, social pathologists played a leading role in under–
mining Protestant individualism, rural values, and the old-style
family. They promoted a "democratic" conception of domestic life ,
advocated permissive childrearing, defended the rights of women,
attacked sexual repression and censorship, and sought
to
make the
members of the family more responsive
to
each others' emotional
needs, more skilled at communicating their own, and more adept, in
short, in the art of interpersonal relations. John R . Seeley and his
collaborators got closer
to
the truth when they noted, in their study of
"Crestwood Heights," the implicit feminism of the social relations
experts and their alliance with women against patriarchal values.
Indeed the mental health movement, and more broadly the "helping
professions," positioned themselves in the vanguard of the revolt
against old-fashioned middle-class values , and their ideology , rather
than harking back to the past, well suited the needs of a society based
not so much on hard work as on consumption, the search for personal
fulfillment, and the management of interpersonal relations .
It cannot even be said that the health industry seeks
to
shore up
the nuclear family by reorganizing it on a more "democratic" basis.
This may have been true earlier in the century, but the ideology of the
health industry- the cult of undemanding interpersonal
relations - has become increasingly independent of specific posi tions
for or against marriage and the monogamous family. Both the friends
and enemies of monogamy uphold divorce as a "creative act" - the
friends of marriage because it provides a necessary safety-valve and its
enemies because it can be seen as a step toward some new kind of
family structure . Both camps extol "non-binding commitments" and
reject as "role-playing" demands that individuals live up to pre–
determined expectations, whether externally imposed or self–
imposed. Both sides - if one can speak of sides at all, in a debate
where the points in contention have become so amorphous-seek
to
free the individual from guilt or failure and condemn "unrealistic"
expectations that are likely
to
give rise to those emotions . Both sides
condemn what they call romantic love , in their view the most
unrealistic expectation of all.
The praise of pure pleasure , emotional health, and easygoing
interpersonal relations , which has displaced the
work~
ethic as the
dominant sensibility, thus reflects the growing influence of the
