The Family Problem, Now
The old family is dead
M.E. O'Brien
Our current era offers a strange mix of family politics. Not long ago, the political center was united in celebrating the family as the foundation of society, a haven in the modern world, and the basis of collective resilience. The family once offered to neoliberal politicians a shared platform, keeping silent its excluded others and wayward critics. But at the margins, peculiar things are taking shape. The family problem is being raised again, anew.
On the right, the family is an ideological centerpiece of a new fascist ascendency. The current far right is not entirely new; it draws on centuries of settler colonialism and anti-Black violence, a romanticization of the family as old as bourgeois society, and fundamentalist theocratic organizing decades in the making. But something has shifted. Among its unifying themes, global fascism joins together in a defense of a particular fantasy of the traditional family. Yet tradition here takes an obscene turn, breaking with bourgeois niceties, exemplified by Trump’s open celebration of incestuous desire, predatory infidelity, and crass nepotism. The recent right-wing political attacks in the United States and beyond on abortion access and children’s gender expression highlight the importance of the family to the new fascist drive. The family is under constant threat in this fascist imaginary, and those that threaten it must be faced with violence. The family problem, the new authoritarians declare, will be answered with blood.
Against this fascist family politics, another break from the family norm is taking shape. Multiple radical formulations of the family problem have recently emerged or re-emerged. First appearing in 2016 and republished here, Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s genealogy traces revolutionary Black feminists engaging mothering as a radical rethinking of care, separating it from “motherHOOD” as “a status granted by patriarchy to white middle-class women.” In this issue, Jules Gil-Peterson joins others in raising the concept of abolition. “I needed what we all need,” she writes, “the abolition of the family form and its economy that infantilizes us all.” Joy James identifies the family as that which is invaded by the state but also bearing its own familial predations and disciplines joining the violence of the state and capital.
As a major national thinker in the developing critique of family politics, Dorothy Roberts calls for the abolition of the family policing system, sketching the state’s brutal war against Black caregiving. Family policing is not just an attack on families, she explains here, but also the production of “norms of what the family ought to be,” a “still-dominant ideal of the nuclear heterosexual family. Part of the movement to abolish family policing is to abolish these norms themselves.”
Two trends operate alongside each other in direct opposition, simultaneously constituting the present: the fascist refounding of a perverse family politics on the one hand, and the radical questioning of family norms on the other. What helps us make sense of these two breaks, the novelty of these two radically divergent ways of raising the family problem?
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The world has changed, and with it the family.
One essential explanation is offered by a critical analysis of capitalist society today. Our conjuncture is created by the last four decades of a global capitalist economic crisis. Profit-rate growth has been sustained only by bubbles, speculation, and at the direct cost of working-class life. The postwar boom that once sustained a liberal fantasy of expanding citizenship and equality has burst. No one knows how capitalism could be fixed again. Faced also with the existential threat of an ecological crisis, elites are growing desperate and the masses are restless. Both the new fascisms and the new radicalisms are forms of recognizing the old ways of cohering hegemony will no longer work. This protracted crisis of capitalism has unraveled the illusory promise that the bourgeois family form could provide universal social stability.
This broad context of protracted capitalist crisis has facilitated dramatic changes in family life. More children are coming out as trans and queer; our sex lives, when we have them, are more likely oriented towards nonreproductive sex; more people are choosing not to marry or live as single; more mothers are in the workforce; and more adults are working multiple jobs. Some of these trends are long-standing phenomena among people who are Black, poor, and queer. But all are increasingly widespread, marking the disappearance of a family norm shared by broad sections of white America in the postwar era: a housewife, a husband with a stable family-wage job, children in school, a house on mortgage—an image of bourgeois normality briefly available to a stratum of the white working class. This is no longer meaningfully accessible to nearly anyone, and no longer desired by many. The world has changed, and with it the family.
“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born,” Gramsci wrote in 1930. “In this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” His words are widely understood to be naming the rise of Italian Fascism, and perhaps also critiquing his left-wing opponents in the Italian Communist Party. Like Gramsci, we find ourselves in an interregnum between the old and the new. Perhaps the divergent ways of raising the family problem now are each morbid symptoms. The old family is dead.
The new cannot yet be born.
Photograph of female members of the People’s Liberation Army, Nepal by Li Onesto. Published in People's War in Nepal by Li Onesto, published by Pluto Press.
The demise of the bourgeois family form has a special meaning for psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis first posed the family problem as its central complex, its founding critique. Hannah Zeavin tells us early psychoanalysts relied not only on the reconstructed families of their patients, but also on direct observation of their own personal families. It was in theorizing the bourgeois family, amidst a cauldron of its others, that psychoanalysis offered its explanations of the human condition. In a 1938 text on the “Family Complexes,” Jacques Lacan writes of Freud’s research on the family, locating his discoveries in his specific context:
“It was at Vienna—at that time the center of a state that was the melting pot of the most diverse forms of the family, from the most archaic to the most developed, from the last agnatic grouping of Slav peasants, through feudal and merchant paternalism, to the most reduced form of the petit bourgeois and to the most decadent forms of marital instability—that the son of a Jewish patriarch discovered the Oedipus complex.”
Lacan named the beginning of psychoanalysis as the crashing together of myriad family forms, in the melting pot of industrializing Europe. Psychoanalysis was formed as the bourgeois family struggled to recognize itself amidst its others. We are witnessing the end of the historical arc of the family problem that Freud initiated: our conjuncture is the terminal crisis of the bourgeois family.
Dimly recognizing the centrality of a defunct family norm to psychoanalysis’s endeavor, some psychoanalysts treat this crisis as an existential threat. Some analysts tell us we need the father, the familial order, and its proper placement. We live in a world that has been robbed of the family as haven and of paternal authority. Otherwise, they say, we are lost to the pre-Oedipal wasteland of narcissism and psychosis. Therefore, because no one else will, the analyst must speak as the absent father to lay down the law, educate, and mold the analysand in his image. And psychoanalysis has long been taken up by normative causes and practitioners. One sadly doesn’t have to look far into the past to find a consensus among analysts that conversion therapy for homosexuality was a necessity or that a cured female patient was one ready to mother.
Yet the features here suggest that, far from being irrelevant to understanding the family problem, psychoanalysis is now absolutely essential.
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This issue provides us all a chance to listen to the many desires the family elides.
The features collected here offer multiple powerful theorizations of the family problem. Both Jules Gil-Peterson and Max Fox use psychoanalytic critique to parse the place of the child in the current political maelstrom. Gil-Peterson traces the emergence of the child as a figure of the bourgeois imaginary, dependent on the brutal dehumanization of other children in the violence of colonialism and capitalist development. “What role can psychoanalysis play in deciphering and challenging this landscape?” she asks, and she turns to Hortense J. Spillers, Frantz Fanon, and Jacqueline Rose to understand, unsettle, and make strange the divisions and exclusions that constitute the child against its excluded others. In so doing, she moves us toward the overcoming of the child and its associated violences.
Max Fox uses psychoanalytic theory to parse the current far right moral panic concerning “grooming,” where any encounter between children and trans or queer people is demonized as a predatory threat. What is at stake here is constituting children as a domain devoid of sexuality or nonnormative gender identification, erasing any possibility of trans or queer children. The adult needs the innocence of childhood to reconcile their own impossible relationship to their own desires. Psychoanalysis, in articulating the existence of childhood sexuality, offers a powerful critique of this “fixed, fetishistic image of the child.”
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Psychoanalysis also offers a means of understanding the family’s current morbid symptoms.
In Totem and Taboo, Freud offers us a mythic account of the formation of the family that begins with a prehistoric murder of the primal father, a murder society obsessively covers over. The new authoritarian leaders are loved because they are imagined to be the promised primal father, the one who has it all without limits. The fascist imagination desires not actual fathers but the uncastrated father, the all-powerful father, the one that can put everyone into their place, once and for all. Lacan writes, “If Totem and Taboo is designed to tell us that there are such things as fathers who linger on, then the true father, the only father, the one and only father from before the dawn of history, has to be the dead father.”
Alex Colston helps us navigate through the tumult of psychoanalytic debates about the absent father. The figure of the father splits psychoanalysis, both in its theoretical lineage and political commitments. “The symbolic father is nowhere, he intervenes nowhere,” Colston quotes from Lacan, challenging the analyst’s confidence in his own paternal function. The symbolic father that coheres and organizes meaning and gender is always mythic, for we have already killed him.
As well as explaining the particular form of familial fascism today, Freud’s account of the murder of the primal father also helps us make sense of the dynamic emergence of radical critiques of the family. Our moment is one where a creeping realization is emerging, one that could not have been recognized during the reign of the bourgeois family: perhaps the fantasy of the uncastrated father may not be necessary; perhaps another way of being is possible. Capitalist crisis has made even the illusion of the family ideal untenable. Fascists offer one solution: the zombie resurrection of the primal father, the manic insistence he lives among us still. The varying critics of the family form and its regimes offer another. This issue provides us all a chance to listen to the many desires the family elides.
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What lies beyond this peculiar conjuncture, this interregnum between the collapse of the old family and the reemergence of something new?
Joy James, in this issue and elsewhere, suggests one essential dimension to what must emerge beyond the family problem: inherent in rebellion is the capacity for caretaking to wrest free of the familial relation of racial capitalism. She locates splits within the maternal functions of racial capitalism, between those women who ally themselves with genocide and all those subject to its horror. She identifies the “longest war” waged by the United States against “enslaved or captive Black women.” The empire depends on exploiting the “emotional, intellectual, cultural, and physical labor” of these “Captive Maternals.” Yet their care relations can become a strategy of resistance. This is the revolutionary possibility that could be unlocked beyond the family problem.
Historically, the family has faced its most radical challenges during periods of mass political tumult. Rachel Greenspan examines the political conditions in early 1970s Argentina that made a radical (if contradictory) critique of the family briefly possible. Greenspan traces the brutal counterinsurgency of the Dirty War, the convergence of Marxism and psychoanalysis, and the broader ferment of Latin American thought and struggle. For Austrian Argentine psychoanalyst Marie Langer, the family problem has far-reaching implications: to critique the family is to call capitalist society into question.
Before capitalism destroyed the myth of the bourgeois family, movements of the late 1960s and 1970s had sought to politically overcome it. Writing in 1972, Mariarosa Dalla Costa describes women of the mass working-class rebellion of Italy’s Hot Autumn. She tells of housewives setting out into the streets, refusing the roles assigned to them by the fantasy and social structure of the family. She writes that the many sites of struggle outside the home presuppose it: “factory meetings, neighborhood meetings, student assemblies, each of them are legitimate places for women’s struggle, where women can encounter and confront men—women versus men, if you like, but as individuals, rather than mother-father, son-daughter.”
Instead of meeting her family members as wife and mother within the home, she encounters them at meetings and barricades. There they fight about gender roles, but also can open onto new relationships of camaraderie and solidarity. Dalla Costa is here pointing to a common experience in mass rebellions: old social roles break down, and the opportunity to encounter each other as people in radically new ways emerges.
This is also a beautiful and succinct description of the psychoanalytic process. By working through our transference neurosis through which we have long encountered everyone as if they were our family members, we remake and rediscover ourselves. In that process, we learn to encounter again our analysts, the people in our lives, and even our family members, but now as individuals, as comrades, as people we are able to see fully for the first time.
The versions of psychoanalysis in these pages critically challenge the normative expectations of the family, the violence of the family policing system, and the therapeutic regime that reinforces gender roles on the patient. These articles point to another possibility for the psychoanalytic endeavor—to learn to relate to others beyond the baggage, accumulated trauma, and desperate agendas that typically drive our lives. On the other side of the transference, the other side of our fantasy, we can encounter each other anew. This encounter can be a confrontation, but it can also be a chance to love each other as the people we are and as the people we may become.
Between the resistance and maroonage of the Captive Maternal in rebellion and the fresh encounter of women and their family members meeting on the barricades, something made possible only by working through the family problem takes shape.