By MARIA RITA KEHL*
A The family was deprivatized from the second half of the 20th century onwards and the central nucleus of the contemporary family was imploded, crossed by intimate contact with adults, adolescents and children from other families
1.
One of the complaints that psychoanalysts hear most often in their offices is this: “I wish I had a normal family!” Teenagers whose parents are separated resent the absence of their father (or mother) in the home. Single women complain that they have not been able to form families, and separated women accuse themselves of not having been able to maintain theirs. Divorced men seek a second chance to form a family.
Single mothers are dying of guilt because they did not give their children a “real family.” And young single people place great hopes in the possibility of forming different families—that is, better ones—than the ones they came from. Above all this talk, there is an institutional discourse that blames the dissolution of the family for the situation of social degradation in which we live.
The speakers of this discourse can be lawyers, educators, religious figures, psychologists. The press is its preferred medium: every year, many times a year, newspapers and magazines interview “professionals in the field” to emphasize the relationship between the dissolution of the family as we knew it until the first half of the 20th century and juvenile delinquency, violence, drug addiction, disorientation among young people, etc.
As if they believed that the family is the nucleus of transmission of power that can and should bear, alone, the entire edifice of national morality and order. As if the social crisis affecting the entire country had no relation to the degradation of public spaces that has been systematically occurring in Brazil, particularly affecting the poorest classes for almost forty years.
And above all, as if they ignored what we, psychoanalysts, can never forget: the “normal” nuclear family, monogamous, patriarchal and endogamous, which predominated between the beginning of the 19th century and the middle of the 20th century in the West (such a short time? yes…), was the great laboratory of neuroses as psychoanalysis, precisely in that period, came to know.
With each new demographic census carried out in Brazil, there is renewed evidence that the family is no longer the same. But “the same” in relation to what? Where is the zero point in relation to which we measure the degree of “dissolution” of the contemporary family? The phrase “the family is no longer the same” already indicates the belief that at some point the Brazilian family would have corresponded to a pattern outside of history.
It indicates that we evaluate our family life in comparison to an idealized family model, a model that corresponded to the needs of the emerging bourgeois society in the mid-19th century. In fact, recent demographic studies indicate trends away from this pattern, which the Brazilian middle classes adopted as an ideal.
2.
In this scenario of extreme mobility of family configurations, new forms of coexistence have been improvised around the need – which has not changed – to raise children, the fruits of temporary loving unions that no law, of God or of men, can force to last forever.
Contemporary society, governed above all by market laws that disseminate imperatives of well-being, pleasure and immediate satisfaction of all desires, only recognizes love and sexual fulfillment as legitimate foundations of conjugal unions. The freedom of choice that this moral change provides, the (real) possibility of trying to correct one's own destiny countless times, exacts its price in helplessness and discomfort.
Helplessness is felt because the family has ceased to be a solid institution and has become a circumstantial and precarious group, governed by the least reliable law among humans: the law of affections and sexual impulses.
The discomfort comes from the debt we charge when comparing the family we managed to improvise with the family our parents offered us. Or with the family our grandparents offered their children. Or with the ideal family our grandparents inherited from previous generations, who did not necessarily achieve it. How far back in time will we have to go to find the ideal family with which we compare ours?
3.
It is not necessary to go back to the European bourgeois revolutions to look for what was lost in the West, and particularly in Brazil, since the 1950s. It is enough to remember what the “traditional Brazilian family” was to ask: what are we lamenting that has been lost or transformed? Would society be healthier if it were still organized along the lines of large rural families, at once protected and oppressed by the patriarch of the big house who controlled the sexuality of women and the destiny of men?
Do we miss the family organized around the landowning patriarch, with its counterpart of illegitimate children abandoned in the slave quarters or in the colony, the silent and sighing official wife, the obedient and fearful children of the father, among whom one or two future apprentices of domestic tyrants would stand out? Wouldn't the retroactive feeling of comfort and security that we nostalgically project onto the Brazilian rural patriarchy, as Roberto Schwarz rightly pointed out in “As ideias fora do lugar”, be a result of the exploitation of slave labor, which Brazil was the last country to abolish, almost at the dawn of the 20th century?
Or do we miss the emerging family of the urban middle classes, closed in on themselves, incestuous as in a drama by Nelson Rodrigues, fearful of any contagion with members of the immediately lower class, kept at a distance at the cost of absurd prejudices and restrictions?
Do we miss the “good” families who lived in fear of their own neighbors, afraid of each new phase of life, terrified of the sexuality of their teenage sons and daughters – slanderous and envious of other people’s lives, managing their married life as if they were running a small business? Do we miss the marriages induced by almost endogamous relationships, strictly restricted to people of our level and maintained at the cost of economic dependence, sexual inexperience and the alienation of women?
4.
In a certain way, the family became deprivatized from the second half of the 20th century onwards, not because the public space regained the importance it had in social life until the 18th century, but because the central nucleus of the contemporary family was imploded, crossed by intimate contact with adults, adolescents and children from other families.
In the confusing genealogical tree of the tentacular family, non-blood siblings live with “stepfathers” or “stepmothers” (for lack of better terms), sometimes from a second or third union of one of their parents, accumulating deep bonds with people who are not part of the original nucleus of their lives.
Each of these super-branched trees preserves the outline of adults' desires throughout the various phases of their lives – erratic desire, made even more complex within the framework of a culture that enables and demands that subjects fight tirelessly to satisfy their fantasies.
It is also important to note the role of the media, particularly domestic and omnipresent television, in breaking down family isolation and, consequently, in the increasing difficulty parents have in controlling what is transmitted to their children. The contemporary tentacular family, less endogamous and more open-minded than the stable family of the nineteenth century, bears in its irregular design the marks of frustrated dreams, abandoned and resumed projects, hopes for happiness that the children, if they are lucky, continue to bear.
Because each child of a separated couple is the living memory of the moment when that love made sense, when that couple, in the absence of a standard that corresponds to the new family compositions, bet on building a future as similar as possible to the ideals of the family of the past. An ideal that will continue to guide, from the place of unconscious fantasies, the projects of conjugal happiness of today's children and adolescents.
An ideal that, if not overcome, can act as an impediment to the legitimization of the lived experience of these mixed, funny, strange, improvised families, maintained with affection, hope and disillusionment, as far as possible.
*Maria Rita Kehl is a psychoanalyst, journalist and writer. Author, among other books, of Resentment (boitempo). [https://amzn.to/3ZuGGyI]
Originally published on Boitempo's blog.
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