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The psychosocial interior of the family: A sourcebook for the study of whole families
228
BOOKREVIEWS
time in hospital’. Stable norms thus represent for the clinician a technique of reducing potential conflict over the discharge date. However, as the doctor’s reference group of the patient is more rigorously defined than that which the patient holds of himself, there is still considerable play for such conflict. These non-medical factors are emphasised by both the longer stay of veterans than self-funded private patients and also the highly accelerated treatment programme of medical personnel. The institutions’ timetables, as has been noted before, substantially serve the convenience of the professionals who work in them. This bargaining process is described as, “a dialectic of anticipation of reactions of the other party-the patient is not free in his own mind to make unreasonable demands and the doctor is likewise not free to ignore the pressures from his patients”. For the most part the norms will coincide, but for the extremes, the very rapidly and the very slowly recovering patient, the interaction regresses both dates to the norm. The healthy are thus slightly held back, and the still sick are probably released slightly early. The most interesting discussion-which is also tantalizingly brief-is of the points of similarity and disimilarity between a whole range of career timetables. The T.B. patient, the polio patient are set alongside the prisoner, the auto-worker, the soldier, the pilot, the university teacher and the child. ROTH argues that these careers share a common culturebound assumption concerning the importance of time. Within this assumption, each career, whether obvious in its hierarchical structure like that of Ph.D. student to professor, or the almost lateral but clearly goal-directed career of the progression from ill-health to health, unfreedom to freedom, or even from a two-door to a four-door car, can be viewed as a career timetable. This concept, together with that of timetable norms, are proposed as affording a mode of analysing the individual life cycle, as a series of purposive events.This is an interesting proposal which although I feel scepticai of ROTH’Shopes of wide applicability-his most generous hope being that the conceptual framework would afford a method of describing the life cycle of societies- nonetheless has considerable value in that it facilitates comparison and generalisation. As such the book merits the attention of both those interested in the sociology of medical care and also those interested in general sociology. It should also, along with Goffman’s study of mental hospitals and Davis’s polio patients, be required reading for medical students as a study of patients and doctors within a specific clinical speciality, which might well serve to bring to their notice less scientific elements present in the therapies of scientific medicine. HILARY ROSE, B.A.Soc. Dept. of Social Science and Administration, London School of Economics, Houghton Street, Aldwych, London, W.C.2.
THE PSYCHOSOCIAL INTERIOR OF THE FAMILY: A SOURCEBOOK FOR THE STUDY OF WHOLE FAMILIES. Edited by GERALDHANDEL.Aldine, New York, 1967. THE EDITORof this volume is to be commended for a valiant effort in assembling a series of published papers which have some bearing to his primary conceptualization that understanding of the relationship of the family to culture and society can only be achieved through a general framework in which the whole nuclear family is the unit of analysis. The assump-
BOOKREVIEWS
229
tion of this approach is that the family creates for its members an inner world; i.e., it has its own subculture and, within this world, socialization occurs befitting the normative standards established through the process of interaction; individual family members respond to the demands of other institutional systems in terms of these norms developed within the family. To date the focus on the whole family has been sadly neglected and that portion of the family field concerned with interaction and intrafamily dynamics has almost exclusively concentrated on dyadic relationships, especially those of marital partners or the mother and her child. The psychosocial interior of the family is not simply the sum total of interactions but a system of interaction between individuals within the nuclear family. It is a system bounded by space and time within which family members meet, interact, communicate, exchange services and information, transmit attitudes, perceptions, and sentiments. It develops over time a posture or position which is a mixture of emotional, physical, and intellectual elements and is presented to the outside world, but does not necessarily coincide with what occurs inside. The family has two faces, an inner one known to its members and the outer one which is viewed by outsiders. This family interior includes basic physiological functions such as eating, excreting, digestion; it is the area of sexual expression and intimate body contact; it is the place of intellectual development and personality formation; and provides in every sense of the word the very breath of life for each of its members. The editor has drawn upon research and theoretical writings of the disciplines of sociology, psychiatry, anthropology, physiology, and social psychology to look at the family and its interrelationship with the outer world. There are seven parts to the volume. The first is concerned with a general framework for analysis of whole families and is a reprint of a chapter from a book Family Worlds written by the editor with ROBERTHESS.The second part contains a number of methods which may be adapted to the study of whole families. These research tools were not designed specifically for this purpose but have the possibility of being reconciled to the theoretical issues and operational problems presented in the study of whole families. These methods range from anthropological types of observations to the use of projective techniques, the TAT, and the revealed difference procedure. The third section is concerned with the relationship of the whole family to culture and society; section four is principally concerned with how a family establishes boundaries which are constraining yet permeable for relationships with non-family members and how these influence the life course of individual family members. Part five indicates how the family transmits understanding and belief and trains its young in different patterns of communication and cognition. Part six has a series of papers on how separateness-connectedness patterns are formed as a consequence of different patterns of interpersonal relationships; section seven is an evaluation of theoretical developments to date and Mr. HANDELposits a number of suggestions for studying and improving current conceptualization of the whole family and needed empirical research. The principal contribution of this book is that it opens up for the family researcher a neglected area of conceptualization and research. It provides for the symbolic interactionist and developmental interactionist researchers a fertile field for the testing of their pregnant postulates and hypothesis. To this reviewer this volume indicates that someone, and hopefully Professor HANDEL, should begin immediately a second volume not composed of a selection of disparate papers fitted somewhat awkwardly into these seven parts but an originally written volume with a well worked out conceptual framework and tested methods, Such a work should include some hard data on how the family is mediator of the culture;
230
BOOKREVIEWS
answers to such issues as the significance of nuclear family boundaries to extended kin family boundaries and the boundaries of other social systems; the specific influence of this whole family system in socialization of its young especially in relation to successful manipulation of other societal systems, how this family as a group may create deviance and handle it and how family resources can be mobilized when its members are in conflict or in trouble with other social systems. My impression is that the editor has had a difficult time in finding selections which conform to the seven-section outline of this book. I am more excited and challenged by his initial conceptualization of the problem and his presentation of it to the reader than by the selection of papers. One is reminded of the difficult problem students often face of having done empirical work and then trying to fit the findings with an appropriate theoretical conceptualization. The articles are of uneven quality and some only indirectly suggest viability of the theme, psychosocial interior of whole families. I regret that the author overlooked the meaning and significance of nuclear family boundaries for the urban kinship network. The impression one gets from reading the majority of selections is that the nuclear family unit deals almost exclusively with other complex bureaucratic social systems. To the contrary, each nuclear unit has a series of successive boundaries of different degrees of permeability. One can conceptualize that the kin family network composed of a number of nuclear units has its own psychosocial interior and the development of cognition, personality characteristics, transmission of values, attitudes and perceptions within each nuclear unit. The stance and activities of this larger kin family system are also different from the nuclear in its transactions with other bureaucratic ones such as medical, welfare, religious, and educational. Raising this issue should not deter the reader from recognizing the importance of this volume. One can add quickly the point that our methodology is not developed sufficiently to handle the study of complex social systems like the kin group using the whole unit conceptualization. In summary, the author has done a service for the behavioral sciences in indicating a paucity of significant conceptualization and empirical work in which the family is conceived as a system with its own psychosocial interior. I found HANDEL’Sown papers, Psychological study of whole families and The family as a psychosocial organization with ROBERTHESS most stimulating. Professor HANDELis to be congratulated for bringing this approach to our attention and one can view each of these papers as supplying added evidence to the notion that a meaningful explanation of behavior must take into account the life style and posture of the family of procreation. This book should contribute to the development of research over the next decade in which the whole family will be conceived as an explanatory variable. MARVINB. SUSSMAN,PH.D. Chairman Department of Sociology, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio.
BOOKREVIEWS
time in hospital’. Stable norms thus represent for the clinician a technique of reducing potential conflict over the discharge date. However, as the doctor’s reference group of the patient is more rigorously defined than that which the patient holds of himself, there is still considerable play for such conflict. These non-medical factors are emphasised by both the longer stay of veterans than self-funded private patients and also the highly accelerated treatment programme of medical personnel. The institutions’ timetables, as has been noted before, substantially serve the convenience of the professionals who work in them. This bargaining process is described as, “a dialectic of anticipation of reactions of the other party-the patient is not free in his own mind to make unreasonable demands and the doctor is likewise not free to ignore the pressures from his patients”. For the most part the norms will coincide, but for the extremes, the very rapidly and the very slowly recovering patient, the interaction regresses both dates to the norm. The healthy are thus slightly held back, and the still sick are probably released slightly early. The most interesting discussion-which is also tantalizingly brief-is of the points of similarity and disimilarity between a whole range of career timetables. The T.B. patient, the polio patient are set alongside the prisoner, the auto-worker, the soldier, the pilot, the university teacher and the child. ROTH argues that these careers share a common culturebound assumption concerning the importance of time. Within this assumption, each career, whether obvious in its hierarchical structure like that of Ph.D. student to professor, or the almost lateral but clearly goal-directed career of the progression from ill-health to health, unfreedom to freedom, or even from a two-door to a four-door car, can be viewed as a career timetable. This concept, together with that of timetable norms, are proposed as affording a mode of analysing the individual life cycle, as a series of purposive events.This is an interesting proposal which although I feel scepticai of ROTH’Shopes of wide applicability-his most generous hope being that the conceptual framework would afford a method of describing the life cycle of societies- nonetheless has considerable value in that it facilitates comparison and generalisation. As such the book merits the attention of both those interested in the sociology of medical care and also those interested in general sociology. It should also, along with Goffman’s study of mental hospitals and Davis’s polio patients, be required reading for medical students as a study of patients and doctors within a specific clinical speciality, which might well serve to bring to their notice less scientific elements present in the therapies of scientific medicine. HILARY ROSE, B.A.Soc. Dept. of Social Science and Administration, London School of Economics, Houghton Street, Aldwych, London, W.C.2.
THE PSYCHOSOCIAL INTERIOR OF THE FAMILY: A SOURCEBOOK FOR THE STUDY OF WHOLE FAMILIES. Edited by GERALDHANDEL.Aldine, New York, 1967. THE EDITORof this volume is to be commended for a valiant effort in assembling a series of published papers which have some bearing to his primary conceptualization that understanding of the relationship of the family to culture and society can only be achieved through a general framework in which the whole nuclear family is the unit of analysis. The assump-
BOOKREVIEWS
229
tion of this approach is that the family creates for its members an inner world; i.e., it has its own subculture and, within this world, socialization occurs befitting the normative standards established through the process of interaction; individual family members respond to the demands of other institutional systems in terms of these norms developed within the family. To date the focus on the whole family has been sadly neglected and that portion of the family field concerned with interaction and intrafamily dynamics has almost exclusively concentrated on dyadic relationships, especially those of marital partners or the mother and her child. The psychosocial interior of the family is not simply the sum total of interactions but a system of interaction between individuals within the nuclear family. It is a system bounded by space and time within which family members meet, interact, communicate, exchange services and information, transmit attitudes, perceptions, and sentiments. It develops over time a posture or position which is a mixture of emotional, physical, and intellectual elements and is presented to the outside world, but does not necessarily coincide with what occurs inside. The family has two faces, an inner one known to its members and the outer one which is viewed by outsiders. This family interior includes basic physiological functions such as eating, excreting, digestion; it is the area of sexual expression and intimate body contact; it is the place of intellectual development and personality formation; and provides in every sense of the word the very breath of life for each of its members. The editor has drawn upon research and theoretical writings of the disciplines of sociology, psychiatry, anthropology, physiology, and social psychology to look at the family and its interrelationship with the outer world. There are seven parts to the volume. The first is concerned with a general framework for analysis of whole families and is a reprint of a chapter from a book Family Worlds written by the editor with ROBERTHESS.The second part contains a number of methods which may be adapted to the study of whole families. These research tools were not designed specifically for this purpose but have the possibility of being reconciled to the theoretical issues and operational problems presented in the study of whole families. These methods range from anthropological types of observations to the use of projective techniques, the TAT, and the revealed difference procedure. The third section is concerned with the relationship of the whole family to culture and society; section four is principally concerned with how a family establishes boundaries which are constraining yet permeable for relationships with non-family members and how these influence the life course of individual family members. Part five indicates how the family transmits understanding and belief and trains its young in different patterns of communication and cognition. Part six has a series of papers on how separateness-connectedness patterns are formed as a consequence of different patterns of interpersonal relationships; section seven is an evaluation of theoretical developments to date and Mr. HANDELposits a number of suggestions for studying and improving current conceptualization of the whole family and needed empirical research. The principal contribution of this book is that it opens up for the family researcher a neglected area of conceptualization and research. It provides for the symbolic interactionist and developmental interactionist researchers a fertile field for the testing of their pregnant postulates and hypothesis. To this reviewer this volume indicates that someone, and hopefully Professor HANDEL, should begin immediately a second volume not composed of a selection of disparate papers fitted somewhat awkwardly into these seven parts but an originally written volume with a well worked out conceptual framework and tested methods, Such a work should include some hard data on how the family is mediator of the culture;
230
BOOKREVIEWS
answers to such issues as the significance of nuclear family boundaries to extended kin family boundaries and the boundaries of other social systems; the specific influence of this whole family system in socialization of its young especially in relation to successful manipulation of other societal systems, how this family as a group may create deviance and handle it and how family resources can be mobilized when its members are in conflict or in trouble with other social systems. My impression is that the editor has had a difficult time in finding selections which conform to the seven-section outline of this book. I am more excited and challenged by his initial conceptualization of the problem and his presentation of it to the reader than by the selection of papers. One is reminded of the difficult problem students often face of having done empirical work and then trying to fit the findings with an appropriate theoretical conceptualization. The articles are of uneven quality and some only indirectly suggest viability of the theme, psychosocial interior of whole families. I regret that the author overlooked the meaning and significance of nuclear family boundaries for the urban kinship network. The impression one gets from reading the majority of selections is that the nuclear family unit deals almost exclusively with other complex bureaucratic social systems. To the contrary, each nuclear unit has a series of successive boundaries of different degrees of permeability. One can conceptualize that the kin family network composed of a number of nuclear units has its own psychosocial interior and the development of cognition, personality characteristics, transmission of values, attitudes and perceptions within each nuclear unit. The stance and activities of this larger kin family system are also different from the nuclear in its transactions with other bureaucratic ones such as medical, welfare, religious, and educational. Raising this issue should not deter the reader from recognizing the importance of this volume. One can add quickly the point that our methodology is not developed sufficiently to handle the study of complex social systems like the kin group using the whole unit conceptualization. In summary, the author has done a service for the behavioral sciences in indicating a paucity of significant conceptualization and empirical work in which the family is conceived as a system with its own psychosocial interior. I found HANDEL’Sown papers, Psychological study of whole families and The family as a psychosocial organization with ROBERTHESS most stimulating. Professor HANDELis to be congratulated for bringing this approach to our attention and one can view each of these papers as supplying added evidence to the notion that a meaningful explanation of behavior must take into account the life style and posture of the family of procreation. This book should contribute to the development of research over the next decade in which the whole family will be conceived as an explanatory variable. MARVINB. SUSSMAN,PH.D. Chairman Department of Sociology, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio.