The psycho-analytic study of the familyFlugel, J. C. (John Carl)
Science
The psycho-analytic study of the family
Flugel, J. C. (John Carl)
Families; Marriage; Parent and child; Psychoanalysis
In this short sketch of what--from the results of psycho-analytic and
other investigations--we may regard as the normal development of the
individual mind in regard to the family relationships, we have hitherto
been concerned more particularly with the sexual emotions and tendencies,
using the word sexual in the wide sense current among writers of the
psycho-analytic school. This has been the case, partly because in our
account we have been largely governed by historical considerations with
regard to the actual chronology of recent psychological progress in this
field (and it was chiefly the sexual aspects of the family relationships
that were first brought to light in the course of this progress); partly
also because it is with regard to these sexual aspects that the increase
of our knowledge through the application of new psychological methods has
been in many ways the most extensive, the most startling and the most
difficult to assimilate. The results considered in the last two chapters
are of such a nature as to have been for the most part unrealised and
unsuspected either by the professional psychologist or by the ordinary
student of human nature: they are, indeed, of such a kind as could only
be obtained by means of a special technique capable of overcoming the
formidable resistances which, as we have seen, are interposed between the
conscious and the unconscious levels of the mind.
The positive results of recent research on the psychological influences of
the family as regards matters less directly connected with sexuality are
of a less unexpected kind, and seem to lie to some extent in the direct
path of psychological progress even apart from the introduction of the
methods of psycho-analysis. Nevertheless, it is the use of these methods
that has given some precision to our knowledge in these respects also, and
rendered more certain and definite what before was but vaguely suspected.
At this point, therefore, it becomes necessary to review the principal
results of psycho-analytic research with regard to these non-sexual
aspects of mental development in relation to the family environment.
[Sidenote: Controversies on this subject]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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