The oedipal family was a theoretical necessity for Freud. However, this focus on the family reflected a more general trend in social science discourse, a discourse that emerged in a period when a multitude of disciplinary problems was becoming apparent, problems for which the “nuclear” family, despite its increasing privacy and anonymity, was used as a plausible source of explanation of attractive and unattractive outcomes.3 The family became a dominant explanation through which our destinies and the destinies of others were made legible to ourselves and others. Destinies for growing numbers seemed to require explanation in ways not previously known. Other efforts at theorizing the family included Mead, Dewey, Cooley, and Burgess.
The family is still commonly viewed in much of social science discourse as the nexus through which effective agents of socialization (parents) are assigned primary responsibility for both socialization successes (conformity) and failures (deviance). Somewhat ironically, to an unprecedented degree, the family was burdened with responsibility for its children’s social and moral destinies at precisely the point in history when most families were losing control of their children’s social and moral destinies.
The interior space of the family was to be policed by a volunteer force of dedicated care-givers. However, the very discourses that focused what was to become a near-puritan zeal in pursuing investment in children also introduced the taint of corrupt self-interest. To see the potential adult in the child required that the legacy of the child, in the form of unreasoned desires and normal misperceptions, be found in the adult. All who might parent would be children first and could be expected to carry forward their own histories of focused and unfocused desires.
Issues of adolescent psychosexual development, as we have been trained to think about them, such as masturbation, penis envy, castration anxiety, bisexuality, and sadomasochism, implicitly assume a context resembling the emotionally dense and sexually hypersensitive oedipal family. An enriched vocabulary of sexual possibilities was both distanced and naturalized by being seen as having been initiated before personal responsibility could be an issue. Even as the inherent dangers of the sexual were being advertised, the healthfulness of these concerns was sheltered by a well-ordered if incoherently understood narrative of development. The inner beast in all of us need not be denied; normal development was the civilizing of the beast, its proper harnessing to socially useful ends.
Despite our eagerness to anchor the complex and variable character of the human to stable foundations, the assumed universality of infancy and childhood may not continue to serve that function; a universalized infancy tends to sustain mythologies of the origins of human personality in much the same way that an assumption of a state of nature sustained theories of the origins of human societies. It is as if these points of origin harbored some ultimate, if mysterious, truth of continuing relevance (Levin 1992).
The oedipal family, in many regards the ideal-typical urban, upper-middle class family at mid-century, gave an ordering, a coherence, almost an organic quality to a rich psychosexual brew. The corrupting governesses or servants of Freud become the anxiously seductive parents of Erikson who are active in the purchasing of love in much the same way that Freud’s anxious child purchased security—at inflated prices (Riesman 1952). In a social setting permeated with Freudian convictions regarding parental influence, the discourses of the family gave rise to the rhetoric, and in a considerable measure the practice, of the child — centered family. The architecture of the family dwelling, and its very location among other aspects of family business, increasingly reflected the powers of children. The imperial child on the interpersonal level may have moved closer to parity with the imperial child at the intrapsychic level than most expected.
Three relevant features of current social conditions contextualize the contemporary family: pervasive change in almost all aspects of social life; unprecedented permeation of the total society by centralized, yet diversified media systems; and high levels of individuation. These tend to make a single model or comprehensive view of the role of the family in psychosexual development difficult to the point of danger. We must now speak of the family as a thoroughly pluralized institution whose many forms exist within equally pluralized contexts. The legacy of early emotional attachment that emerges in different family settings, and the experiences of childhood through which these are reworked and to some extent transformed, must also be considered in terms of the specific social contexts within which their claims upon individual behavior and affect are to be realized. Evolving child-parent relations reflect not only changes in what it is to be a child but also, not uncommonly, changes in parents and in generally accepted conceptions of parenting roles. Even the home, the basic stage upon which the family drama unfolds, has changed in virtually all regards, from its architecture to its political system and economy
Increasingly the family is experienced as being less permanent physically, socially, and psychologically In other words, we have too exclusively focused on the adolescent as a transitional figure, while assuming the parent and the surrounding context as such are unchanging, finished products. However, the literature on the mid-life crisis, and more appropriately the patterns of behavior that give a semblance of plausibility to such a literature, suggest that many adolescents may be experiencing their initial adolescence while their parents (or other proximate adults who resemble parents) may be experiencing substantial crises of identity that can be too easily mistaken for a second adolescence—in some instances we might be tempted to say “an additional adolescence”.
The normal pathologies of adolescence, as well as its lesser irritations, are conventionally seen as the inevitabilities attending the multiple transitions occurring during this period. Young adulthood to the end of middle age, the longest block in conventional views of the life cycle, years covering parenting behaviors, too often was described exclusively in terms of stabilities and gentle slopes of change. Discontinuities during this stage of “full” adulthood were treated as deviance and attention was focused upon finding restorative treatments and effective preventatives. More recently, we have come to accept these as the normal pathologies of transitions, transitions that are as likely to be imposed by collective history as they are prompted by the events of individual biography.
It is reasonable to assume that sexual development will of necessity reflect the surrounding context. The family obviously plays an important and for some a key role in the achievement of sexual identities and patterns of sexual behavior. (The two are far from being identical or always stable in their reciprocal relations.) The role the family plays in these developments, however, may be no more or no less than the role the family plays in other socially significant developments.
At the neonate level there are aspects of developmental transformation that are universal or close to it. However, what is universal in such experiences can have the significance of that universality diminished by the increasingly variable experiences within modern and postmodern cultures (Kagan 1985). Critical qualities of parenting have changed since Freud, as they were changing dramatically while he lived. Perhaps, more accurately, we might say that the distribution of parenting styles has changed dramatically over this past century while the cultural contexts within which the parenting occurred have been changing even more rapidly. Among these changes is the increasing dominance of mass media that provide hyperreal images of alternative styles of family life (a pluralism of styles of family life sharing primarily a view of family life as organized around anticipated manipulations, attempts at manipulation, and the tactics of counter-manipulation). As the world of opera furnished the family romances of the early part of the century, more current versions of family romances have the capacity to play as alternating components of multi-screen, electronic collages.
Current relationships between adolescents and parental figures may be as significant as those found in the archaeological survivals of the psychic experiences of early childhood. Rather than viewing the development of a sexual identity as the delayed flowering of earlier commitments, I would propose that the achievement of a sexual identity for most of us is a continuing act of bricolage, a process of assembly that joins the past and present, a process where the value of all personal history must risk fluctuation in significance.
Achievement of an initial version of one’s sexual identity relatively early in adolescence may be of greater importance today than ever before. Contemporary adolescents experience themselves within societies that advertise a pluralized sexual culture more explicitly than before. They also face heightened probabilities that they themselves, and many around them, will be initiating and concluding significant kinds of sociosexual relationships.
Given the virtual normalization of pre-premarital sex, combined with the continuing trend toward delaying the age of first marriages, recent cohorts come to their first marriages with significantly more sexual experience than any prior cohorts. Even those adolescents whose sociosexual experience remains limited do so within a climate that increasingly assumes and normalizes such experience. A small measure of this change can be found in current public debate on providing condoms in public high schools, where significance is to be found in the very fact that such a debate occurs in the first place.
One consequence of this trend, one that will probably have enormous ramifications, is the collapsing into a brief period—some might say too brief —of the time between an initial sense of oneself as a sexually significant person and the point at which regular sociosexual involvement occurs. This period is one where the dimensions of an intrapsychic erotic culture are elaborated, in the relative freedom of an inner space where the regulations of actual social and physical limitations need be observed in only the most flexible ways and where the passions and injuries of the moment can compete with their earlier incarnations. This would suggest that the balance of relations between intrapsychic sexual scripting (making the exciting acceptable) and interpersonal sexual scripting (making the acceptable exciting) may be in the process of being altered. As the practice of fantasy and the practice of behavior meet earlier, the sexualization of desire is more available to the issues of the present moment and, correspondingly, more remote from the archaic toxic waste of the legacy of childhood’s lusts, hurts, and misperceptions. Such legacies must now compete
with the enforcement of group norms, which are commonly experienced as being equally unreasoned and equally cruel.
Most adolescents, then, find themselves within richly sexualized subcultures where there are modes of acting in sexually significant ways that are not necessarily genital in uses of language and costume, as well as pluralized definitions of relationships in which they are expected to be sexually involved. There is probably more social support for adolescent sexual activity by peers and others than has been known previously in modern Western experience (Kallen and Stephenson 1982). The greater visibility of the sexual, including the greater visibility of the sexuality of all family members down to the youngest, like the presence of sexualized language, becomes a near constant. The primal scene, as performed by bodies not unlike parental figures, is available in a constant flow of mass-media images.
I am not sure anyone presently understands fully the implications of these shifts in age and relationship to courtship. One possibility that seems reasonable is that a greater visibility of sexual activity will lead to an increased empowering of the process of interpersonal scripting, a greater employment of the sexual in the service of what is on the immediate surface of social life. This, in turn, opens the possibility of the formation of sexual identities that are less the servant of compacted semi-permanent simulations, less the obsessions of deep character than the opportunistic affectations of the moment. Previously, the involvement of adolescents in sexual relations was associated with separation from parental control. The larger part of premarital sexual experience, particularly for females, occurred in the context of courtship. Currently, for most adolescents it occurs without leaving the parental household, though boyfriends or girlfriends often become quasi-family members. This earlier entry into sociosexual activities creates a powerful, but far from exclusive, claim on peership with parents and other adults that can only further the continuing transformation of the politics of the family. A peership particularly for those adolescents whose parents were the initial vanguard of the sexual revolution, parents who themselves were familiar with both extensive premarital sex and the use of recreational drugs. The traditional erotic farce that commonly plays off a confusion of generations, with parents and children encountering each other in questionable circumstances, finds extensive material in all segments of the contemporary scene.
Undeniably, the family remains an environment of great significance in the process of adolescent psychosexual development. However, the effective penetration of the family by pluralized media and the powers of peer attachments make it difficult, in many cases, to point to singular and direct effects of the family that retain the burdens of responsibility for their children’s social and moral destinies. The secrets of our sexual behavior and the employments of our sexuality will reflect changing family histories and evolving family romances, the latter moving in tides of public visibility from comforting romantic idealizations to a return to gothic horror stories of sexual abuse presided over by hypersexual parents.
The current, if still muted, sexual climate of the family can alter the interplay of guilt and anger that infused the oedipal family and enriched the erotic for so very long. The interplay of guilt and anger is reflected in the surrounding society’s changing concerns for the sexual vulnerabilities of children. Traditional concerns with protecting the young from premature discovery of the sexual created an atmosphere that cast a nervous furtiveness about adolescent sexual activities, concerns that succeeded in generating strong feelings of guilt. More recent concerns with abuse encourage paranoia as a mask for anger. Let me be very specific. I am not referring to those who have been abused, for whom both guilt and anger are not uncommon, but to a much larger group—those who grow up in climates that broadly advertise and instruct in the possibility.
Where once children were medically examined and psychologically inquisited in a search to uncover the vice of “self-abuse” (i. e. masturbation), they now experience the same procedures in the scrutiny for evidence of sexual abuse. Likewise the induction of anxiety to protect the child from self-abuse has been replaced by the induction of anxiety to protect them from the sexual danger posed by others. The adult gaze on the sexuality of the child still renders them “subjects of study” and/or “objects of concern”, and the sexuality of the child is still reconstituted from adult confession. Adult tales of the resultant damage of childhood masturbation have been replaced by adult tales of the resultant damage of childhood sexual abuse.
(Rogers and Rogers 1992:166)
This partial shift from a focus on masturbation, which is essentially guilt producing, to a focus on abuse, which tends to produce anger, points to even more dramatic change in the psychological, as well as social, structure of the family.
Parents, particularly the parents of the opposite sex for those experiencing themselves as moving towards heterosexuality, will obviously have many of the attributes that the adolescent is expected to recognize and respond to as being sexual. This connection becomes particularly significant when the parents are seen by the child as being sexually active, sometimes increasingly evident particularly to those adolescents who have witnessed parents returning to the dating and mating game. The stereo-typical notion of Victorian reticence and prudery clearly create a different set of conditions for managing the problems of inclusion and exclusion than would be true for most of the varieties of contemporary middle-class North American families—even where the family remains intact. The same may be said about changing patterns of authority within the family and the changing division of labor within the household.