To what extent has theory and research on families been successful in transcending the individual-society dualism?
(Copyright Tonya Alexandri 2015)
This essay will firstly attempt to show that the individual-social binary is expressed in the tension between the psychological and sociological traditions and that the methods used and consequently the knowledges produced, which are always partial, provisional and situated in terms of changes, methodology, time and place, are determined by implicit or explicit ontologies within these traditions. Secondly, it will present and critically evaluate theories and research on families and show that critical social psychology perspectives can be more successful in transcending this enduring theme in social psychology, which inevitably relates to other binaries and the coupled themes of situatedness and power relations.
To begin with, social psychology (SP) is vulnerable to unproductive dualistic thinking, especially the individual-society dualism, and consequently, knowledge about families will reflect these tensions.
For instance, although families have been intensively studied within SP, its developmental focus has resulted in drawing boundaries between individual and broader social processes, and further reproducing the individual-society binary. Lucey claims that the individual and the social have either been kept separate or researchers have reduced the social elements to the study of interpersonal processes within the family (Lucey, 2007). Furthermore, even though families are often mentioned as groups they have been neglected as a topic for focused study and most psychological SP work has viewed the family as an individual, private domain and the location of causes and outcomes. The focus has mostly been on structures and processes within the family, such as, the mother-child interaction, and little attention has been paid to broader social processes.
Within this tradition changes are seen to be produced mostly through cognitive, biological and sexual development of children; neglecting to acknowledge power dynamics within the family and external influences. Moreover, by considering childhood and adolescence as transitory phases and children as lacking any ontology and agency (James and Prout, 1990, cited in Lucey, 2007), developmental psychology reproduces the agency-structure dualism. Finally, this highly individualistic approach has viewed the family as historically and culturally static, ignoring situatedness and rendering context, class, race and gender differences invisible (Phoenix, 1991, cited in Lucey, 2007). Theories and findings have been decontextualised and considered to apply universally, and any differences have been marginalised or analysed as evidence of deviance.
However, many changes have taken place, especially in Western societies, and families cannot be studied as a separate domain with a unitary form and non-permeable boundaries. A clearly ‘bounded’ family is up to debate and boundaries vary in different contexts (McKie et al., 2005; Cicirelli, 1994, cited in Lucey, 2007). Globalization processes, wars and immigration trends have further resulted in the proliferation of transnational families. Sutton (2004, cited in Lucey, 2007) conducted in-depth-interviews of Caribbean families and found that the concept of family was highly elastic and inclusive. Findings from other studies, involving children, have also challenged links between biological and social ties (Morrow, 1998, cited in Lucey, 2007).
Therefore, studying individuals within families would be more meaningful if social, cultural and structural influences were considered.
Critical perspectives, such as, the critical discursive perspective (CDP) and the social psychoanalytic perspective (SPP) could provide resources for going beyond the individual-society dichotomy and other binaries because they initially situate the family within a wider societal context and assume an interconnection between the private realm of families and the public world of structures and discourses. They both conduct qualitative research that moves away from the strictly developmental focus of traditional psychology and situate their findings to avoid reproducing partial images.They further suggest that social reality is constructed in everyday discourse, and are interested in how subject positions are taken up, how this often produces inequities and how dominant ideologies influence identity formation.
The CDP suggests that discourses, shaped by ideologies, provide means of representing and constructing ‘reality’; in other words, they assist our construction and understanding of the world. Social relations, practices and identities are discursively produced and restricted by cultural contexts and structures. Research on singleness, for instance, demonstrates that it is a discursively constructed disadvantaged social category in contrast to coupledom, which is constructed as privileged.
It shows how meanings of family impact individuals and their identities, and how discourse resources evaluate singleness against normative ideals, and view it more as a personal failure. As a result available discourses can be inadequate in capturing the totality of single women’s experience (Roseneil and Budgeon, 2004, cited in Lucey, 2007).
Another important tenet of the CDP is its conceptualisation of the individual as both the producer and the product of discourses. Reynolds and Wetherell (2003, cited in Lucey, 2007) explored how single women draw on existing contradictory, polarized and contextualised interpretative repertoires, which construct identity possibilities that women have to work with to construct their identities.
In the study most participants either drew on idealized repertoires highlighting choice, autonomy and self-actualisation or on repertoires that involved denigration, deficit and social exclusion.
However, Reynolds and Wetherell suggest that a strategy involving reflexivity would be more useful and that singleness should be studied as a set of personal narratives and subject positions because narratives provide a means to manage identity in a fragmented and changing ideological field. The use of ‘ideological field’ shows that power determines shifting meaning patterns which construct singleness (Reynolds and Wetherell, 2003).
Additionally, the CDP examines how dominant discourses implicate political and moral evaluations that impact individuals and how power and ideology operate through social discourses and practices to privilege some at the expense of others. Discursive psychologists have explored how power and ideology work within family negotiations about domestic labour and how they impact identity and produce gender inequities.
Chodorow (cited in Sclater, 2007) draws on the psychoanalytic notion that culture, ideologies and beliefs are promoted by family members and introjected by children to further suggest that gender inequalities in society can be traced back to early experience.
In contrast to, the Distribution Justice Framework (Thompson, 1991, cited in Lucey, 2007), which is based on questionnaire surveys, and neither takes account of ideological contexts that influence family negotiations nor explains how domestic practices influence identity construction, the CDP analyses extracts from interviews to show how gender roles are constructed and how terms of ‘fairness’ are brought to meaning within daily discourse. Dixon and Wetherell (2004, cited in Lucey, 2007) argue that in most research ‘fairness’ is decontextualised and suggest that even when meanings of fairness are jointly created they are not necessarily fair for they are influenced by prevailing ideologies that define gender inequalities as normative.
Despite its strengths and critical potential the CDP has been criticised for privileging language in relation to subjectivity by overemphasising discourse and neglecting to acknowledge that experience is also constructed extra-discursively through embodiment, which cannot be reduced to discourse. Also, it is not interested in causality or in pursuing deep underlying significances and fails to consider individual agency or the fact that individuals have multi-layered biographies and unique experiences.
Whereas the discursive perspective focuses on what people say, what discourses they draw upon and how they use them, the SPP focuses more on individuals rather than discourse and goes further to ask why people take up certain subject positions. It is interested in their emotional investment in what is hidden and not said, and suggests the term investment rather than choice because it implies that unconscious processes also influence the adoption of subject positions and agency. The SPP reconsiders the possibilities of agency and suggests there is less intentionality and rationality implicated in terms of what subject positions are taken up.
Similarly to the CDP, the SPP emphasises the dynamic, relational and inseparable nature of psychological and social life (Frosh, 2003, cited in Lucey, 2007,) but additionally, theorises and analyses unconscious processes, which also form subjectivity, and is thus differentiated by the underpinning concept of a dynamic, conflictual unconscious. Contradictory wishes and anxiety, which are considered inevitable and essential to our development (Freud, 1936, cited in Lucey, 2007), and defensive mechanisms influence our construction of ‘reality’ and often distort our perception. Consequently, by addressing unconscious processes, psychosocial research adds another layer of interpretation.
This notion that human behaviour and interactions are partly the result of unconscious processes challenges the claims that we are guided by reasonable and rational motives and that consciousness is the locus of self; assumptions that inform a lot of the research on families within the more individualistic, developmental approach. On the other hand, from a mainstream approach the SPP is critiqued as highly interpretative and as lacking validity. Psychoanalytic notions, which inform SPP theories and research, have been considered as rather deterministic neglecting to take into account the particularity and diversity of individual experience and family dynamics.
The emphasis the SPP places on the inseparability of inner psychological life and social life means that all social contexts and family members impact unconscious dynamics and vice versa.
Lucey suggests that research on siblings is useful in exploring the permeable individual-social boundaries (Lucey, 2007). Research on siblings shows how unconscious processes merge with the social and how siblings enter into processes of identity formation. Siblings influence individuals’ subjectivity because they are part of what is introjected during childhood and may become ‘critical internal voices’, which along with internalised societal moral codes, help regulate our impulses and desires, and affect our thoughts, feelings and actions. For instance, in Lucey and Edward’s study (2006, cited in Lucey, 2007) the eldest sister is idealized through ‘splitting’ and becomes a ‘critical internal voice’. However, because siblings are simultaneously unique and also share genetic and social inheritance, there is always the risk of viewing the subject as separate from sociality or as over determined by structures, thus reproducing the individual-social binary.
Lucey and Edwards’ study on sibling relationships in different types of families is informed by Mitchell’s (2003, cited in Lucey, 2007) ideas that siblings can be internalised as ego-ideals and can become parts of the self. The study reveals that the introjection of siblings as ego-ideals is achieved through psychic processes constantly interacting with discourses and practices circulated within the familial and wider social context.
Chodorow (cited in Sclater, 2007) supports that there are no
non-permeable boundaries between individuals and that relationships involve ‘intersubjectivity’; a meshing of individuals’ desires, needs and anxieties. She challenges the individual-society dualism by suggesting that we internalise aspects of the world, during childhood, which become intra-psychic processes that can operate throughout our lives by influencing behaviour and social lives.
Therefore, a SPP transcends the individual-society binary because it does not only consider the psychodynamics of siblings but also explores how external forces and processes are interconnected with individual and group psychological processes. It consequently views the self as inevitably social; in constant interaction with family members, communities and institutions. Edwards et al also found that Asian siblings’ intersubjectivity was highly influenced by cultural traditions, moral and religious codes and values within their family and the wider Muslim community with which they identified. Within this context the sisters ‘cherished’ interdependency, understood the self as part of a collective rather than an autonomous individual and prioritized the needs of the collective; contrary to, the western model of the highly autonomous self.
Beck and Beck claim that active membership of familial, religious and communal groups and care obligations are salient in positioning people in non-Western societies (2002, cited in Hollway, 2007).
Summarily, both perspectives focus on social and individual processes; agree that the family is not a static, context and value-free institute and that there is no ideal, dominant type of family, despite similarities or surface appearances. Both perspectives are interested in the experience and the meanings constructed within families, the discourses and practices used by family members, and the ideologies that shape family processes and practices. They acknowledge the importance of discourse and contextualization in the production of subjectivity and in understanding why certain subject positions are taken up. They further agree that reality and our experience of external reality is co-constructed through social and intersubjective interactions. Furthermore, the discursive emphasis on language and the psychoanalytic emphasis on subjectivity could function complementarily in generating even more synthetic findings.
To sum up, it is apparent that research on families produces different knowledges, which depend on the ontologies used, and often reflect the limitations of the methods used. Theories and research within mainstream psychology seem to reproduce the individual-society dualism, whereas, work on families allows critical social psychology to transcend the binary because it does not separate the individual from external processes and examines meanings, experience and the interrelationship between society and shifting, dynamic and diverse family forms and practices. Within this tradition knowledge is contextualised and power relations are believed to be implicated in all knowledge production.
References
Hollway, W. (2007) ‘Self’, in W. Hollway, H. Lucey and A. Phoenix (eds) Social Psychology Matters, Milton Keynes, Open University Press.
Lucey, H. (2007) ‘Families’, in W. Hollway, H. Lucey and A. Phoenix (eds) Social Psychology Matters, Milton Keynes, Open University Press.
Reynolds, J. and Wetherell, M. (2003). The Discursive Climate of Singleness: The Consequences for Women’s Negotiation of a Single Identity. Feminism and Psychology, 13, 489-510.
Sclater, S. (2007) ‘Close Relationships’, in D. Langdridge and S. Taylor (eds) Critical Readings in Social Psychology, Milton Keynes, Open University Press.