Changing Nature of Family Structure: Developmental Theories Under Challenge

The impact of contemporary social forces upon family structure and personality development was addressed by the three presenters at this workshop, while the discussant focused upon the difficulty of confirming psychoanalytic hypotheses concerning this complex interface. In introducing the three presenters, Ruth Stein observed that all of them emphasised the effects of social factors upon individuation and autonomy. Kitty Schmidt explored these themes in relation to adolescence in a totalitarian society; Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel described a heightened and pathological self-sufficiency related to the breakdown of family structure; and Nancy Chodorow considered the difficulty that women encountered, in a society where many choices were open to them, in consolidating a generative maternal identity freed from impingement by early relationships with mother and siblings.

In her paper, ‘Some possible consequences of changes within families: a wave of disorders aimed at autarchy’, Chasseguet-Smirgel grouped together drug and alcohol addiction, eating disorders and certain kinds of sexual conduct. All these behavioural disorders, she said, shared a goal that she termed ‘autarchy’, the aim of becoming totally independent of human objects. In most cases the autarchic ambition involved doing without the mother. For women, this forced independence was associated with an attack upon the mother, in the form of an attack upon the woman's own body (which was identified with the mother's body). In men, this aspect was less evident.

Chasseguet-Smirgel described two male patients, both alcoholics, for whom dependency on a substance that could be controlled and replaced warded off passive longings for the nurturance they had not received in childhood. For two female patients, eating disorders reflected a refusal to enter the biological order of female development. For the anorexic woman, restriction represented a triumph over the need for the object. For the bulimic, binging and purging r