Marriage and the Family in Freud's Writings*

With but few exceptions the development of psychoanalytic theory and the recently emerging family theories have had little contact or dialogue with one another. While this split is historically understandable it is clinically unsupportable and from the point of view of scientific development most unfortunate. Of course, to speak of psychosocial phenomena scientifically is a hazardous venture. Things are more chaotic today than when Freud (1926, p. 192) said a half-century ago that “if you venture upon a psychological assertion, you must be prepared to meet judgments and contradictions from every quarter. In this field … everyone has a mental life, so everyone regards himself as a psychologist and everyone can ‘run wild' as he chooses.” We are faced today with an ever increasing and bewildering array of therapeutic approaches whose theoretical underpinnings are often quite fragmentary.

Psychoanalysis has for 75 years evolved the most compelling and comprehensive theory of man's psychic life. It accomplished this by a rigorous application of the psychoanalytic method, the data base of which was relatively free of direct observation of a person's social field. While psychoanalytic theory has been evolving and changing over the years there has been reluctance to utilize data obtained by non-analytic methods. The major exception to this has been the more recent investigations of mother-infant interaction as well as the observations made in the preschool