An Unnatural History

Parents. What are they? Are mother and father reducible to some basic unit, or element in a system, organic and psychological? For children in therapy, adolescents in their teens or early twenties, answering the question of parents seems as urgent as their attempts at emotional livelihood. It is posed in many ways since the combinations are endless, and in flux. But isn't there an essence in families, some basic constituent to describe, to predict, to handle—like fire, in its infinite forms?

Fire adjusts to conditions—it rages or goes out due to them. Out of their belief in free will families reject any notion so elemental. Can we isolate certain of the conditions determining, or being determined by, the essence of families and its movements?

There are historical factors. Parents, if at all deserving the name, try to build. In a time of economic depression this process is threatened; they fear poverty, hunger, and degradation. Their fear is objective, the struggle clearly material, and they work for decades spurred by that fear. They play the role of necessity together, and finally all is well; they have a large house tucked away in the suburbs, a two-car garage, servants.

But now, incredibly, amid all that well-being another kind of struggle arises with apparent suddenness, no less threatening to the family's survival than the first. Somehow the tables are turned and material things are as cheap as desire and ambition once were. And a new fear, a new enemy, attacks desire and ambition, like a snake in their suburban paradise with a world of subtlety at his disposal. The situation is as confusing and difficult now as before it was calculable. Ah! the enemy's rallying cry rings loud and clear; he sounds the alarum of Subjectivity! And who are his first recruits, his young and noble warriors? Why, an entire generation of them appears on the scene; a veritable band of crusaders arises, attacking, besieging their parents' simple-minded, tyrannica