The work-family conflict is not a new phenomenon. Almost a century ago, Freud had something to say about the early trend toward mothers working in the paid labor force. Hannah Decker in her book Freud, Dora, and Vienna 1900, describes the following exchange. “At a 1908 meeting [of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society] devoted to ‘The Natural Position of Women,’ Freud commented during the discussion: ‘A woman cannot earn a living and raise children at the same time. Women as a group profit nothing by the modern feminist movement…’”
As many have observed, Freud had difficulty stepping outside early 20th century Viennese culture on the question of women. While the idea that “a woman cannot earn a living and raise children at the same time” is belied today by statistics showing that 63 percent of mothers with children under the age of six and 78 percent of mothers with school age children are employed, the conflict between work and family unquestionably remains for these working couples.
Psychoanalysis has much to contribute to the public policy debate over how to reduce the conflict between work and family life. Many facets of this contribution could be cited, but one important and pressing area of concern stands out: the distressing effect of the work-family conflict on poor children. In 1996, Congress passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act which, as its name implies, puts the personal responsibility of parents at the center of the anti-poverty agenda. Since this law took effect, states have been required to reduce their welfare caseloads by moving welfare recipients into the paid labor force.
How are we to understand the effect of the welfare-to-work laws on the 12 million children living in poverty in this country? How can poor single mothers be helped to manage a work-family conflict that can be crushing to even the most privileged couples? How do we ensure that the exponential level of stress that working brings to single-parent households does not prevent poor children from developing into successful, resilient, well-adjusted adults?
Psychoanalysis usefully directs our attention away from the personal responsibility of adult citizens and toward the needs of poor children. Lawyers and public-policy experts tend to take a strictly maturational view of the matter: All children will develop the skills for economic self-sufficiency and emotional well-being as a matter of course. If these children fail to succeed as adults, that failure is the product of their own choices and is their own personal responsibility. But as analysts well know, success in life is not simply a matter of maturation or choice. Single mothers without child support or day care or transportation, or even working elevators face formidable obstacles to providing good-enough care for their children, and these obstacles pose their own psychological challenges. Mothers without the psychological resiliency for tolerating the high levels of stress that accompany work under conditions of poverty and the emotional demands of childrearing in these trying circumstances need social and emotional supports in order to provide a good-enough caregiving environment for their children. Many single mothers succeed without these supports, of course. But many fail, as any of us might fail in similarly trying circumstances.
Anti-poverty policies in this country should be focused on providing good-enough caregiving environments to impoverished infants and toddlers rather than on the personal responsibility of overwhelmed adults. At a minimum, high quality publicly funded infant and toddler day care should be a part of the agenda for helping at-risk families. Research suggests that at-risk children can actually benefit from high quality childcare. The most successful early childhood programs combine high quality early child-care with parental education and training. Public-policy experts are beginning to study how investment in early childcare brings high long-term financial returns. According to the economist James Heckman at the University of Chicago, the Perry Preschool Program in Michigan produced long-term social gains of $13 for every $ 1 invested in the program. The participating children stayed in school longer, had higher earnings, and engaged in less adult criminal activity than the control group.
Analysts can join public-policy experts in explaining to a skeptical public how high quality early childcare helps to bring individual and social returns by alleviating the potential adverse developmental effects of severe poverty on young children. Psychoanalysis convincingly shows the basic role of the early caregiving relationship to the development of the psychological qualities and skills important for adult life, skills which include the development of an integrated sense of self and others, a secure hold on the boundary between fantasy and reality, strong adaptive defenses, and the capacity for emotional self-regulation. All these developmental achievements have roots in the early caregiving relationship. By collaborating with lawyers, economists, sociologists, and public-policy experts on the issue of universal early childcare, analysts have the opportunity to instill in the public's imagination a renewed appreciation for Freud's core insight that early childhood experience profoundly shapes our adult lives.
Psychoanalysts have a crucial role to play in public advocacy for the importance of governmental investment in early childhood programs. Yet efforts to educate lawyers, economists, and social scientists who have a serious interest in understanding the deeper realms of self-knowledge, the dynamic unconscious, child development, and human relations
Anne C. Dailey, J.D., is Evangeline Starr Professor of Law and associate dean for research and faculty development at the University of Connecticut School of Law.
should also be undertaken. Outreach to academics and public-policy researchers requires overcoming a certain institutional reserve deriving from an earlier era when non-analysts applied psychoanalysis indiscriminately to social and political problems. While risks certainly exist, the result could be a renewed role for psychoanalysis in enriching public-policy debates on pressing social and political problems. And in the process, psychoanalysis might find itself enriched as well.