On Home Remedies

AEROBICS, assertiveness training, behavior modification, body language, biofeedback, creative divorce, do-it-yourself psychotherapy, dream analysis, egospeak, est, esp, high-fiber diets, homeotherapy, i ching, isometrics, macrobiotics, mega-vitamins, metatalk, numerology, open marriage, parenting, psychodrama, reality training, psychocybernetics, sense relation, silva mine control, tantric sex, transactional analysis...

Deal with it, folks. California has become the emotional and psychological, if not the intellectual mecca of America. New home remedies for family and personal problems appear weekly on the nation's bestseller lists, and everyone who's anyone in the public eye has a psychoanalyst in the closet. Behind every great man, it seems, is a great shrink.

But even if we all get in touch with our feelings and tap our feet to our biorhythms, we still can't cope. While pop psychological and sociological analyses may provide short-term solutions to the problems posed by life in American society, they don't really get to the roots of those problems. Indeed, as Christopher Lasch argues in Haven in a Heartless World, the new nostrums are more symptomatic than curative of America's psychological malaise.

Lasch studies the family as a traditional institution crumbling under the strains of competitive, modern society. In his sometimes dogmatically Marxist paradigm, the family as an institution embodies the contradictions of capitalism. Just as the early industrialists "socialised" production by taking productive activity out of the home, he argues, society is now achieving "the socialization of reproduction." While parents still seem to manage their families, they do so under the watchful eyes of doctors, psychiatrists, educators and other "experts." Marriage is invaded by advisers on "the joy of sex" and the proper mix of "love and orgasm."

Outsiders have always been eager to offer advice on the proper raising of children. But now, Lasch argues, the advisors seek a new kind of legitimacy. They claim to speak as scientists wielding truth, rather than as moralists, as detached rationalists rather than mothers-in-law. By translating social problems into a "religion of health," the experts step righteously into realms of family affairs once considered private and intimate. The social scientist treats his subjects as a doctor would his patients.

Because his problems have been redefined as illnesses, argues Lasch, the man on the street has been freed from responsibility for running his own life and raising his children. Yet the modern social scientific approach has also increased man's sense of responsibility, for it suggests he can solve his problems only through the use of scientific techniques and that it is therefore incumbent on him to master these techniques. The socialization of reproduction has succeeded, argues Lasch, in "making people unable to provide for their own needs without the supervision of trained experts." Although capitalism still lauds the family as the foundation of a stable society, the educative, economic and protective functions of the family are gradually being taken over by the state and its allies in the social science establishment in the interests of "social control."

Lasch places his argument in an historical context, tracing critiques made of marriage and family life over the past 50 years. The greatest part of his book is devoted to explicating the theories of sociologists, anthropologists and psychologists. The general outlines of the rise and fall of anthropological evolutionary theories of the family and the empirical sociology of urbanization are clear, well-written and illustrated with historical examples. But the chapter on the development of personality theory and the psychoanalytic controversies of the '30s and '40s is far less transparent to the uninitiated. Occasionally, Lasch loses the thread of his argument as set out in the early chapters; at times he fails to preserve the connection between intellectual history and social history. Too often, he seems to soar to unnecessarily abstract heights, to stray into foggy, anecdotal or theoretical discussions which have no apparent ties to the major threads of his argument.

Although Lasch never explicitly suggests that families should be offered no advice at all, he sees the counsel of experts as of dubious value. He feels that the decline of the family is the inevitable concomitant of the changing economic and social system, and so reserves judgment on the remporary advantages that might be offered by the invasion of experts. But the most controversial element of Lasch's argument involves his questioning of the motives of the so-called helping professionals.

Lasch seems to imply that the triumph of social science effectively furthered the aims of self-appointed masters of social control. He writes of the socialization of production that "the industrialists...kept to themselves the knowledge of the process as a whole," while creating the vast armies of managers and labor. The socialization of reproduction, argues Lasch, amounted to a deliberate attempt to reduce parents "in the same way" to a passive dependence on a master.

While Lasch's analysis of the effects of the rise of modern social science may be largely accurate, his capitalist conspiracy theory seems too simple to explain the development of applied social science. Lasch himself seems to recognize this: he alludes to the agents of socialization only indirectly.

AND THIS LAST point illustrates the main problem in the book, that of finding Lasch's own position and focus among the many opinions and levels of argument he presents. He uses social history occasionally to illustrate a point, yet he sometimes seems to write from an entirely theoretical perspective. He writes mostly about studies of the family rather than about the family itself: he opens with a Marxist discussion of the place of the family in capitalist society, and in his conclusion he uses psychoanalytic theory to analyze the current problems in families. The conclusion seems fitting in its application of psychology to social problems, a synthetic finish to a theoretical discussion. But it fails to connect with the historical and empirical lines of earlier chapters.

Lasch's book does falter in its line of argument occasionally, but it is, on the whole, an impressive synthetic sociological treatment of a complex and important subject. Lasch cuts a wide swath through the popular literature in the social sciences, even if he almost totally denigrates its content. Haven in a Heartless World is a provocative discussion of the problems in the social science establishment which spews forth pop psychology, and in the family lives of the millions of Americans who eat it up.