The Nuclear Family
How a complex became a norm
Brian CONNOLLY
According to a commonsense definition of the nuclear family, if we were to strip away all other kinship and social formations, we would be left with the nucleus of the married heterosexual couple and their children. The sense of this unit as a basic form, as the Marxist social critic Raymond Williams notes, emerged in the eighteenth century. Between the seventeenth and nineteenth century, Williams writes, “the sense of the small kin-group, usually living in one house, came to be dominant.” By the twentieth century, the nuclear family had become so dominant, one had to distinguish a different (larger) unit as an “extended family.” However much the nuclear family has become a household concept, the term itself first appeared on the scene in the work of anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski in “Psycho-Analysis and Anthropology,” published in the British journal Psyche in 1924. This origin in Malinowski’s work has largely been forgotten, but more than that, his sociological invention of “the nuclear family complex” was the result of a repressed misreading of Freud—conditioning the historical forgetfulness in the first place—one that has deeply informed the subsequent history and politics of the nuclear family. The nuclear family, in short, emerged in error.
Despite the centrality of the family to the psychoanalytic project, neither Freud nor any other psychoanalyst used the term “nuclear family” prior to 1924. Rather, Freud wrote of the “nuclear complex of neurosis,” from which Malinowski would, erroneously, derive his own term “nuclear family complex.”[1] In his 1908 essay “On the Sexual Theories of Children,” which preceded both the case study of Little Hans and the section of Three Essays on Theory of Sexuality on “The Sexual Researches of Children” (added in 1915), Freud writes of the nuclear complex with regard to children’s attempts to understand reproduction. Unconvinced by their parents’ explanations, children come to believe there is some other, hidden factor. Freud argues this is the origin of psychical conflict. “The set of views which are bound up with being ‘good’ … become the dominant and conscious views; while the other set, for which the child’s work of research has meanwhile obtained fresh evidence, but which are not supposed to count, become the suppressed and ‘unconscious’ ones.” The nuclear complex follows from this repression and is an effect of parents’ moral vision of (reproductive) sex. Neurosis results from the tension between the supposed good, proper knowledge that circulates on the surface of the family, and the child’s sense that this is only a partial, unsatisfying story concealing real knowledge. Through this conflict, Freud concludes, “the nuclear complex of a neurosis” comes into being.
A year later, this notion of a nuclear complex was expanded in a long footnote to the case history of the Rat Man. “The content of the sexual life of infancy,” Freud writes, “consists in auto-erotic activity on the part of the dominant sexual components, in traces of object-love, and in the formation of that complex which deserves to be called the nuclear complex of the neuroses.” This complex, Freud elaborates, encompasses the child’s earliest tender and aggressive impulses, awakened afresh with respect to siblings and parents alike through the impingement of real events, like a father’s prohibition of masturbation or the arrival of siblings as rival objects of attention. This familial dynamic—the solicited and prohibited erotics of the family, entailing both hostility and affection—marks the tense conjunction of internal privacy and external publicity. As Freud hews infantile complexes more closely to the familiar setting of the family, the nuclear complex of neurosis more clearly takes on the lineaments of the Oedipus complex after 1910.
Later, in Freud’s most anthropological text, Totem and Taboo, the transhistorical nature of the nuclear complex was established more positively, even though it had the generic contours of a myth. This was the text that caught the eyes—and stirred the misgivings—of so many anthropologists, Malinowski among them. Building on the so-called armchair anthropology of James Frazer, E. B. Tylor, and Émile Durkheim, among others, Freud reworked Darwin’s “primal horde” in order to speculate on the origins of the Oedipal prohibitions—the taboos on parricide and incest. A matter of the psychical conflict of familial inheritance and the effect of primal repression, the Oedipus complex was thereby made culturally and historically universal. As Freud put it, “the beginnings of religion, morals, society, and art converge in the Oedipus complex. This is in complete agreement with the psychoanalytic finding that the same complex constitutes the nucleus of all neuroses.” In his wide-ranging, speculative exploration of totemism and kinship, Freud refers to the conjugal family not as the nuclear family but rather as “the real family.”
As Freud develops his structural account of neurosis in each of these instances, he privileges the nuclear complex—a seeming constant of psychical strife within familial settings—over the changing historical or sociological formations of the family. These are, of course, not disconnected. The importance of the historical formation of the family is undeniable: its ambivalent psychic life, the social and cultural expressions of bourgeois Europe, and fin-de-siècle Vienna in particular, as well as Freud’s own family. For Freud, nevertheless, neurosis is an effect of the emergence of repression and psychical conflict, and the nuclear complex of neurosis is located at the fraught conjunction—and disjunction—of psyche and culture, private and public, internal and external. The nuclear complex of neurosis, then, is a psychical condition that, ambivalently, affects social and cultural organization, which in turn affects psychical reality.
Emerging out of a critique of psychoanalysis and the Oedipus complex to boot, Malinowski’s anthropological and sociological conception of the “nuclear family complex” emphasizes the nuclear family as a basic social unit and practically dispenses with the neurosis involved. This not only entailed a significant change in meaning, but, insofar as the “nuclear family” has become a dogmatically common-sense idea, it has made for a fateful repression of the psychoanalytic understanding of neurotic complexes. Our attachments to it as an ideal rest, in large part, on this repression of neurosis.
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A Polish ethnographer trained in England, Malinowski was among the first to introduce ethnographic fieldwork, in particular the practice of participant observation, which he conducted among the Trobriand Islanders, particularly on the island of Kiriwina in Papua New Guinea, during three major trips between 1914 and 1918. This research served as the basis for Malinowski’s landmark works in the 1920s, among them Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), Sex and Repression in Savage Society (1927), and Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia (1929). Especially in the early 1920s, Malinowski exhibited a deep interest in psychoanalysis. As the anthropologist George W. Stocking, Jr. notes, Malinowski came to psychoanalysis at a time when psychoanalysis and anthropology were overlapping methods of inquiry, and by the mid-1920s, he “stepped forward as a prospective Freudian revisionist, seeking simultaneously to apply psychoanalytic concepts to anthropology and to modify them in light of ethnographic evidence.” In other words, Malinowski initially set out to prove Freud right with better evidence. What he found in his fieldwork, however, was a matrilineal society that appeared both to confirm the centrality of sex and to counter the universality of the Oedipus complex.
Malinowski’s critique of psychoanalysis, as well as his coining of the “nuclear family complex,” was produced and justified by the positivist empiricism of his ethnography. This was a time, in Europe and the United States, when the modern human sciences were consolidating inside and outside the universities. In this context, Malinowski privileged the particular and sociological over and against the universal and psychological, frequently situating himself in a sociological perspective in his critiques of psychoanalysis. For instance, in the opening pages of Sex and Repression in Savage Society, Malinowski writes, “the sociological nature of this doctrine is obvious—the whole Freudian drama is played out within a definite type of social organization, in the narrow circle of the family.” By coining the nuclear family complex, Malinowski was redefining the Freudian scenario as a sociological problem in and of itself—not adding to the psychological but displacing it.
Psychic life, in his account, was subordinated to the supposedly empirical observation of kinship and sex practices, and yet Malinowski’s fieldwork was marked by its own speculation. As James Clifford puts it, Malinowski was “a naturalist presenting facts plus heightened ‘atmosphere,’ his scientific-cultural descriptions yielding morally charged humanist allegories.” An early proponent of functionalism, Malinowski never quite achieved that project. Rather, as Clifford notes, he “produced no synthetic portrait [of Trobriand culture], only densely contextualized monographs on important institutions.” Malinowski’s larger project, aimed at establishing the function of social facts and institutions in the service of a wholly integrated science of culture, was concerned with the consequences of these observable phenomena and how they interacted to sustain that integrated culture. This fantasy of a wholly integrated culture was never realized, in part a result of all the empirical observations that could not be functionally integrated into the culture. Psychoanalysis, with its emphasis on the disturbing consequences of the primal repression of parricide and incest, diagnosed the problem with the fantasy of a wholly integrated culture and the functionalism that sustained that fantasy.
Malinowski appears to offer an ostensibly positivist, empirical project to determine what makes a family, but as Clifford points out, this project was replete with “imponderabilia” that evinced a “desire to unmake as well as to make a whole.” Malinowski’s functionalist desire for a total, integrated system was itself supplemented by additive, sometimes error-ridden, and, therefore, symptomatic moments that prevented the system from finding closure. Thus, Malinowski’s determination of the nuclear family complex emerged to claim that a better empiricism could resolve the errors of psychoanalysis—a kind of conflict and transference to the very field of psychoanalysis—yet he erred in his own, however more systematic, way. The subsequent history of the nuclear family has turned on this functional desire for an integrated total system organized around the nucleus of the family.
Malinowski was taken with much of the psychoanalytic project, but he was not convinced of its universalist presumptions. Malinowski’s central disagreement with Freud in 1924 was that there was not one “nuclear family complex” but rather multiple nuclear family complexes—potentially as many as there were human societies. His critique amounted to a claim that the Oedipus complex was the nuclear family complex of Western bourgeois societies, perhaps, but it was not applicable to the Trobriand Islanders, whose primary incest prohibition was not parent-child but rather brother-sister, and whose primary male authority was not the father but the uncle (mother’s brother). Malinowski was among the first to offer what has long been a central critique: the supposed universalism of psychoanalysis rests on an imperial sense of the Oedipus complex, obliterating social and cultural differences to remake global kinship and psyche as so many variations on the Western, bourgeois family.
This is, of course, a vital critique, and while it deeply informed the invention of the nuclear family, Malinowski’s misreading occurred at an equally important but adjacent site, that of the conceptualization of the family itself. If Malinowski acknowledged that there were psychical and social conflicts in and around the family, he tended to associate them with maladjustments. In doing so, his critique of psychoanalysis minimized the crucial Freudian insight that the family was organized around both quotidian and mythic conflicts in no way reducible to simple maladjustments. This would ultimately lead to the same consequence of a hegemonic determination of the family form, but this time through sociological inquiry. Whereas Freud’s theorizations operated at the intersections of psychical and social, conscious and unconscious, Malinowski presented a one-way street from social to psychic. The sociological field would follow suit and symptomatically reinforce this approach.
In 1930, in direct reference to Malinowski, a little-known anthropologist, Gertrude Doniger, wrote an essay on Malinowski, mother-right, and psychoanalysis for Margaret Sanger’s Birth Control Review. Doniger quoted Malinowski as having written the following in Sex and Repression in Savage Society: “The nuclear family is a functional formation dependent upon the structure and upon the culture of a society.” In Malinowski’s original text, “nuclear family” is “nuclear family complex.” By the 1940s and 1950s, symptomatically slipping through history, “complex” had been dropped in sociological and anthropological texts, Malinowski became a less direct reference, and “nuclear family,” sans complex, had become the dominant conceptual term, both in the social sciences and more broadly, further obscuring the connection between neurosis and family.
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Following Malinowski, the family is now primarily seen as a sociological formation, and any psychological effects are just that—effects of a more primary social formation. As a social institution, the family was imbued with determinative capacity. “Psycho-analytic doctrine is essentially a theory of the influence of family life on the human mind,” as summarized in Malinowski’s terms: “the nuclear family complex, the most important fact in human mentality according to Freud, is due to the action of a certain type of social grouping.” If this were the case, then the variability of families across cultures and societies and throughout time would determine, in a strict sense, the conditions of the psyche.
As Malinowski noted, “The problem therefore emerges: do the conflicts, passions, and attachments within the family vary with its constitution, or do they remain the same throughout humanity? If they vary, as in fact they must do, then the nuclear complex of the family cannot remain constant in all human races and peoples; it must vary with the constitution of the family.” By prioritizing the social form of the family as the nuclear condition, Malinowski shifted the terrain of the issue, and the phrase “nuclear family complex” captures that shift. As Christopher Lasch put it in Haven in a Heartless World, his polemical (and unconvincing) defense of the nuclear family and lacerating critique of social sciences, Malinowski “subtly perverted the Freudian view.” The theory of the family was no longer the nuclear complex of neurosis, which manifested itself, psychically and socially, in the conflicts of the Oedipal triad. Now it was the nuclear family as the fundamental unit of social life—which by necessity varied from culture to culture—that determined psychic life.
For Freudians, the problem with Malinowski’s interpretation was that he substituted social organization for the psyche. This contention was the crux of two essays Ernest Jones wrote for the International Journal of Psychoanalysis in 1925 and 1928. The first was a review of Malinowski’s original 1924 essay in Psyche; while Jones appreciated the promise in Malinowski’s ethnographic work and his engagement with psychoanalysis, he was, nonetheless, sharply critical of his argument about mother-right. Stung by Jones’s critical and dogmatic response, in 1927 Malinowski published Sex and Repression in Savage Society, which incorporated his 1924 article, and thus continued the use of nuclear family complex, but added new material that marked a critical rejection of psychoanalysis, dismissing it as a popular craze that had duped many. “Many fools have been deeply impressed and many pedants shocked and put off. The present writer belongs evidently to the first category, for he was for a time unduly influenced by the theories of Freud and Rivers, Jung, and Jones. But pedantry will remain the master passion in the student, and subsequent reflection soon chilled the initial enthusiasms.”
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Malinowski’s “nuclear family complex” serves as a fantasy, a defense against unconscious wishes, and ultimately against castration.
Jones published a long review of Sex and Repression in Savage Society that crystallized the distinction between the nuclear complex of neurosis and the nuclear family complex. To defend psychoanalytic inquiry, Jones’s critique was organized around four central problems in Malinowski’s work. First, Malinowski’s empirical orientation was too reliant on simple description. As Jones writes, “for him nuclear complexes are very superficial and descriptive terms…. Seeing only that the nuclear complex may be fashioned by the particular type of family organization, he never asks if there may not be still more fundamental factors in its creation.” Second, this descriptive impulse obscured the fundamental work of repression by confounding “social disapproval with what psycho-analysts call repression.” Third, Malinowski’s claim that the matrilineal, avunculate structure of Trobriand kinship disproved the universality of the Oedipus complex was a superficial and misguided reading of Freud. “Dr. Malinowski calls his description of avunculate society a ‘correction of extreme importance.’ But it is not a correction at all. We never doubted that in consciousness uncles can function in the way that fathers more often do among ourselves. So can schoolteachers, but this is nothing more than a form of the father complex, not a primary ‘teacher complex’ in itself.” Finally, Jones complained that Malinowski elided the split between unconscious and conscious, diminishing the importance of the unconscious.
One need not endorse all of Jones’s typically dogmatic critique to see that he identified a central problem with Malinowski’s account, one that underlay the phrase “nuclear family complex” and its subsequent conceptual history. Malinowski deployed the phrase “nuclear family complex” as a simple description and one that was inadequate to the task. “Nuclear family complex” is an inaccurate compression of the nuclear complex of neurosis and the familial form of the Oedipus complex, and by emphasizing the nuclear family complex as a descriptive term focused on the social formation of the family, he essentially excised neurosis, which led, in turn, to a shortsighted sociology of the family.
As Malinowski wrote in the closing pages of Sex and Repression, “from the point of view of psychoanalytic theory it is difficult to explain why the complex should be harmful ... the Oedipus complex is the fons et origo of culture, the beginning of religion, law, and morality. Why should there be any need to remove it? Why should humanity or the ‘collective mind’ have ‘devised’ any means to break it up? To us, however, the complex is not a cause but a by-product, not a creative principle but a maladjustment.” Of course, it’s not a question of more and less harmful. Malinowski’s “nuclear family complex” serves as a fantasy, a defense against unconscious wishes, and ultimately against castration. This only becomes stronger when, in subsequent decades, the “complex,” that tenuous connection to Freud, is dropped from common usage. The nuclear family is then an idealized, complementary unit, where conjugal and filial intimacies must be satisfactory, if only once various maladjustments are corrected for. Such a fantasy, which has stayed with us for a century now, ultimately works in the service of repressing that inaugural castration with which Freud was concerned in Totem and Taboo. Indeed, one might say that Malinowski, and the subsequent conceptual history of the nuclear family, have always been on the side of the parents, whose views Freud characterizes, in that first instance of the “nuclear complex of neurosis” (discussed above) as “bound up with being ‘good.’”
If the Oedipus complex connected the family to an unconscious psychic formation intimately associated with neurosis, Malinowski set it free as a descriptive term: every society has a nuclear family form, and the task is to discern it through positivist observation. Once the family form was valorized as a positive entity, a natural given at the heart of any and every society and culture, the methodological task was simply to describe its appearance across space and time. Thus, Malinowski’s descriptive impulse would mark the increasing use of the term “nuclear family” in the social sciences across the following decades, but paradoxically, this descriptive logic was central to making the nuclear family a universal sign of Western bourgeois ideals. What started out as a critique of psychological universalism only enshrined a new common sense about the sociologically given “nuclear family,” a term that survived through Malinowski’s introduction but whose origin in, and proximity to, psychoanalytic inquiry became shrouded in historical repression.
While Malinowski would continue to argue for a kind of cultural relativism for the remainder of his life, a position that would be influentially expanded by the culture and personality school of thought—associated with Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Edward Sapir, and others—by 1929, Malinowski had come to identify the nuclear family with the conjugal pair and children. In an entry on kinship in the Encyclopedia Britannica in 1929, Malinowski writes of “the typical family” as “a group consisting of mother, father, and their progeny… found in all communities, savage, barbarous and civilized; everywhere it plays an important role and influences the whole extent of social organization and culture.” This same logic animated subsequent use in the 1940s and 1950s (and well after), when American social scientists, often under the auspices of the U.S. government, fanned out across the globe to gather empirical data on all human societies. No matter where they went, they seemed to find something they could describe as a nuclear family.[2] This was a crucial project in mid-century Cold War neocolonialism, whose necessary premise was the certainty that the nuclear family exists, or should exist, everywhere and always—a manifest psychical projection.
The simple descriptive impulse at the heart of the invention of the nuclear family has had long-lasting consequences. The dogged persistence of the nuclear family as an essential form cannot be decoupled from this sociological descriptive origin. The illusory transparency of description has long buttressed the normalization of the nuclear family form. In its effort to describe the nucleus of human kinship and society, it naturalized this particular familial form, which is now commonly referred to as “the family.” The determination cuts out the unconscious, repression, psychical conflict, and neurosis, making them at best problems of a maladapted family—not, as Freud argued, a conflictual dynamic of desire that makes and unmakes such entities. Sociological representation of the family has repressed the dysfunction—the errors—latent in its social and psychical form. The family, so the story has gone, could always be improved until perfected. Is this desire for perfect, functional, socially adapted kinship not the ultimate nuclear complex of the family?
[1] Freud, of course, wrote in German of the “kerncomplex,” and kern is more commonly translated as “core” or “kernel.” However, it is clear that Freud’s use of the term emerged out of his work in cytology in the 1870s and that his regular use of kern was derived from the cellular nucleus, or zellkern. See Bettina Bock von Wülfingen, “Freud’s ‘Core of Our Being’: Between Cytology and Psychoanalysis,” Ber. Wissenschaftsgesch 36 (2013): 1–19.
[2] For an example, see Handbook on the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands (Washington, DC: Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, 1948), 189–91. For a critique of the universalism of the nuclear family that underwrites kinship studies, see David M. Schneider, A Critique of the Study of Kinship (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984).