Politics in Family Life

A Special Group

The family is a unique entity: the foundation of society and the first organized group in evolutionary terms.

The family possesses goods and power has a role, so politics applies. By drawing on our inquiry into political choice, we can understand family life from an unusual but useful perspective. At the same time, family life may teach us more about politics.

The family is considered here as equivalent to the household, the smallest form of territorial community. However… the analysis to follow would also include families whose members do not live together but who still experience themselves as tightly knit and affected by each other's choices and attitudes.

The family-household is a place where people, typically blood relatives, live together intimately. It is based on a nucleus of parents+children, and so there is marked disparity in maturity, self-sufficiency and physical strength amongst its members. This disparity immediately raises power issues.

The family is characterized by:

• Biological basis similar to other mammals
• The first social group given to humanity
• Unavoidable experience for almost everyone
• The crucible for upbringing and personal identity

More features of family-households…

• Minimal spatial separation
• Sharing of critical resources for living
• Expectations of belonging and devotion
• Nurture of children
• Minute details of daily life potentially affect all
• Many member decisions affect some or all other members
• Focused upon by religions
• Anti-society tendencies

Family Tensions

Because the family is so small and there are no organized groups as in wider society, we cannot use the same internal duality: «the people» v «the powerful». However, we can perceive what must correspond to this: «family members» v «family power sources».

From our discoveries in society, we know that the power within a family will be found in the lower four Levels of the Tree, and the individual members of the family will be located in the upper three Levels. From that framework, we can also guess that the power sources within the family are likely to overwhelm individual family members.

The present analysis should be relevant to therapists, and welfare/community workers, because this phenomenon is the basis for various paradigms
including:

• kinship-centredness as a mode of interacting for benefit
• psychodynamic therapy in which malign family influences or events are viewed as the source (not the cause) of a distorted adult life
• schools within marital and family therapy that focus on the harmful use of power within the family, or on strategies in which the therapist allies with victimized members to increase their power.

The social v privatedynamic duality in relation to making choices and energizing the group also needs some adjustment. Its form in this context is proposed as: 
family-centric (F) or member-centric (M) or both simultaneously (B).

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• Start with the power sources in family life.

Originally posted: July 2009; Last updated: 12 June 2014.