The Sacred Family
The nuclear family is the machine which constantly manufactures and reproduces workers, subject-consumers, cannon fodder, and all structures of obedience to power; it also makes young people conditioned in a way that turns them into new, stable couples who breed more children, create new families, and thus perpetuate the cycle. The family is not only a reproductive structure of the workforce; it is also its maintenance shop, its lottery, its place of rest, and the inner sanctum of its delusions. It is the factory of everyday fascism, of the oppression of women, of psychological terrorism against children and adolescents, of the values of selfishness, of the petite-bourgeois small-mindedness in the private sphere set against the values of the public and political spheres. Not only do the values of obedience to authority pass through the family, but also those of knowing how to get by; how to manipulate others; how to put on a mask; how to cleverly navigate power relations; how to subordinate oneself and how to command others; how to be efficient, productive, opportunistic, possessive, selfish, and tough: in a word, the family is the basic institution by which one comes to learn the dominant rationality.
But this learning is neither painless nor lacking in contradictions. The larger part of mental disorders are born precisely to these contradictions: when the contemporary family begins to dysfunction, it simultaneously produces and shapes the children who rebel against it; and those who don’t manage to rebel against it turn into neurotics or psychotics—good conforming citizens satisfied with their mortal obedience, mediocrity, and normality.
Jervis, 1979, p. 88.
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