Family, the basis for neuroses

            Many years ago, when I was a naive student and started to create my proper philosophy, I read one small and thin book written in green letters. This book influenced me a lot and many times there were ocasions to remember it or quote it. I’m talking about „T.A.Z.“ (or „The Temporary Autonomous Zone“) by Hakim Bey. My recently anti-system formed mind was amazed by thoughts that appeared in this short but rich work. I totaly agreed with all that was written there and I thought, that this anarchistic work must have a strong impact on some alternative stream of the contemporary society. However, nobody from my friends, colleagues or teachers knew it. Now it’s been more than twenty (!!) years it was written, so maybe some of you have gotten to know it (it’s available in online version as well, or you can just inform yourself about the work at wiki).

            What I saw as the most significant thought of this rather essay was (among other striking themes) the concept of family and family life. Bey literally says that family is cesspit of the society. At the time of the creation of first human societies, there were just groups – the group was a social unit where lived various generations of usually more families or just one big family (all of them were relatives). The group was characteristic for the strong cooperation and unity of its members. By the modern concept of family the model of groups was abandoned and this led to alienation among the non-close family members. This is basically the thought Hakim Bey is presenting us and there’s historically nothing wrong about that. It was a way of how the things were developping: the group was usually moving itself from one place to another according to the possibility of gathering the food and when the first settlements were formed, the model of co-living changed as well - the family as parents and children started probably because of the focus basically on bringing up the children, to provide the children a stable home where they can live and grow up.

            But when the experience was telling the people that this model of a family is somehow wrong, noone had the idea to return back to the group model (although some communities live like this nowadays and it really works, e.g. this one). What actually was that experience which was calling out but noone paid any attention to it? Simply, just the experience of us all – of the children who had to live under the reign of parents‘ rules that sooner or later became more or less repugnant. From what idea do you think Sigmund Freud created his famous theory about opressed suffering from childhood? I think almost every child has suffered some time at home from whatever but what’s important – it can be really whatever, but it depends how the parents treat the issue and if they make the children feel responsible. Especially young children about 3-5 years are very sensitive and they can understand every rising up of the parent’s voice as they had done something wrong and they feel the fault which in fact is not appropriate. But they don’t understand that yet. And although they even don’t worry about that at that particular time, the treatment of their parents around this age will appear in their later behaviour, in the personality as a whole. And that’s why we sometimes act and react in some strange way and we don’t know why – we have some unconscious patterns already coded in ourselves. They are unconscious because we experienced something as very young children and we don’t remember that or we just don’t think about that until something happens – and this reminds us what happened to us long time ago. This is what Freud calls (in my words) „putting something aside“ – we put aside those things that happened to us in childhood just because our lives go on and we don’t have time to stress ourselves, so we simply foget that. And when we are facing some extreme situations we usually act surprisingly even to ourselves.

            The first advice is to get conscious of that, to realize what is happenning and why it is happenning, because if you don’t realize that, it can lead to many neuroses that you have just oppresesd in childhood and adolescent age, and that can come out in stronger way than if you work with them for some time already. The worst is maybe the fact that you can learn to work with these problems when you are an adult. When you are a child or a teenager, you can’t cope with your feelings in any easy way and this reflect significantly in your behaviour. Then there is very simple for the parents or teachers to judge your personality, to put you into the box with particular labels. At the parents‘ side it’s usually because they just project their wishes into the children and these wishes sometimes stay unfulfiled. They blame the child and the child feels bad about that; the children finally blame themselves too. This never should happen.

And what’s on blame here (if we are talking about blame, we have to blame someone or something as well!) is the family itself. This model of small family. Now the parents don’t have to care about the group interests, but about interests of just themselves and their children and they are so overfocused that they are creating the environment where there is not possible to live happily. The modern family parents think that they make the children happy by buing them some material presents. Now, the young parents of today are trying to bring the children up in some kind of respectful ambient, but we will have to wait some time to the results. In fact many of them are already acting like their parents unconsciously.

So, what I was trying to say from the beggining is, that the family itself as an institution is the most probable basis for many mental disorders, neuroses of all types and moreover, the wicked genetic information.

They know why they sing it’s all in the family.