Negative Aspects of Family Life

Radical Psychiatrists
Laign
Ideas
Claimed to reveal the reality behind normal family life.
Concluded the family is damaging and can cause schizophrenia.
Behaviour disorders as a response to intolerable family situatiobns such as the conflicts of parents.
'Mad' people come from 'mad' families.
Behaviour that may appear bizarre has meaning for the individual.
Criticisms
Untypical families studied.
No normal control families for comparison.
Laign retracted many of his controversial ideas before he died.

Cooper
Ideas
Adds a Marxist perspective to Laing's ideas.
Family seen as an ideological conditioning device reinforcing the power of the ruling class and crushing individual identity.
Tensions and guilt in the family and caused by capitalism and it is these chains that have to be broken to produce a creative and indepndent individual.
Criticisms
Impossible to validate.
Assumes the child is powerless.
Focuses exclusively on the negative aspects of family life.

Anthropologist
Leach
Ideas
Studied pre-industrial societies where extended kin provide emotional and practicle help.
This led him to believe isolated nuclear family is emotionally overloaded, it internalises problems and expects too much of members.
Claimed the 'family with its narrow and tawdry secrets is the source of all discontents'.