Behavior: The American Family: Future Uncertain

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A related danger is to romanticize and sentimentalize the family. From the Greek tragedians to the modern psychoanalysts, men have known that the family, along with being a source of immense comfort, is also a place of savage battles, rivalries, and psychological if not physical mayhem. Psychoanalyst R.D. Laing says that the "initial act of brutality against the average child is the mother's first kiss." He finds it hurtful that a child is completely at the mercy of his parents, even to having to accept affection. Laing's colleague, David Cooper, calls the nuclear family the "ultimately perfected form of nonmeeting" and, in a new book called The Death of the Family, demands its abolition. These are extreme views, but it may be better to face the fierce aspects of family life than to expect only bliss. There is something of the disillusioned lover in many people who today are trying to live outside the conventional family.

Dissatisfied with the traditional family setup, or simply unable to cope with it, Americans by the thousands are seeking alternatives. One that has most captured the imagination of youth and that has an almost religious appeal to members of the counterculture is a family structure that is as old as antiquity: the commune. Utopians from Plato onward have visualized children as not being raised in traditional families but in various communal organizations; the instinct that pulls man toward a tightly knit "nuclear" family has often been counterbalanced by the dream of escaping from it.

Only five years ago, there were perhaps a hundred "intentional communities" in the U.S., founded mostly by religious fundamentalists, Utopian socialists or conscientious objectors. Today, as an outgrowth of the hippie movement, there are about 3,000, a third of which are in rural settings. "There are farms everywhere now, and we might go in any direction on compass to find warm bread and salt," writes Raymond Mungo in Total Loss Farm. Although Vermont, Oregon, California and New Mexico are still the favored states, some new commune clusters are cropping up in what Mungo calls "the relatively inferior terrain and vibration of Massachusetts and points south and west, and the huge strain of friendless middle America."

Most of the new communards are fleeing what they regard as the constriction, loneliness, materialism and the hypocrisy in straight society and the family life on which it is based. Yet some of the same old problems reappear—for example, the tug of war between individualism and submission to the group. One contributor to the Whole Earth Catalog summed up his own experience. "If the intentional community hopes to survive, it must be authoritarian, and if it is authoritarian, it offers no more free dom than conventional society. Those communes based on freedom inevitably fail, usually within a year."