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Fam Proc 27:17-31, 1988

Generation and Gender: Normative and Covert Hierarchies

VIRGINIA GOLDNER, PH.D.a
aAssistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, 102 East 22nd Street, New York NY 10010.

This essay argues that gender is an irreducible category of clinical observation and theorizing, as crucial to the family
therapy paradigm as the concept of "generation." Gender, therefore, is not a secondary, mediating variable like race,
class, or ethnicity, but, rather, a fundamental, organizing principle of all family systems. The author analyzes the history
and politics of family therapy in order to explicate how gender, as a co-equal concept, was erased as a universal
principle of family organization, leaving only generation. The theoretical and clinical implications of situating gender at
the center of family therapy are then discussed.
The primary purpose of this essay is to rescue the topic of gender from the category of the "special case" or "special
issue," and to locate it where it belongs, at the center of family theory. By considering gender a central theoretical category,
and opposing its marginalization, I am following an established tenet of feminist scholarship. This is to insist on a
constructivist view of knowledge that takes nothing for granted, and asks the same question of every idea: Does it make
room for both male and female experience or does it make man the measure of woman?
Establishing the truth value of ideas by evaluating them against this standard is a habit of mind with a social history.
Indeed, it is arguably the single most significant accomplishment of the original, humbly conceived, consciousness-raising
groups of the 1960s. As women met together to compare notes on their lives, they began to realize that they had been
deprived of their subjectivity by a culture that expected them to be sexual objects for men and facilitating environments for
everybody. The more they talked and laid claim to themselves, the more of themselves they found had been left out of the
world. And this led to a striking insight: gender dichotomies were not only restrictive, they were also constituitive. In other
words, the gendering of social spheres not only constrained personal freedom, but gender categories also determined what it
was possible to know.
Coming to this discovery was historic. It meant that the feminist project that had brought women together had to be
reconceived. It was no longer a matter of demanding equal access to a man's world, but of asking what the world would be
like if women had equal power in creating it. This meant that gender could no longer be conceptualized as simply a barrier
to be transcended, because it was itself a metaphysical category, a central organizing principle of knowledge and culture.
This paradigm shift in our view of the problem has led academic feminists to theorize about the gendering not only of
social spheres but also of the act of knowing itself. There is now a burgeoning literature elaborating the premise that
thinking is gendered and that different modes of thought produce different kinds of knowledge (3, 9, 16, 27). Having staked
out this claim for cognitive variation, feminist investigators have been led, inevitably, to challenge the hegemony of
traditional (masculine) forms of intellectual inquiry and even to question the fundamental assumptions underlying
traditional canons of knowledge.
This conceptual revolution has made its mark in philosophy, literature, anthropology, history, and psychoanalysis. In
family therapy, feminist criticism is at an earlier stage. We have done extensive and important work in documenting the
androcentric biases of clinical theory and practice, but we have only just begun to tackle the intimidating project of the
conceptual transformation of our discipline as a whole. It is time.
Family therapy, as a field, has finally taken notice of feminism and has taken it seriously. The noisy feminist presence of
the past few years has been virtually impossible to ignore, and, in any case, family therapists by political temperament do
not like to be on the "wrong side" of a socially progressive issue. Indeed, reactivity to feminism has now become so intense
that political responses, which typically take a decade to unfold, seem to have been condensed into a scant few years.
Looking back at this very recent history, it appears that, after a long period of polite silence, family therapists suddenly
developed an intense curiosity about what feminists were saying. This was followed by hurried attempts to incorporate
feminist concerns into the field, which was ambivalently received by feminists who liked the attention to their agenda but
feared that the price of admission would be cooptation.
Not surprisingly, as the dialogue developed, reactivity intensified, generating increasing polarization and even political
backlash. More recently, there seems to be evidence that feminist ideas are being assimilated into the mainstream, but the
professional climate remains "edgy" and intermittently adversarial. A systems consultant describing the process would
probably observe that a short, intense period of uncertainty, ambiguity, and unstable coalitions quickly congealed into a
predictable, symmetrical spiral between discrete factions.
If we are to move beyond this rebuttal, retort, and rejoinder mode of transaction, feminists will need, once again, to
elevate the level of discourse about gender. This will involve demonstrating that our primary goal is not the moral reform of

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errant colleagues, but the transformation of our theory of familiesand family therapy will only gain in the process. Such a
transformation requires situating gender at "ground zero."

GENDER AND GENERATION

Put in formal terms, this means conceptualizing gender as an irreducible category of clinical observation and theorizing,
as fundamental to the family therapy paradigm as the concept of "generation." Indeed, the position to be advanced here is
that gender and generation are best understood as the two fundamental, organizing principles of family life.
There is nothing revolutionary or even particularly feminist about such a view. Indeed, all classic theories of family and
kinship in anthropology and sociology begin with two universals: age and sex (6, 7, 19). In anthropological terms, age and
sex, as the only self-evident biological givens, are taken to constitute the two universal principles of kinship organization.
Because the distinctive feature of human society is the transformation of nature into culture, these immutable givensage
and sexbecome transformed into the complex cultural phenomena of "generation" and "gender."
In the classic sociological analysis of the modern family, the functionalist Parsons (23) also regards age and sex as the
underlying axes of family relations. His way of casting the subject matter has been much criticized by feminists, but that is a
separate matter. For our purposes, the important point is that in academic conceptualizations of kinship and culture, age and
sex are taken to be co-equal principles of organization. Indeed, it is around the structuring and interpretation of these two
social categories that primitive societies and modern families organize themselves. Think, for example, of Bateson's (1)
discussion of the Iatmul in Naven. Even though his formal subject was social instability (how conflicts and divisions in a
group are handled), his argument hinged on an analysis of the balance of power between the men and women of the tribe at
different stages of the life cycle.
In contrast to this suddenly self-evident point of departure, family therapy theory seems oddly lopsided. Insofar as we
have a theory of the family at all, as distinct from a theory of communication or of structural "good form," it is a theory that
relies on a single cultural concept: the idea of the family life cycle and the presumption of the necessity for a hierarchy of
the generations. What is fascinating about this view is what it leaves out.
I thought it would be interesting to trace back the history of ideas in family therapy in order to find out how gender, as a
co-equal concept, was ignored or erased as a universal principle of family organization, leaving only generation. Rereading
Haley's classic chapters on the family life cycle in Uncommon Therapy (13) and on hierarchy in Problem-Solving Therapy
(14) seemed a good place to start because his presentation of these two ideas has been so central to the development of
family therapy theory. Moreover, given that both these books are products of their era as well as of their author, I thought
they might serve as time capsules back to the recent past, revealing what could be seen and named, and what could not. In
this regard, I was intrigued to note how gender appeared and then was made to disappear in Haley's characterization of
family life.
In Uncommon Therapy, for example, when introducing the historic formulation that "families undergo a developmental
process over time, and human distress and psychiatric symptoms appear when this process is disrupted" (p. 41), Haley
particularizes his meaning of family development by adding the phrase, "the dilemmas that arise when men and women
mate and rear children" (p. 41). Here we have what could have been the beginning of a dual description of family
dilemmas, read out in terms of both gender and generation. However, Haley's attention to gender unravels as the discussion
proceeds. "Men and women" soon become "human beings" who are then made synonymous with "men," as in: "Men have
in common with other creatures the developmental process of courtship, mating, nest building ..." (p. 44).
Examples of the variety of "mating practices" of the "human species" follow:

A man can copulate with any woman who passes, the more anonymous the better. Men can also have clandestine
affairs... Human beings have also tried out the arrangement of multiple husbands or wives characteristic of some
species. Most commonly, men select a single mate for life and remain with her constantly; at least this is the myth of
monogamy in middle-class America ... [13, p. 45]

This paragraph is telling in a number of ways. Not only are women made to disappear by use of a universalizing male
pronoun, but, when they do appear, they are not represented as sexual subjects who can claim men for anonymous sex, have
clandestine affairs, or choose life-long monogamy. They surface only as objects of male desire, not as subjects in their own
right.
In other words, what Haley seems to mean by asserting that the "human species, with its complex capabilities, can follow
any of the mating habits of other animals" (p. 44), is that human males have the freedom to "exchange women" for purposes
of sex in as many ways as other male animals. Stated this way, Haley has unwittingly observed what anthropologists,
beginning with Levi-Strauss (19), have had to explain: that men have "certain rights [to] female[s] ... and that women do
not have the same rights [to] males" (26, p. 177).

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By losing hold of gender as an irreducible, orthogonal axis of family organization, Haley (13) buries women in his prose,
and then intermittently brings them back to life, as in this feminist swipe at psychoanalysis:

Many wives ... discontented with the narrow pattern of suburban life, have been stabilized for years by intensive
analysis. Instead of encouraging them to take action that would lead to a richer and more complex life, the therapy
prevents that change by imposing the idea that the problem is within their psyche rather than in their situation. [p.
43]

A similar incongruity between Haley's protofeminism and his patriarchal presumptions is to be found in his discussion of
hierarchy in Problem-Solving Therapy (14), published three years later in 1976. When making the point that every
"therapist must think through his [sic] ethical position" (p. 102),1 Haley writes:

Although one must accept the existence of hierarchy, that does not mean one needs to ... accept the status quo
either in terms of the economic structure of society or [in terms] of a particular [family] hierarchy. Everywhere there
are hierarchical arrangements that are unjust. One economic class suppresses another. Women are kept in a
subordinate position in both family and work groups merely because they are female. People are placed in
subordinate positions because of race or religion. Children are oppressed by their parents, in the sense of being
restricted and exploited in extreme ways. [p. 101-102]

Here, gender inequality, located inside as well as outside the family, appears along with race, class, religious and even
age oppression, as "wrongs that need righting" (14, p. 102). In other words, gender, like race and class, is construed by
Haley as a secondary, mediating variable that structures social existence, often in oppressive ways.
But having already distinguished gender from these other mediations by observing that gender (like age) orders
intrafamilial as well as extrafamilial hierarchies, Haley drops the subject. Two paragraphs later, gender has already been
obliterated as a distinctive social category by use of the generic "people," and generation now emerges as the "most
elementary" family hierarchy.

When we look at the family in terms of hierarchy, the organization includes people of different generations, of
different incomes, and of different degrees of intelligence and skills.... The most elementary hierarchy involves the
generation line [because] at the most simple level it is parents who nurture and discipline children ... [14, pp.
102-103]

Privileging generational relations by presuming there is anything simple and universal about parents caring for children
is anthropologically naive and factually inaccurate. Malinowski (20) made this claim in 1913, and revisionist critics ever
since have been documenting his errors. Indeed, if there is anything universal about the social organization of childcare it is,
as the anthropologist Rosaldo (25) concludes, that "women almost everywhere have daily responsibilities to feed and care
for children ... while men's ... obligations tend to be less regular and more bound up with extra-familial sorts of ties" (p.
394). Similar conclusions were reached by another anthropologist, Fox (8), who writes that "whether or not a mate
becomes attached to the mother on some more or less permanent basis is a variable matter" (p. 39).
In other words, one can never "simply" (to borrow Haley's word) talk about parenthood. There are only mothers and
fathers producing progeny, after which fathering seems to be a highly variable social occupation. Thus, it appears that the
division of labor by sex, with women bearing primary responsibility for childcare, may be even more "basic" to the
structure of kinship than the hierarchical organization of family members by age.
Determining which is more primary, "gender" or "generation," is not as important as establishing that both are essential
to any description of family relations. Even Freud took this premise as a given, situating the conditions of civilization on the
resolution of a universal family drama organized around the erotization of generational relationshipsthe Oedipus
complex. Thus, for Freud, Parsons, and Lévi-Strauss, the politics of age and sex hierarchies constituted the central force
field of family life and culture. In the context of this broadly based, intellectual tradition, the mysterious omission of the
category of gender from the first premises of family therapy becomes stranger and stranger.

THE DENIAL OF GENDER

Returning to Haley's (14) disarmingly simple paragraphs about hierarchy and injustice, written in 1976, one is tempted
to speculate about the meaning of his ability to see and simultaneously not to see women as occupying a central and
problematic position in family hierarchies. Over ten years later, it is easier to recognize how difficult it is to navigate the
ethics of hierarchy for the conduct of clinical work. Musing on the psychohistory of this problem, one might conjecture that
by denying the centrality of gender for family relations, Haley (speaking for the field) could avoid confronting the issue of
gender inequality in family life.

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This strategy was almost certainly not intentional, yet it was accomplished painlessly and elegantly by what, with
hindsight, could be called a theoretical sleight of hand. By privileging the category of generation, and trivializing the
category of gender, Haley could dispense with the vexing question of sexual inequality in marriage thus: spouses, by virtue
of being at the same generational level, are, by definition, equals. In other words, merely by being age peers, and therefore
having generational parity, husbands and wives were presumed to occupy the same level of the domestic power hierarchy.
Haley's cautiously abstract definition of "generation" in Problem-Solving Therapy illustrates the elision through which
gender becomes incidental to generation: "By generation is meant a different order in the power hierarchy, such as parent
and child or manager and employee" (14, p. 109).

THE RATIONALIZATION OF GENDER INEQUALITY

There is an argument to be made that Haley's graceful detour around the reality of gender inequality protected family
therapists from ethical dilemmas that we, as a field, were unprepared to face. By speaking only in terms of the universality
of generational hierarchies, Haley neutralized the issue of power. There is, of course, something inherently plausible about
the notion that older people should be in charge of younger ones. Because it does not grossly violate our democratic ideals
to think in terms of age hierarchies, the authoritarian parent who goes too far can easily be seen as merely "doing too much
of a good thing." (This is often the way the diplomatic family therapist would frame the issue.)
On the other hand, it is not so easy to rationalize the persistence of gender hierarchies, given our egalitarian values. In
fact, the history of the obfuscation of the gender issue in our field seems to suggest that we simply cannot tolerate the idea
that arrangements of inequality between men and women may be structurally essential to family relations. In fact, the truth
of family life in our time might be described as consisting of two social hierarchies, one acceptable, indeed normative,
"generation," and one unacceptable, and therefore covert, "gender."
Unfortunately, much as we might like to think otherwise, the social fact of gender inequality, of man's dominion over
woman, has probably always and everywhere been the norm. Although there have been many attempts to read into the
anthropological and historical record a matriarchal or sexually egalitarian past, most contemporary scholars lean toward the
view that human cultural and social forms have probably always been male dominated. Moreover, there appears to be a
universal connection between women's primary responsibility for the care and feeding of children, spouses, and other kin,
and their secondary status in both domestic and public domains (25).
What distinguishes our time and place from others is that women's subordination to men has become morally
unacceptable. Nonetheless, it persists. This contradiction between our democratic values and our social practice is not easy
to rationalize. Appeals to the historical precedent of women's inherent inferiority or to the fictional claim of separate but
equal spheres of influence have long since lost their legitimacy. In their place, contemporary strategies for tolerating
patriarchy seem to depend on viewing the situation in such a way as to minimize or at least contain the scope of the
injustice.
These devices run the gamut from Haley's rhetorical magic, in which the whole problem is made to disappear in one turn
of phrase, to Parsons' (23) rationalizations for a sexual double standard written twenty years earlier. Parsons has been an
easy target for feminists because his defense of patriarchy is so transparent. Reconstructing his awkward and ambivalent
attempts to justify what is unjustifiable will provide an interesting counterpoint to the strategy of simple denial that has
characterized the family therapy field.
What Haley could assert as a conceptual giventhat spouses, by virtue of being at the same generational level were
therefore equalsParsons had to "prove." His argument, rooted in a theory of the historical evolution of the modern family,
posited that with the development of industrialization, husbands lost much of the legal and material basis of their authority
over their wives, so that marriages could now become arrangements of equals, that is, the "companionate marriage." Thus,
for Parsons, equality between husbands and wives was not axiomatic, but rather a sociopolitical accomplishment, an
achievement of bourgeois democracy at a certain point in its history.
Yet there was too much evidence against this celebratory view of American history, even for such a celebrant as Parsons.
Reading his work carefully, as the sociologist Beechey (2) has done, reveals that he was neither comfortable nor
intellectually satisfied with his characterization of gender equality in marriage.
In one essay, "An Analytical Approach to the Theory of Social Stratification (1940), for example, Parsons states that in
American society, members of kinship groups are "treated as 'equals' regardless of the fact that by definition they must
differ in sex and age ... [T]he only differentiation tolerated is that involved in the socially approved differences of the sex
and age status" (23, p. 77). The justification of his claim that marriage is a relationship of "equals," and does not involve
structural domination and subordination, seems to be based on the inference that because the wife's social status is
established on the basis of her husband's occupational position, the two become equal in marriage even if they were not
equals at birth. Thus, inequality between men and women disappears because, by becoming a wife, the woman "acquires"
her husband's social position.

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Interestingly, in a 1954 revision of the paper, Parsons (23) abandoned this line of argument and actually conceded that
some degree of gender inequality was necessary for the preservation of the family unit! He rationalized this conclusion with
his special brand of functionalism:

It follows that the preservation of a functioning family system even of our type is incompatible with complete
equality of opportunity.... [This] is attributable to its conflict with the functional exigencies of personality and
cultural stabilization and socialization. [p. 422]

Yet, when stripped of functionalist rationalizations, Parsons' observations were stark and prescient. In his paper "Age
and Sex in the Social Structure," for example, Parsons asserted without equivocation or apology that the male world of
work, from which women were excluded, was the primary site of power and prestige in America. He went on to speculate
that if women were to compete with men in that public arena, the structure of family life would have to go through a
profound transformation:

[The wife/mother] is excluded from the struggle for power and prestige in the occupational sphere ... It is of course
possible for [her] to follow the masculine patterns and seek a career ... in direct competition with men of her own
class [but] this could only be [accomplished by] profound alterations in the structure of the family. [24, pp.
258-259]

These conclusions, which were theoretical hypotheses for Parsons in the 1940s, are now empirically based givens in the
sociological research literature on marriage and divorce. But even before the "evidence" was in, Parsons clearly had stated
his belief that the maintenance of the nuclear family under capitalism depended upon sexual inequality in the form of role
complementarity and the prescription of separate, gendered spheres. This is far more explicit and compromising than
Haley's (14) cool, contradictory assertion that families, by definition, are headed by two co-equal executives, Mom and
Dad, although he simultaneously asserts: "Women are kept in a subordinate position in both family and work groups merely
because they are female" (p. 102).
This oddly inconsistent position has gone without challenge in our field because the ideas occupying each of those
clauses have been kept apart from each other. Contradictions that Parsons had to confront could remain inconsequential in
family therapy as long as gender remained a marginal category. In fact, with the exception of Haley's remarks, I could not
find a single reference to gender, let alone gender inequality, in any of the classic family texts.2 Insofar as feminist concerns
entered our field at all, they were kept outside the family. This was accomplished by a reworking of the doctrine of separate
spheres.

THE FAMILY VERSUS SOCIETY

In our updated version, public and private domains are no longer taken to be equal, but they are still kept artificially
separate. In other words, family therapists do not deny the fact that women are politically and economically one-down; they
simply hold onto their conviction that, in the privacy of their own homes, men and women are equals.
This naive and uncritical dichotomization of public and private spheres is especially incongruous in a field that
historically congratulated itself on its rigorous commitment to an ecological paradigm. To presume that social hierarchies
topple at the domestic portal violates the principle of ecological embeddedness on which our theory depends. How family
therapists have kept these two worlds apart for so long and with so little strain is the real subject of this essay.
The resilience of this kind of wishful thinking is a measure of its multiple origins and causes, some of which have already
been suggested. An additional factor is the sociohistorical context in which our ideas have been formed.
The illusion of marital equality in a male-dominated society requires the illusory division of the world into public and
private domains. This bifurcation of social existence can be likened to a kind of cognitive "deep structure" that limits the
scope of even the most rigorous, ecosocial paradigm. As participants in a competitive, capitalist culture, it may be that we
simply cannot conceive of the family except in symbolic opposition to a harsher public arena.
This juxtaposition of public and private contains a host of elaborated antinomies that cannot easily be brushed aside,
even for a more accurate, formal paradigm. When we think of the family, and then think of the world that surrounds it, we
tend to think in terms of contrasts like these: love versus work, cooperation versus competition, timeless versus temporary,
noncontingent versus instrumental, feeling and morality versus law and contract, altruistic versus acquisitive, collective
versus individualistic, equality versus hierarchy, and so on (6).
Although family therapists do not sentimentalize these distinctions in the manner of 19th-century popular culture, our
training, and what it was designed to counteract (the reification of the individual), does encourage us to think of families as
"havens in a heartless world" (18). This is clearly incompatible with Parson's admission that gender inequality is structured
into domestic life because our theories presume an ultimate consensus of interests among family members who are

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conceived as "parts of a whole."

No matter how abstract, or ironic, our descriptions of a family system, there is always an underlying idealization of the
family as constituting some kind of poetic, transcendent unity. This vision of ultimate interdependency is covertly
ideological because its power comes from an implied comparison with the outside world, a place where individuals are set
against each other in the marketplace of daily life. Our holistic conception of human relations, therefore, is compelling not
only because of its formal, explanatory power, but also because it evokes a metaphorical critique of capitalist individualism.
Minuchin and Fishman (22) probably take this imagery the farthest because their preferred metaphor of the family
"organism" moves beyond an implicit nostalgia for a pre-industrial past, and evokes a timeless analogy to natural,
biological systems. "The family as a whole seems almost like a colony animalthat entity composed of different life forms,
each part doing its own thing, but the whole forming a multibodied organism which is itself a life form" (p. 12).
This image of the family as body politic, with parts and wholes intricately balanced, cannot be easily reconciled with a
view that has husbands and wives engaged in a contest for power because of their irreconcilably conflicting interests.

THE FAMILY VERSUS THE STATE

Minuchin the clinician has no illusions about the "goodness" of families, and has never minimized their terrible,
destructive power. Similarly, Minuchin the theoretician is quite clear about what he intends to convey by the organism
metaphor, and what he does not. He puts it best in his book co-authored with Fishman (22):

[T]hose who attempt to come to grips with man's [sic] interdependence often resort to mystical or holistic
philosophies connecting man with the universe. It is less painful to conceive of man as part of a universal
intelligence than as part of the family network, a living organism closer to our experience. We can embrace man the
cosmic hero, but we would prefer to turn a blind eye to his fight with his wife over who should have locked the front
door. [p. 12]

However, for Minuchin the rhetorician (21) the "family organism" begins to take on an ideological function. Indeed, the
organism metaphor seems to fuel his sense of mission because he maintains the political posture that to be for the family is
to be for the individual. This militant holism is not only an implicit critique of the culture of capitalism. It is also an explicit
political attack on the modern Welfare State, whose activities he perceives as intrusions into realms of privacy that threaten
self-determination, especially for the poor (21). Thus, by protecting the "family organism," we are protecting our sense of
personal integrity and individuality.
This view of the family-as-victim of the public sector has been most systematically developed by Lasch. In Haven in a
Heartless World (18), the first of a series of books on this theme, Lasch argued that the modern liberal approach to the
family was ultimately an excuse for middle-class professionals to tell private citizens how to live. He attempted to show
how the modern welfare state had displaced the family, writing of the "forces that ... invade the private realm" (p. xvii), and
the "assertion of social control over activities once left to individuals and their families" (p. xiv). He even has a section
entitled "The Proletarianization of Parenthood" (pp. 12-21), in which he analyzes the means whereby the state has usurped
parental prerogatives.
The politics of this account informed the rhetoric and professional agenda of both Haley and Minuchin during the
expansion of family therapy in the 1970s. They saw the family as being dismembered, invaded and regulated by
professional experts with their own agendas-bureaucratic, psycho-analytic, medical. Stating it crisply in Problem-Solving
Therapy, Haley (14) wrote, "Despite its humanitarian nature, the clinical field is also an important arm of social control in
society" (p. 196). Protecting the family against the intrusive violations by the social welfare and mental health industries
became part of the political culture of family therapy, and remains a central focus of Minuchin's current work (21).
What is important about the history of these ideas is that it highlights how our thinking about families was shaped by this
battle with the bureaucrats and the "experts" they relied on. Set against the specter of an enormously powerful, unwittingly
destructive, social control apparatus, we conjured up an image of "family" as a beleaguered but still hearty, "natural" unit.
"The family," Minuchin and Fishman (22) wrote in 1981, "is the natural context for both growth and healing ... The family
is a natural group which over time has evolved patterns of interacting" (p. 11).
This emphasis on Nature is the key, because it is related to the privileging of generational relationships and the
marginalizing of gender conflicts in our theory of family systems. Looking back, once again, to Haley's formal exposition of
the family life-cycle framework in Uncommon Therapy, it is clear that situating the family in Nature was crucial to his
universalizing of the generational construct.
The intellectual conceit organizing his discussion relies on a semi-whimsical, semi-serious play of analogies between the
social practices of human beings and those of other "beasts." Haley (13) writes:

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The systematic study of the human family ... has coincided with the study of the social systems of other animals ...
[H]uman beings as well as the other beasts of the field and the birds of the air have been observed in their natural
environment.... Men [sic] have in common with other creatures the developmental process of courtship, mating,
nest building, child rearing and the dislodging of offspring into a life of their own, but because of the more complex
social organization of human beings, the problems that arise during the family life cycle are unique to the species.
[p. 44]

The power and wit of exploiting this analogy becomes clear in the next page with a breathtaking one-liner: "A crucial
difference between men and all other animals is that man is the only animal with in-laws" (p. 45)!
By borrowing metaphors from ethology instead of confronting the dilemmas of cultural anthropology, Haley could keep it
simple, generating an image of "the family" that suited the demands of theory and the political agenda of the field in general.
By suggesting, for example, that symptoms could be understood as "comments" that conveyed distress about the predictable
difficulties of generational development throughout the life cycle, Haley exploited a developmental metaphor to score a
political point. This is because his assertion contained the implication, made more or less explicit, that families, if they were
not interfered with, could evolve home-grown solutions to many of these developmental crises.
This idea eventually came to incorporate Minuchin's image of family-as-organism and Bateson's "mind and nature"
metaphors. In its current usage, "family development" is analogically tied to representations of evolution so that the
argument now reads something like this: Were it not for developmental snags and external meddlers, families would
"naturally" grow and develop, and in the process emerge as more complex forms of life.
Much has been accomplished (and obscured) by this evolutionary analogy. By turning families into organisms, a
naturalistic, developmental frame could be used to normalize psychological problems. This has been useful in protecting
individuals and the sphere of private life from the truly destructive impact of medical and psychiatric interventionism.
Moreover, the generational emphasis, with its associated imagery of the timeless universality of cycles of birth and death,
has been empowering to parents needlessly intimidated by professional advice givers. In this regard, we might remember
that the standard clinical maneuver of "putting the parents in charge" is less a comment to unruly children than a challenge
to interfering professionals.
Thus, by proselytizing about the integrity of the family unit, and emphasizing the "natural order" of the generations,
family therapists were actually waging a political battle on behalf of parents against the State (and competing with other
segments of the mental health establishment for those parents' allegiance).

FROM "NATURE" TO "POWER"

Unfortunately, this semi-explicit political agenda obscured as many realities as it revealed. As I have argued elsewhere
(10, 11, 12), the ideal of restoring parental authority often got translated in clinical practice into the attempt to restore
patriarchal authority by implicitly blaming mothers for fathers' weaknesses. Moreover, by "normalizing" generational
hierarchies, conflicts between husbands and wives were depoliticized. The struggle for power between the sexes was
relevant only insofar as it compromised parental functioning. Gender differences had to be made incidental to generational
difficulties because they could not be camouflaged as normal aspects of the natural developmental flow.
In short, to confront gender inequality on its own terms would have meant an end to the idealization of family
relationships. "The Family" could no longer stand outside of hierarchical society, just a bit closer to nature and to our
pre-industrial past. Instead of the presumption of an ultimate "consensus of interests," we would have to consider that
families are also entities divided against themselves, and that they are structured around an inherent "conflict of interests"
between males and femaleseach sex belonging to a distinct social group, but one having more power than the other.
To entertain such a view would undermine, in the most profound sense, the political and philosophical commitments of
the family therapy field. It would mean questioning the conceptual transcendence of "The Family" as our unit of description,
and with it the epistemological, if not moral, idealization of the family as some kind of "ultimate unity." It would undermine
the radical constructivist credo that power is an illusion, or, as Bateson put it, a "myth ... that always corrupts because it
proposes always a false ... epistemology" (28, p. 106). It would require instead a reading of family relationships at two
levels of description: one elucidating the paradoxes of circularity, the other confronting the realities of domination. Both
punctuations are necessary to capture the essentials of the family drama, just as domestic conflicts must always be cast in
terms of both old and young, male and female.
All this, in turn, would mean moving toward a theoretical model that integrated the "truths" of radical constructivism
with the "truths" of feminist materialism. As an "ecology of ideas" organized by perspectives and metaperspectives (4),
families are mental entities to which power terms could not apply. As social arrangements made "real" by the very real
activities of the larger society, families are material structures in which gender inequalities have been, historically,
inevitable.

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WHICH MEANS WHAT IN PRACTICE?

It means, first, recognizing that every family, and every family therapy session, is as much about the politics and meaning
of gender as it is about the politics and meaning of growing up. In other words, there is no such clinical entity as a "gender
case" any more than there is a unique clinical entity, a "generation case." Even to ask, "What are the gender issues in this
family?" misses the point. Just as it is simply not possible to think as a family therapist without using a generational or
life-cycle perspective, it is equally nonsensical to presume anything fundamental has been said about a case until it has been
considered through the lens of gender.
Gender and the gendering of power are not secondary mediating variables affecting family life; they construct family life
in the deepest sense. Taking this assertion as a given (which would include the corollary that gender is organized
hierarchically with men in the dominant position), should not mean conceding anything to feminists because it should be, by
now, a commonplace truth at the level of the earth is round. Indeed, by making this our starting point and integrating gender
and gender inequality into the formal infrastructure of our theory, we will have, de facto, depoliticized these terms by
granting them a presumptive status.
This would improve the working climate for all of us because our old arguments are tiresome and repetitive, and there
are new possibilities for theory, research, and practice that we could now begin to address. For example, some of the most
interesting questions to consider are those that attempt to unconfound the variables of gender and power. Because men and
women have been found to operate differently in personal relationships (9, 16), it remains to be seen whether those
differences are best explained as a function of the power differential between the sexes, or as a function of the sex
difference itself. In other words, looking at intimate relationships, when do men act more like men, and women more like
women, no matter what their social position; and when do those "on top" (those with more access to institutional power) act
more like those on top, no matter whether they are male or female?
Researchers who have taken an interest in such questions have typically studied couples who were observed while
interacting around task-oriented matters. In these situations, power rather than gender has been found to be the primary
determinant of how each party operates (15). However, one prominent research team (17) has suggested that varying the
context of the interaction in which couples are studied could produce a different outcome. They speculate, for example, that
for couples dealing with "the reciprocal disclosure of very intimate feelings," the conversational division of labor might be
very different than for couples restricted, by virtue of the research design, to task-oriented discussions (p. 44).
Needless to say, family therapists have much to contribute to these questions. We do not have to create a laboratory
situation to investigate different kinds of conversation. The clinical situation spills over with possibilities. Given our special
proximity to the everyday dramas of romantic and domestic life, we are in a unique position to document and analyze the
relative contributions of gender and power in the structuring of intimate relationships.
Moreover, insofar as we recognize that power is gendered, the phenomenon of gender inequality will force us to advance
our thinking about the relationship between politics, ethics, and the enterprise of psychotherapy. Any light we can shed on
this difficult issue will make a contribution that extends beyond the particular concerns of family therapists because every
clinician and every school of therapy must construct a moral philosophy from which to do business. From the easy critiques
of behavior therapy to the historic debates among the early psychoanalysts, the problem of politics, morality, and neutrality
remains an ordeal for applied psychology.
Taking the problem of feminism and family therapy as a case in point, we might categorize the excesses in our internal
debates in terms of "Left Errors" and "Right Errors," the terms Mao Tse-tung used when educating his political cadres. The
Right Error here is the argument that feminists are imposing their values by introducing "political" issues into treatment, as
if raising moral questions were the same as being moralistic. Collapsing this distinction makes feminists bad therapists by
definition.
In fact, the fear of being moralistic has led to another kind of bad therapy, a therapy that silences discussion of the moral
dimensions of intimate life: power, privilege, fairness, and exploitation, issues that are of profound psychological
importance. Everyone's life and everyone's mind is organized by value-laden concepts because every one of us has a
conscience. To sidestep questions of right and wrong because of a crude misunderstanding of what constitutes the proper
domain of psychotherapy is to be inauthentic and psychologically distant from people's experience.
The Error from the left is equally profound. It involves collapsing another distinction, the distinction between words and
deeds, between therapy and politics. This is the argument that relies on the aphorism "therapy is political" as opposed to
working with the more precise phrase, "therapy has political aspects." The problem with the familiar slogan is that it
reduces therapeutic conversation to politics, and politics to conversation, which trivializes both enterprises. Not every word
a therapist speaks or permits should be "politically correct," and no interview should be "scored" according to how many
sexist or egalitarian thoughts are voiced. This kind of vulgar reductionism has no place in the clinical milieu, a setting far
too dense with possibility and ambiguity. The "meanings" of therapeutic talk radiate to the edges of the imagination.
Absolutes bend out there, paradoxes abound.
Given the difficulties and temptations of both these positions, every serious therapist must find a place to work, think,

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and talk that, however imperfectly, preserves the integrity of the clinical enterprise. This, in turn, requires a philosophically
precise definition of what psychotherapy is, and what it is not.
The best contemporary description we have generated is captured by Maturana's phrase "the conversational domain,"
although I prefer crediting the idea to its earliest source, "Anna O," (a.k.a. Bertha Pappenheim), who coined the phrase "the
talking cure" to describe her work with Breuer almost 100 years ago. Pappenheim's poetic and prescient image,
anticipating the modern constructivist view of the treatment situation, provides a point of entry into the problem at hand.
Containing psychotherapy within the conceptual boundaries of a conversation clarifies its limits and possibilities.
Therapeutic talk is, of course, all about the politics of influence. It is a conversational domain that is a concrete as well as
symbolic platform on which players maneuver for position and control of meaning. If, then, we were to take as our subject
the politics of heterosexual relationships, and the means by which those politics organize the politics of family therapy, we
could then define our clinical task as the search for a way to talk to families about both these politicized spheres. In other
words, the question becomes: How can we make the sexual politics of observed and observing systems a subject for
therapeutic conversation?
Bringing sexual politics into the dialogic realm would mean discussing the dilemmas of love and power, and discussing
the problems of discussing those dilemmas in relation to a therapist of a particular sex and point of view. For example, in a
recent case seen at the Ackerman Institute by Gillian Walker and myself, Walker asked a Black man who had been
"resisting" our line of questioning, "What best explains your not wanting to tell me too much: that I'm White, female, or
highly educated?" The man, married to a White woman, answered immediately, "Mostly that you are a woman. I'm used to
White people and I don't care that much about education." This exchange freed up the conversation so that sex, race, and
class (in that order) were no longer forbidden subjects, but became the subject of the therapy.
Similarly, in another case that Robert Simon and I saw at the Ackerman, a young, decidedly "unfeminist" wife
complained, after some prodding, that she was afraid she would forget what she had to say while waiting for her husband to
finish speaking. When I, intrigued, asked her what she thought it meant that I'd asked her husband to speak first, she blurted
out, "Well, we live in a patriarchal society. I guess you are caught up in it too."!
Once it becomes absolutely clear that psychotherapy is nothing more and nothing less than talk, then it is best to
conceive of family therapy as a rhetorical strategy that helps elucidate the dilemmas of love and power between men and
women living in a patriarchal society. This means capturing in language a double description of the bonds of love, a
description that includes both circular reciprocity and hierarchical inequality. Developing questions, metaphors, and stories
that make such talk possible has become the central focus of my clinical work.

WHAT THERAPY IS NOT

Framing the clinical task as "rhetorical" is a way of saying it is not "technical." Thinking in terms of techniques, solutions,
or even interventions, muddies the waters conceptually and politically. Leaving the conceptual critique for others, I will
focus and close on a political note.
Thinking of family therapy in terms of techniques carries the implication that family problems are technical problems and
that technical problems are solvable problems; it's just a matter of finding the right technique. This is a simplistic kind of
American pragmatism in which moral, political, historical, and existential dilemmas become trivialized into bureaucratic,
organizational problems (she's too close; he's too distant).
This sort of instrumentalism has always seemed, from my point of view, to be infected with a willful strain of naivete.
This is because, from a feminist perspective, there is always an element of impossibility that adheres to family life, and to
romantic love, which simply cannot be fixed, not even by the most canny and humane systems consultant. Not all, or even
most failures in treatment are therapist-generated, nor can someone else's more artful interview necessarily save a marriage.
If we are to see our work clearly, I think we will have to face a truth about men, women, and families. As long as the world
is an unfair place, as long as patriarchy prevails, love will be tainted by domination, subordination will be eroticized to
make it tolerable, and symptoms will be necessary to keep families from flying apart.

REFERENCES
1. Bateson, G., Naven. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1958.
2. Beechey, V., Women and production: A critical analysis of some sociological theories of women's work. In A.
Kuhn & A.M. Wolpe (eds.), Feminism and materialism. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978.
3. Belenkey, M., Clinchy, B., Goldberger, N. and Tarule, J., Women's ways of knowing. New York: Basic Books,
1986.
4. Bogdan, J. L., Family organization as an ecology of ideas: An alternative to the reification of family systems.
Family Process, 23, 375-388, 1984.

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5. Braverman, L., Beyond families: Strategic family therapy and the female client. Family Therapy, 8, 143-152,
1986.
6. Collier, J., Rosaldo, M. and Yanagisako, S., Is there a family? New anthropological views. In B. Thorne (ed.),
Rethinking the family. New York: Longman, 1982.
7. Dimen-Schein, M., The anthropological imagination. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1977.
8. Fox, R., Kinship and marriage. London: Penguin Books, 1967.
9. Gilligan, C., In a different voice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982.
10. Goldner, V., Feminism and family therapy. Family Process, 24, 31-47, 1985.
11. Goldner, V., Warning: Family therapy may be hazardous to your health. Family Therapy Networker, 9(6), 18-23,
1985.
12. Goldner, V., Instrumentalism, feminism and the limits of family therapy. Journal of Family Psychology, 1,
109-116, 1987.
13. Haley, J., Uncommon therapy: The psychiatric techniques of Milton H. Erickson, M.D. New York: W.W. Norton,
1973.
14. Haley, J., Problem-solving therapy. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1976.
15. Howard, J., Blumstein, P. and Schwartz, P., Sex, power, and influence tactics in intimate relationships. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 51, 102-109, 1986.
16. Keller, E. F., Reflections on gender and science. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.
17. Kollock, P., Blumstein, P. and Schwartz, P., Sex, power, and interaction: Conversational privileges and duties.
American Sociological Review, 50, 34-46, 1985.
18. Lasch, C., Haven in a heartless world: The family besieged. New York: Basic Books, 1977.
19. Levi-Strauss, C., The elementary structures of kinship. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969.
20. Malinowski, B., The family among the Australian aborigines. London: University of London Press, 1913.
21. Minuchin, S., Family kaleidoscope. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984.
22. Minuchin, S. and Fishman, H. C., Family therapy techniques. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981.
23. Parsons, T., Essays in sociological theory. New York: Free Press, 1954.
24. Parsons, T., Age and sex in the social structure. In R.L. Coser (ed.), The family: Its structure and functions. New
York: St. Martin's Press, 1964.
25. Rosaldo, M. Z., The use and abuse of anthropology: Reflections on feminism and cross-cultural understanding.
Signs, 5, 389-417, 1980.
26. Rubin, G., The traffic in women: Notes on the political economy of sex. In R. Reiter (ed.), Toward an
anthropology of women. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978.
27. Ruddick, S., Maternal thinking. In B. Thorne (ed.), Rethinking the family. New York: Longman, 1982.
28. Sluzki, C. E. and Ransom, D. C., (eds.). Double bind: The foundation of the communicational approach to the
family. New York: Grune & Stratton, 1976.
Manuscript received February 1, 1987; Revisions submitted August 26, 1987; Accepted August 31, 1987.
1Haley does make a formal, footnoted disclaimer in Problem-Solving Therapy (p. 2) about his use of "he" when referring to
therapists who can be of either sex. Apparently, he became aware of the "pronoun problem" after the publication of Uncommon
Therapy, in which he uncritically used "men" as a synonym for "human beings."

2From this perspective, Haley's inconsistencies, however politically problematic, represent an attempt to address a problem that
no one else thought to name. See Braverman (5, p. 149) for other examples of Haley's prescient attention to matters of sexual
politics.

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