Films/DVD Asylum

Posted by Bruce from DC (i) on July 12, 2001 at 11:33:03

In Reply to: Re: Gee Whiz posted by Alan on July 11, 2001 at 17:08:23:

Alan, I enjoyed your comments about A.I., even though I haven't seen the film. Those comments made me want to see it, despite some negative reviews. And, as a general matter (and as a parent of 3), I think kids are getting the short straw in the US today in ways that were not true when I was a kid 40 years ago. As I am sure you would agree, money is not a substitute for "face time"; and, what I see among many affluent families is that kids get money from their parents but not much attention. However, I attribute this, not to any neurotic characterstic of families, but to a gradual movement in the US to celebrate gratification of the individual's needs over the group's needs, however you define "group". This seems to have begun, (gulp!) in the 1960s.

However, I am interested in your observation that "the best of them [families] are a neurotic mess."

Two questions:

1. By what (or whose) standards are they a "neurotic mess" ?

2. What (or who) is it that validates those standards?

My own observation as a non-professional is that families are a "mess" in the sense that they are extremely complicated, exhibit tremendous variation from sample to sample and thereby defy easy categorization. Why are they a "mess"? Because family membership is not a matter of choice. Although husbands and wives choose each other when they get married, I think we all agree that 10, 20, 30 years later, both partners are different people. And, of course, relataives are a fact, not a choice. A child does not choose her parents, and vice-versa. So, families are an act of will. They exist because their members have decided to make them exist. Necessarily, that involves a patchwork of emotional improvisation, as the family members do what they can -- and what they have to -- to get along with each other.

Certainly for the intellectual, whose tendency is to want to organize things into manageable classifications and categories, this is inconvenient. But, to my mind, "neurotic" is a negative value judgment; and inferring "neurotic" from "messy" is not self-evident to me. Most people -- who are the products of families -- manage to function in the societies in which they are born with reasonable success.

A final point that, I confess, always annoys me. At least in the popular mind, the goal of pyschiatry seems to be to have people who are "well-adjusted." Certainly, if I were choosing dinnertable companions or a group with whom to spend a weekend at the beach, I would want them to be well-adjusted. They might also be crashing bores.

The "well-adjusted" imperative ignores the fact that many, many persons who have made significant contributions to society in all fields of life were not at all "well-adjusted"; and some of them, probably by your definition, were/are "neurotic." I'm not at all sure I would want to do without them.

In my mind, "well-adjusted" may also be a synonym for "mediocre."

Neurotic Bruce.