Death of the Family

by David Graham Cooper

Book Overview

In this critique of the family most of my paradigmatic references will concern primarily the nuclear family unit in capitalist society in this part of this century. The broader reference, however, and... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• ISBN: 0394712331
• ISBN13: 9780394712338
• Release Date: January 2000
• Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
• Length: 145 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.

Customer Reviews

outdated in *pieces*, astounding as a whole

"I'm glad this philosophy never caught on, otherwise we'd all be Existentialists (meaning a 90% chance we'd never mature past freshman year of university-level I-think-I'm-so-cool-I-worship-Sartre mentality, since 90% of Exies I know of fit that description)."The first reviewer's comments could almost be a sort of tragic addendum to Cooper's text; his talk of "maturity" confirms with an unconscious vengeance everything Cooper discusses in the book.Yes, Cooper may have quoted Sartre one too many times; but in this astounding and painfully enlightening work we find an original voice, over and apart from his contemporaries. Cooper is speaking not only to our conscious, intellectual or philosophical selves--he is tapping into the subconscious. "Openness means pain, and, despite attentive kindness and help and clarification that one may get from other people, the pain ultimately has to be suffered alone. It is from this position of solitude that the ultimate clarification must come. Make no mistake about it, other people will always sense, even without realizing what they sense, when someone in the group has been through this sort of self confrontation. It would be fatuous to speak of communes without the presence in the group of, in the first instance, at least the person who has rigorously enough dealt with his life in these terms (pg 46)."Confident enough to generalize here, I would say that anyone who denies the singular brilliance of this passage has thrown the baby out with bathwater--that is, they unconsciously deny the very real kind of liberation Cooper writes of before actually reading the book. (Case in point: Reviewer Number One).Cooper goes onto illustrate the System of Guilt so prevalent in our society, which prevents any true self realization and condemns us to a life of stagnation and mechanical responses engendered by fear. Cooper has the intuitive, not only intellectual, honesty to understand and admit the nearly insufferable pain which results from true self examination: abandonment, despair, the whole host of human emotions which absolutely must be worked through lest we endanger our chances of self realization. Like the greatest of revolutionary authors, he exhorts us to dissolve the self-image, which now (far more so than when Cooper wrote this) governs our society and the better part of our day to day behavior, insulating us within walls which one day, if we persist in our neurotic non-communication, may become insurmountable.Yes, of course: the talk of communes and Marxism are no longer relevant. Some of this is a time piece, and some it rivals and even surpasses the work of oft-touted 60's gurus like Herbert Marcuse, R.D. Laing, and (of course) Timothy Leary. One need not be an "existentialist" or anything of the sort to understand, experientially, the message of this book.

An astonishing assault on one of society's sacred cows

David Cooper, one of the grand old men of existential psychiatry, delivers a withering assault on the family from an individualist perspective. "Bringing up a child," he says, "is bringing down a person"; the family teaches us to live "agglutinatively," hence pathologically, rooting our identity in our birth milieu instead of in who we are as individuals.It's hard to find books that recognize that the family -- modern society's bedrock institution -- has critical problems which themselves underlie so many of our social problems.Written in the 70s, the book has a streak of Marxist jargon that contemporary readers may find distracting. But look past that -- beneath it is as pure and radical a call to tear down the family and all the "subtle violence" it works on the individual that you will ever read.