Familialism is an ideology that promotes the family of the Western tradition as an institution.[1] Familialism views the nuclear family of one father, one mother, and their child or children as the central and primary social unit of human ordering and the principal unit of a functioning society and civilization. This unit is also the basis of a multi-generational extended family, which is embedded in socially as well as genetically inter-related communities, nations, etc., and ultimately in the whole human family past, present and future. Familialism advocates Western "family values" and usually opposes other social forms and models that are alternative to such family values (i.e. single-parent, polygamy, LGBT parenting, etc.). A typical trait of familialism is the insistence that "normality" resides in the patriarchal nuclear family.[2]
Familialism is usually considered conservative or reactionary by its critics who argue that it is limited, outmoded and unproductive in modern Western society. As a social construct imposed on non-Western cultures, it has been criticized as being destructive. Its prevalence in psychoanalysis has been criticized, and its antagonistic relationship with LGBT culture has been noted.
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Familialism has been challenged as historically and sociologically inadequate to describe the complexity of actual family relations.[3] In modern American society in which the male head of the household can no longer be guaranteed a wage suitable to support a family, 1950s-style familialism has criticized as counterproductive to family formation and fertility.[4][5]
Imposition of Western-style familialism on other cultures has been disruptive to traditional non-nuclear family forms such as matrilineality.[6]
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in their now-classic 1972 book Anti-Oedipus, argued that psychiatry and psychoanalysis, since their incept, have been affected by an incurable familialism, which is their ordinary bed and board.[7][8][9] Psychoanalysis has never escaped from this, having remained captive to an unrepentant familialism.[10]
Michel Foucault wrote that through familialism psychoanalysis completed and perfected what the psychiatry of 19th century insane asylums had set out to do and that it enforced the power structures of bourgeois society and its values: Family-Children (paternal authority), Fault-Punishment (immediate justice), Madness-Disorder (social and moral order).[11][12] Deleuze and Guattari added that "the familialism inherent in psychoanalysis doesn't so much destroy classical psychiatry as shine forth as the latter's crowning achievement," and that since the 19th century, the study of mental illnesses and madness has remained the prisoner of the familial postulate and its correlates.[13]
Through familialism, and the psychoanalysis based on it, guilt is inscribed upon the family's smallest member, the child, and parental authority is absolved.[14]
According to Deleuze and Guattari, among the psychiatrists only Karl Jaspers and Ronald Laing, have escaped familialism.[15] This was not the case of the culturalist psychoanalysts, which, despite their conflict with orthodox psychoanalysts, had a "stubborn maintenance of a familialist perspective," still speaking "the same language of a familialized social realm."[16]
LGBTQA communities tend to accept and support the diversity of intimate human associations, partially as a result of their historically ostracized status from nuclear family structures. From its inception in the late 1960s, the gay civil rights movement has asserted every individual's right to create and define their own relationships and family in the way most conducive to the safety, happiness, and self-actualization of each individual.
For example, the glossary of LGBT terms of Family Pride Canada, a Canadian organization advocating for family equality for LGBT parents, defines familialism as:
a rigidly conservative ideology promoted by the defenders of "Family Values," who insist, despite all the sociological evidence to the contrary, that the only real family is a traditional 1950s-style white, middle-class household with a faithfully married dad and a mom whose sex life is strictly yet blissfully procreative, and whose high moral standards are passed on like old china to their perfectly heterosexual children.[17]