Talcott Parsons’s Psychosocial Theory of Family and its ‘Second-Generation’ Students

• In Event: History of Sociology and Social Thought Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Roundtable 1: Classical Foundations and Contemporary Critique

Abstract

Talcott Parsons’s psychoanalytic sociology first took form during the Second World War with the publication of several articles, ‘the wartime essays’, on Nazism and antisemitism, in which he employed a Freudian approach in analysing the German national character. The following decade he produced another set of writings, ‘the totem-taboo thematic essays’, which addressed problematics like those explored by Freud in his controversial, Totem and Taboo. It was, in fact, the case that, throughout much of the 1950s, Parsons utilised elements of classic Freudian thought to formulate a comprehensive conceptualisation of the personality and its relations to culture and social systems.

In this article, I provide an overview of Parsons’s most psychoanalytically oriented book, Family, Socialization and Interaction Process (hereafter FSIP), which appeared in 1955, with added consideration of his ideas on life course maturation. My main goal is to introduce this largely neglected aspect of Parsons’s psychoanalytic sociology - his ‘psychosocial theory of family’ - to a new generation of scholars.

This article consists of three main parts. In the first, I sketch Parsons’s views in FSIP, powerfully impacted by orthodox Freudianism, on family socialisation and related issues. In the second part, I examine the work of four scholars who were Parsons’s protégés and were strongly influenced by psychoanalysis around the time that FSIP was published. They critiqued, supported and appropriated the main conceptualizations presented in FSIP and some of Parsons’s other related writings. I briefly show how Parsons’s ideas were taken in several directions by these family sociologists of the ‘second generation’, the cohort of 1950s students who began their careers under Parsons’s tutelage. In the third part of this article, I offer a first intimation as to why Parsons’s psychosocial theory of family system did not survive in its totality beyond the second generation.

Author

• A. Javier Trevino, Wheaton College