Five American Families

By Horace Judson

PATHWAYS TO MADNESS by JULES HENRY 477 pages. Random House. $10. Paperback $2.95.

How do people go crazy?

It is a question that seems to obsess the 20th century. Staring into the glassy eyes of the madman, just what does one see reflected? An empty room? A fellow sufferer? The family circle, crowding close? An entire culture? Students of mind seem to have learned from students of matter that the smashed atom will reveal astonishing forces lurking within the normal.

The century was fairly launched by Freud's probing of those psychic forces. But Freud's was only half a revolution. In the second half of the century, the probing of madness has entered a different phase. The new psychiatry, as Jules Henry writes, involves "a fundamental alteration in the approach to the patient--from seeing him alone, to seeing him together with his family; from perceiving him as sick, to perceiving him as a member of a sick family."

The work of diverse figures including Bruno Bettelheim, R.D. Laing and Gregory Bateson, this family theory of psychosis has been popularized in such movies as Wednesday's Child. Recently it provides what intellectual justification there is for the total-immersion documentary film reporting of domestic life that produced the TV series An American Family (TIME, Feb. 26).

Pathways to Madness, published last year and now issued in paperback, is Anthropologist Jules Henry's application of that approach to five American families touched by madness. Henry, who died in 1969 at age 65, reached beyond the family portraits to apply the new psychiatry to American culture.

Patients. When psychiatrists started to observe and treat families, as Henry and others have noted, they made the unsettling discovery that a person may go crazy not simply as an individual and from inside out, but as part of a group, usually the family, whose other members subtly--indeed, unconsciously--coerce him into a role and then stigmatize him. Henry, trained as an anthropologist observing primitive South American tribes, as early as 1948 urged that psychiatrists look at the families of their patients. But he came to such work himself only late in his professional life, as an associate of Bruno Bettelheim's in the study of autistic and schizophrenic children.

Henry's research prompted him to go live with the families of such children. Out of years of such work, he selected the five case histories that make up the skeleton of Pathways to Madness. Each family was profoundly sick, each had one member already put away as autistic or psychotic. But Henry warns the reader--and by implication admonishes his less scrupulous colleagues, some of whom have even seemed eager to abolish the family altogether--that "psychosis is not created by family life only."

What is most striking at first is how different Henry's families are, for example, from the flamboyant Louds of the TV series. Chillingly, they seem quite average on the surface. Samples of the five:

> The Joneses are suburban, Midwestern. The father is a dentist, and quarrelsome. His wife seems intelligent but disorganized, at first sight a cheerful slob--until Henry demonstrates that her chaotic housekeeping is just one of many signs of a pathological distortion of her perceptions. Though they have one autistic child already, the couple use their three remaining children against each other implacably. The mother has a jolly you-run-and-I-chase-you game she plays with her toddler--except that the child is encouraged to run right into the street. "When our backs were turned for a moment, Harriet got out almost to the middle of the road, and a huge oil truck came tearing around the corner and missed the baby by about ten feet. [Then] the chasing game between Harriet and her mother began again."

The father has created a painful emotional separation between one son, Bobby, age 12, and the mother; Bobby systematically torments his younger brother Jackie but she does nothing to stop it, even turns on Jackie herself: "Since fear of the final loss of [Bobby's love] may be impossible to face, she is willing to sacrifice Jackie...In the dialectic interplay between Bobby's ferocity and his mother's wavering, Jackie is punished for suffering too much."

> The Rosenbergs are lower middle class, the parents immigrants from an Eastern European ghetto. The mother is dominant, loud, managing. The father is slyly passive. The eldest son is psychotic and institutionalized. Two more sons live the life of the Portnoys without the saving graces of intelligence, low comedy or even good Jewish food. "Her cooking is unspeakable," Boarder Henry notes in real anguish. In the intense family circle, hiding true feelings and shamming what they think they should feel, bickering, scolding, boasting, hitting out, the Rosenbergs reinforce the tensions that make them enemies and each other's prisoners.

Irving, age 13, the bright, violent, asthmatic older son still at home, is the current scapegoat because he sees the desperation of his situation: "Gestures of love keep the hunger for it alive, causing suffering because they give hope. Thus there is another diagnosis of Irving's illness...he has all the symptoms of tantalizing hope: excessive demands, noisiness, aggressiveness, inappropriate expectations and insatiability."

The observations on the five families read like the working notes for five novellas of American life by John Updike--but an Updike who has been matured out of recognition, touched by nightmare. Even so, the five sets of case notes are merely the occasion and excuse for the book. Henry scatters the details of the five families around him and puts them together again into something altogether larger, a remarkable series of essays on the quality of life in America today: essays on Anger and Quarreling, on The Anatomy of Sham, on the Disciplining of Children, on the Compulsion to Murder Pleasure, on Learning to Disbelieve and Cover Up, on Alienation as Chained Flight. Henry rises at times to the level of the great masters of the essay form. One piece in particular, about the predicament of present-day youth, does the work of an entire book by Herbert Marcuse. Its conclusion: "Sex and truth were once companions in the prison of repression; now sex is freed--to become truth's jailor."

Henry's case against contemporary culture has affinities to other recent at tacks, for example, those of European intellectuals who combine Freud with Marx and Hegel, like Marcuse or R.D. Laing. Projected broadly, such ideas can generate anger and despair.

Freud at least offered his version of the ancient Socratic hope of self-mas tery through self-knowledge: "Where Id is, Ego shall be." But if the demons with in are themselves determined by forces without, the Western ideal of the autonomous individual is truly dead. Laing's and Marcuse's writings twitch and shudder with free-floating rage: the only hope for sanity, they argue, is in the reconstruction of the entire society. In this last book, at least, Henry seems to have drawn back from the brink of vi olent revolution. Instead, he stands, again with Freud, not for the revolutionary view of history, but for the tragic view of man. If that is a flaw, it has also a somber majesty.

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