Therapist Jay Haley talks about disturbed power relationships in modern families.
Jay Haley is one of the nation’s leading family therapists —a quintessentially pragmatic man with a clear eye andsardonic wit who teaches his students how to make ailing families function again. Mostly, in his view, this involves straightening out mixed-up family hierarchies—like the "perverse triangles" that forms when, for instance, one parent becomes allied with a child against the other parent. (For an account of Haley’s methods of dealing with these harmful alliances, see the box on page 3).
As a therapist who has been working with families for nearly 30 years, the 59-year-old Haley is eminentlyqualified to talk about the problems of the American family today. To hear his views, I went to meet Haley in the small private house in Washington, DC, where he maintains his Family Therapy Institute. I expected a rather formidable figure. I found a tall, rangy man with a graying mustache, western in bearing (he was born in Wyoming), soft-spoken, and wearing sandals.
We covered a range of topics: divorce, remarriage, the economy’s effects on families, the case of John W.Hinckley Jr. and his family. But always the conversation seemed to come back to questions that Haley considerscentral: power and family hierarchies.
f a kid is acting up or crazy, we know that his parents must be divided, that the familyhierarchy is in confusion.
"If a kid is acting up or crazy, we know that his parents must be divided, that the family hierarchy is in confusion."
Maya Pines: When you work with families, you must have some kind of ideal family in mind,don’t you?
Jay Haley: No.
Pines: No? Well, what are you working toward, then?
Haley: Oh, rearranging that particular family. You see, I used to do research on families, and I was astonished at their diversity. There are no many different ways to be a family. You don’t come out of that with an ideal way of how a family ought to be.
Pines: Didn’t Tolstoy say that all happy families are alike, while each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way?
Haley: I know the quote you mean. I don’t think Tolstoy say a lot of families.
Pines: He didn’t see as many as you did?
Haley: Well, one of the curious things that happened about the mid-1950s was that, for thefirst time, people arrangedsituations in which families could actually be observed talkingtogether. Before that, we had only people’s reports about what they did with one another. And when you observe them, you see that there are tremendous cultural differences—Italianfamilies, Asian families. And there are big class differences between the working class, the miserably poor, and the rich. There are families in which people aren’t married. And familieswhere they were formerly married. Families where the kids are adopted. Families made up of kids from three marriages.
Pines: What is the total number of families you’ve observed?
Haley: God, I have no idea. I see them six to eight hours a day, all day long, day after day. You know, there’s a theory that after you’ve seen more than 300 families, you begin to go
through a change in your thinking about the mature of human beings. Up to that point, you canthink about them as a collection of the individuals. But somewhere around 300 you begin to understand that people aren’t what they’re traditionally thought to be. That is, you really beginto believe that people do what they do because of what other people do, and not because of individual choice or free will. And it’s anunsettling idea. I remember that when the family therapist Don Jackson managed to communicate something of that to FriedaFromm-Reichmann, the psychoanalyst, she replied, "I don’t see how you can live with thatidea."
Pines: Then how can you tell who is influencing whom in a family?
Haley: Well, if a kid is acting up or crazy, we assume that the family hierarchy is in confusion.
Pines: How do you recognize a family’s hierarchy?
Haley: By watching the way the family members deal withanother—who interrupts, who takes over the interview. We also have them talk to one another about the problem thatbrought them here, and in the process, their hierarchy begins to appear.
Pines: What kind of hierarchy is there in healthy, normal families?
Haley: I don’t know. How would anybody know? There hasn’t been any research on it that I know of except through self-reports. But if you have a young person who’s violent, crazy oron drugs, one way to get him over it is to have a strong family hierarchy—to put parents in charge, sometimes in a almost tyrannical way. Now that doesn’t mean we believe that this ishow people ought to live. If you have a kid with a broken leg, you put a cast on that leg, butthat does’ mean the way to raise normal kids is to put casts on their legs.
Pines: What would you have done with the Hinckley family?
"We’ve had families with a kid who won’t go to school. But once the parents are in agreement, by God he’ll do it."
Haley: I never met them, so I don’t know. Probably I’d have had the parents take the boy in and get him on his feet and working before he left home. Often in families there is a kid whofails, who staggers away and wanders around the country. I think this has a function: It stabilizes the family by having it concentrate on him. And you can’t get him free of that situation by just telling him to go away and avoid his family, or having the parents throw himout, because he collapses and comes back again. You have to have him come home. Then he can leave home properly, after he’s started functioning in a normal way.
Pines: But how could the Hinckleys have made him function normally?
Haley: They could have brought the kid home and come to some agreement about what heshould do go to school, work. ...My impression from the newspaper reports is that the parents objected to what he was doing while financing his doing it—an don’t think that’s sensible.
Pines: He was pretty old for them to control him, he was in his mid-20s.
Haley: Age has nothing to do with it. It has to do with the stage of family life you haven’t got past. That’s one of the tragedies in many families. If a young adult begins to leave him and it
goes badly, they never get away from one another. It can go on for years—in and out of jail, inand out of the hospital or various programs. The parents can’t cure him, and they can’t get red of him. And often they get advice from a well-meaning psychiatrist: Throw him out! I think this is a grave error. Because he’ll be back. Hinckley will be back with his parents. They’ll be struck with him till they’re 70. Because it’s been mishandled up till now.
Pines: How could they have forced him either to go back to school or to work?
"We've had families with a kid who won't go to school. But once the parents are in agreement, by God he'll do it."
Haley: There are ways. I don’t want to talk about the Hinckley, but we’ve had other familieshere with a kid who won’t go to school, and once the parents are in agreement, by God he’lldo it.
Pines: That sounds a lot like what people used to say about the need to have a united front.
Haley: Yes, it is an old-fashioned view. And I’m not sure it apples to normal families. But with a problem kid, then they’d better pull together.
Pines: Can a coalition between the parents ever be the cause of a child’s problems?
Haley: There probably are families in which the parents are in some kind of unfortunate,bizarre, extreme coalition against their kids, but it’s not common. Sometimes you’ll have two
parents who share a delusion of some kind. I remember a couple in Colorado who shared the delusion that there were some airplanes over them trying to give them rays through the roof. They had lead on the roof. Their little girl was always with them until the therapist got her intonursery school and away from their constant influence.
Pines: What should parents do if their kid had become a drug addict?
Haley: There have been some studies showing that addicts are really very involved with theirfamilies—much more so than was ever thought. We assume that if the parents take charge of the kid and get him off drugs, he’ll stay off; but often, if the problem is handed to an expertwho tries to get him off drugs, he’ll collapse and go back home and start all over again. Now I don’t want to imply that the parents caused it. It’s just that once a kid is into it, the way to get him off drugs is to bring him together with the parents and have the parents take charge of him. The parents don’t cause it, but they can cure it.
Pines: Do you have any evidence that parents can cure it?
Haley: There was a program at the Philadelphia Child Guidance Clinic, a group led by DuncanStanton, on family therapy of street addicts, in which there was quite a high cure rate. They did very well there with the same sort of organizational, structural approach of putting theparents in charge.
Pines: You really believe in having the parents take charge.
Haley: In recent years I’ve gone further in that direction. For example, when young peoplecome out of a mental hospital and start family therapy, I prefer to have the therapist side withthe parents against the offspring during the first interview, in order to construct the correct hierarchy. This is quite the opposite of 20 years ago, when we tended to side with youngpeople against the parents because of the idea that the child was a victim and the parents were a noxious influence.
Pines: What if the parents are divorced or remarried?
Haley: In some of these blended families, with children from several different manages, there are special problems. We’ve been seeing more of them.
Pines: What kind of problems?
Haley: Oh, "my kids, your kids, and our kids"—that sort of thing. If a guy brings a couple of kids into a family and the woman has a couple of kids of her own, very often there’s adisciplinary issue: Who has the right to discipline whose kid: There are also hierarchical problems. You may get a family with two 12-year-old boys, and that can be quite a problem.
Ordinarily, kids work out a hierarchy by age.
Pines: In such cases, what do you do?
"My impression is that Hinckley’s parents objected to what he wasdoing while financing his doing it. I don’t think that’s sensible."
Haley: Negotiate. Lay out a plan for the family. Mostly we work on getting the parents to agree on what to do which the kids. And if there’s a real problem—a kid with a problem that looksas if it’s the result of a blended situation—we may not only bring in all the kids and both parent, but also the previous family–the biological father or mother—and get everybody toagree. I remember we did that with an adolescent who stole women’s underwear and hid it in his room. To deal with his sexual confusion, we brought in his biological mother as well as hisstepmother and his father.
Pines: Did it help?
Haley: Oh, yes.
Pines: Is he still doing it?
Haley: Not as far as I know. It’s been two years. It was an exasperating case. His father just sort of vaguely protested. So we put the father in charge of solving the problem. Theprocedure we gave him was that every time the kid stole lingerie again, the father would have to come home from work and go out in the backyard to watch the kid dig a hole three feetdeep and bury it there.
Pines: Who dreamed that up?
Haley: I did. If you make it more difficult for somebody to have a symptom by making him go through an ordeal of some kind every time he shows that symptom, he’ll give up the symptom.
Pines: Did you explain to the family why you wanted the kid to dig that hole?
Haley: Not in this case. We just told them he’d get over his problem if he did that.
Pines: And they followed your instructions?
Haley: Yes. People while do what you ask. That’s the art of directive therapy. I mean, if you can get somebody to lie on his bacak and talk to the ceiling, while a psychoanalyst sitsbehindhim, for seven or eight years and pay money to do that, people will do anything!
Pines: Is there anything people can do by themselves to improve their family lives, especiallywhen they have children?
Haley: It’s hard to generalize. My wife, Cloe Madanes, and Ihave been thinking of writing a self-help book for families. But it’s a real challenge. Because I think that if a family is havingdifficulty with a kid, they tend to think and do the things that are part of the system that iscausing the difficulty. They have trouble getting out of the system by themselves. If you getinto a struggle with your wife and everything you do is producing struggle, and you realize that,it doesn’t mean you can stop doing it. It’s when an outsider comes in with different things to do that you have a chance to get out.
Pines: Wouldn’t it help to examine one’s own family hierarchy?
Haley: I don’t think so, no. Depends on what you’re trying to solve. You can examine it—but I’m not sure you can do any thing about it. (?Jt.)
Pines: Suppose one figures out who has the real power in the family. Can’t one deliberatelychange the balance?
Haley: You’d have to have a family meeting and get some agreement on trying to change it,and then in the process it might change. Sometimes what you can do is have the family draw on the blackboard who’s in charge, and then who next is in charge if that person is not home.And sometimes you can have them show the way it is in their family, and the way it ought to be. People can usually lay that out pretty clearly. Butchanging it is something else. You’d have to have a very careful plan, and go at it indirectly. The structure of families tends to be pretty firm.
Pines: Have you seen any body succeed at that?
Haley: No, I haven’t. Husbands and wives struggle to do that with each other quite often and that’s what makes the struggle.
Pines: I wonder how you’ll ever write that self-help book, considering the way you answerthese questions.
Haley: It would have to be carefully figured out. We were thinking of calling the book DrivingEach Other Sane. I think you could say, if you were in adolescent, what you could do; or if you were a wife, or a husband, or a grandparent. And from certain positions, if you planned a careful strategy, you could produce some changes in you family. But it would requireinstructions. The book would guide people to it. Because they aren’t able to do it on their own. The average person who is kind of unhappy with the way his family is and tries to change it is in difficulty if he goes in and says, "I don’t want it like this anymore." That tends to arouse thevery activity he’s trying to stop. He needs to triangulate according to somebody else’s system. (Why not try God’s Way, Agape! Amen! Jt.)
Pines: Family therapists seem to talk a lot about triangles. Who started it?
Haley: Oedipus.
Pines: Okay. I mean, when did therapists begin to think in terms of triangles?
Haley: Well, you see, the period of the ‘50s was really the end of the individual in therapy.That’s when psychoanalysis died as a force in the world. In the ‘60s, therapists developed a
dyadic view—both in behavior modification, with one person reinforcing another, and in communication therapy, where everybody was translating symptoms into communications
between husbands and wives, or between mothers and children. Then, in the ‘70s, therapists really got into triangles and organizational structures. It was quite a step, to begin thinking in three. You could think in terms of coalitions."Feminism has moved women to more equality with their husbands. But it’s awkward to have two equals in charge of a group—like having two Presidents."
Pines: Can you give me an example?
Haley: Yes. Suppose we see a mother asking a child what she should do to punish him. In the ‘50s we’d have thought there was something wrong with that woman’s thinking, that she wasasking the permission of her child to punish him. By the ‘60s we’d have focused on the ways both she and her child were behaving, that they got caught up in this strange thing where shewas asking the child’s permission to punish him; and then we’d analyze the double bind. By the ‘70s we’d have assumed that a woman behaves like that when she doesn’t havepower—when she doesn’t have the authority to tell the kid what to do because the kid has power from his father or grandmother, and therefore the mother has to ask the kid’s
permission, because she doesn’t have authority of her own. If you think in a longer unit thantwo, you look to see who else is involved when a mother is acting peculiarly, and usually you
see that somebody else is in coalition with the child against her. At least, these are three different explanations of the same behavior. And I think the triangular one is the most interesting on for therapists, because it gives them more opportunities. You can work with themother, the father, the kid, or the while situation.
"Feminism has moved women to more equality with their husbands. But it's awkward to have two equals in charge of a group--like having two Presidents."
Pines: But that’s more difficult than working with just one person, isn’t it? I mean, if you problem is the result of your chemistry, presumably some kind of pill can change it If you’re
driven by your psyche, presumably some kind of individual psychotherapy can change it. Butif you’re driven by other people, then it’s even more difficult, because you have to change many different people at once.
Haley: I wouldn’t think of it that way. As I see it, the effect of pills is often determined by the social situation. And the individual psyche and what happens to it are determined by otherpeople. I don’t really you can change any individual psyche without changing other people. Which is really the family view—that the way you think and believe is a product of yoursituation and relationships, rather than that your relationships are a product of what you thinkand believe. In many ways, family therapy is easier than others because you motivate a lot ofpeople to do something and a lot of things happen.
Pines: Do you still think in terms of the double bind, in which people become ill because they receive conflicting messages from their mother or someone else in their family?
Haley: Mo. That phrase has been used in so many ways that I don’t even know what it meansanymore.
Pines: Have you noticed any new patterns, recently, in the kinds of problems that bring people to therapy?
Haley: I think that economic factors are becoming very important. Now we tend to get kids who had left home coming back home as they lose their jobs. And the family that’s been
organized without them has to reorganize to have them back again. The really sad cases arethose of girls who get married to get away from their parents, and then the marriage breaks up and they have no place to go. So they came home with a baby, into a household where theydidn’t hike the parents or didn’t get along with them in the first place. Those are very sticky problems.
Pines: And what’s the solution?
Haley: Just to have the family reorganize so as to share the labor, share the space and the privacy, and decide who’s going to take care of what.
Pines: In general, do you find that there is more authority and hierarchy in families now than there was 19 years ago?
Haley: Well, the culture is getting much more conservative. That tends to make the familymore hierarchical, more structured. There was a time, in the ‘60s, when people make the mistake of taking the totally unexpressive way one behaves in therapy and translating it intohow to raise a kid. Parents tried, but it can’t be done. It made for some very strange problems. I remember a psychiatrist who had a 7-year-old boy, and when he threw a party the kid wouldcome downstairs and drink out of the bottle. The psychiatrist was terribly embarrassed, but he wouldn’t tell him not to, because you don’t tell a kid not to do something. So there was thatquality around for a while. That’s one of the reasons I hesitate to say that anything you do in therapy can be applied to normal life.
Pines: How much has the women’s movement changed the hierarchy in families?
Haley: It’s moved women to more equality with their husbands. But it’s a problem in somemarriage, because it’s awkward to have two equals in charge of a group—like having two Presidents. So they have to divide it up in some way: One takes foreign policy, and the othertakes domestic policy. Yet if you get into a real ethnic, Italian neighborhood, or among alder people, or working-class couples, you can’t use that model, because the husband still has more power.
Pines: On the whole, is your view of the American family very grim?
Haley: No. Grim in what way?
Pines: Oh, so many struggles over power, so many ways for the family to go wrong.
Haley: No. The main problems of the American family seem to have come from affluence, at until very recently. Long ago, families used to hangtogether because they had to. The wife stayed with her husband even if he treated her badly, because they had to be supported. And a woman who didn’t get married had to find a family to live with. And kids stayed with their parents even when they didn’t want to, because theycouldn’t afford to move out.
Pines: Was that better, in your opinion?
Haley: No, not necessarily. But it’s a big change when there’s enough money in the culture for people to move out, and when there are enough jobs so that wives can go to work and kids of18 came go to work. It means that there’s no economic cement holding the family together anymore.
"The main problems of the American family cane from affluence. There's no economic cement holding it together anymore."www.psychspace.com心理学空间网
