Fantasies of Containment: Entanglements Between the Nuclear Family and Therapeutic Culture in the Making of the Self

Abstract

This dissertation is about the way that larger power dynamics are rendered invisible at the very site where they are felt most acutely: in our own bodies and in our most intimate relations. Using the white, middle-class nuclear family as my site of analysis, I explore the way that feelings of guilt and anxiety are often viciously turned against the self in ways that further individualize pain and suffering. The logic of domination through difference is a consistent theme that runs throughout this work: I explore how power is reproduced through a persistent fantasy of control and closure that manifests itself in a variety of ideals, aspirations, and discursive mechanisms associated with the middle-class nuclear family. By examining my parents’ narratives of their marriage, family life, and eventual divorce, I show how containment is offered time and time again as a solution to dysfunction and uncertainty, even as the impulse toward control and containment amplifies or reinforces the structural and psychic conditions that have created tension. I place my parents’ narratives in a larger context of gendered dynamics, neoliberal restructuring, and therapeutic culture in order to both contextualize and depersonalize feelings of dysfunction, blame, and guilt, offering a reflection that might interrupt, however briefly, the individualizing tendencies of normalizing power.