How to be happy though human / by W. Béran Wolfe.
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contact with it. Mental incest may spread its contagion
throughout an entire environment, whereas physical
incest affects only the contracting parties.
The real purpose of the family is to prepare the young
for the assumption of mature social, vocational, and sexual
relationships. The family is the testing ground of the
social feeling, the proving ground of social cooperation.
When the family breaks off from its purpose, and becomes
an end in itself, it destroys not only the maturity and
mental health of the individuals who compose it, but fails
in its ultimate purpose of social preparation and testing.
As it exists to-day, the family is a relic of a now discredited
patriarchal culture. As such it is in the process of
disintegration and reconstellation to meet the needs of a
new civilization in which men and women will cooperate
as equals. Even the best family life, therefore, with its
over-emphasis on the r6le of the male, and its subordina¬
tion of women, is not too well fitted for preparing
children for a courageous social life. The dangers arising
out of the family constellation of the various children have
already been discussed in previous paragraphs. The
family stands indicted, therefore, in the most favourable
circumstances, as not quite adequate to its present-day
task.
How the Family Inhibits Mental Maturity
You can well imagine that the dangers of family life
are doubly exaggerated when family life, family loyalty,
family pride, are held up as the very goals of human
existence. You can imagine how objectivity is warped
when a brother or a father must be defended simply
because he is a brother or a father. You can well conceive
how the constriction of the social horizon by the
boundaries of family life runs counter to the purpose of
nature, and to the laws of mental health that we have
already outlined. The family is the breeding ground of
envy and jealousy, of personal ambition, of egoism, of
hypersensitivity, of suspicion, and sexual perversion.
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