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?
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.
Haley: By watching the way the family members deal withanother—who interrupts, who takesPines: 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."
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.
Haley: I never met them, so I don’t know. Probably I’d have had the parents take the boy inPines: 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.
past. That’s one of the tragedies in many families. If a young adult begins to leave him and it
Haley: Age has nothing to do with it. It has to do with the stage of family life you haven’t gotgoes 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.
a problem kid, then they’d better pull together.
Haley: Yes, it is an old-fashioned view. And I’m not sure it apples to normal families. But withPines: 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?
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.
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 ofPines: 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?
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.
Haley: Oh, "my kids, your kids, and our kids"—that sort of thing. If a guy brings a couple ofOrdinarily, 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."
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.
Haley: Negotiate. Lay out a plan for the family. Mostly we work on getting the parents to agreePines: 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?
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.
Haley: It’s hard to generalize. My wife, Cloe Madanes, and Ihave been thinking of writing aPines: Wouldn’t it help to examine one’s own family hierarchy?
I’m not sure you can do any thing about it. (?Jt.)
Haley: I don’t think so, no. Depends on what you’re trying to solve. You can examine it—butPines: Suppose one figures out who has the real power in the family. Can’t one deliberatelychange the balance?