Therapist Jay Haley talksabout disturbed power relationships in modernfamilies.
Jay Haley is one of the nation’sleading family therapists —aquintessentially pragmaticman with a clear eye andsardonic witwho teaches his students how to make ailing families functionagain. Mostly, in his view, this involves straighteningout mixed-up family hierarchies—like the "perverse triangles"that forms when, for instance, oneparent becomes allied with a child against the other parent. (For an accountof Haley’s methods of dealing withthese harmful alliances, see the box on page 3).
As a therapist who has been working with familiesfor nearly 30 years, the59-year-old Haley is eminentlyqualified to talk about the problems of the American family today. To hearhis views, I went to meet Haley in the small private housein Washington, DC, where he maintains his Family TherapyInstitute. I expected a rather formidable figure.I found a tall, rangy man with a graying mustache,westernin bearing (he was born in Wyoming), soft-spoken, andwearing sandals.
We covered a range of topics: divorce, remarriage, the economy’s effectsonfamilies, the case of John W.HinckleyJr. and his family. But always the conversation seemed to come backto 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.
"Ifa kid is acting up or crazy, we knowthat his parents must be divided, thatthefamily hierarchy is in confusion."
Maya Pines: When you work withfamilies, you must have some kind of idealfamily in mind,don’t you?
Jay Haley: No.
Pines: No? Well, what are youworking toward, then?
Haley: Oh, rearranging that particularfamily. You see, I used to doresearch on families, andI was astonished at theirdiversity. There are no many different ways to be afamily. You don’t come out of that with an ideal way ofhow a family ought to be.
Pines: Didn’t Tolstoy say thatall happy families are alike, while eachunhappy familyis unhappy in its own way?
Haley: I know the quote you mean.I don’t think Tolstoy say a lot offamilies.
Pines: He didn’t see as manyas you did?
Haley: Well, one of the curiousthings that happened about the mid-1950s wasthat, for thefirst time, people arrangedsituationsin which families could actually beobserved talkingtogether. Before that, we had only people’s reports about what they did withone another. And when you observe them, you see that thereare tremendous culturaldifferences—Italianfamilies, Asian families. And there are big class differences between theworking class, the miserably poor, and the rich. Thereare families in which people aren’tmarried. 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 numberof families you’ve observed?
Haley: God, I have no idea. Isee them six to eight hours a day, all daylong, day afterday. You know, there’s a theory thatafter you’ve seen more than 300 families,you beginto go
through a change in your thinking about the mature of humanbeings. Up tothat point, you canthink about them as a collection of the individuals. But somewhere around300 you begin to understand that people aren’t what they’retraditionally thought to be. Thatis, you really beginto believe that people do what they do because of what other people do, andnot because of individual choice or free will. And it’sanunsettling idea. I remember thatwhen the family therapist Don Jackson managed to communicatesomething of that to FriedaFromm-Reichmann,the psychoanalyst, she replied, "I don’t see how you canlive with thatidea."
Pines: Then how can you tellwho is influencing whom in a family?
Haley: Well, if a kid is actingup or crazy, we assume that the familyhierarchy is in confusion.
Pines: How do you recognize afamily’s hierarchy?
Haley:Bywatchingthewayt
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