The death of the family; - Hardcover

David Cooper, one of the grand old men of existential psychiatry, delivers a withering assault on the family from an individualist perspective. "Bringing up a child," he says, "is bringing down a person"; the family teaches us to live "agglutinatively," hence pathologically, rooting our identity in our birth milieu instead of in who we are as individuals. It's hard to find books that recognize that the family -- modern society's bedrock institution -- has critical problems which themselves underlie so many of our social problems. Written in the 70s, the book has a streak of Marxist jargon that contemporary readers may find distracting. But look past that -- beneath it is as pure and radical a call to tear down the family and all the "subtle violence" it works on the individual that you will ever read.