A brief history of semantics doesn't necessarily explain our fondness for families, whatever their composition, that are rife with "issues," as they are now called. But the morphing of the nuclear family surely has a role in the media celebration of messed-up domestic groups. If television means to offer a reflection of real life -- or, more recently, real life itself -- dysfunction is going to pop up, now perhaps more than ever. Beaver, Bud, Princess and Kitten -- every episode of their fictional lives involved a crisis, but it was a crisis fit for the times. Telling a fib was big news in the world of Ricky Nelson; it could be that Ozzy badgering his daughter Kelly about a gynecologist's appointment is the moral equivalent. What was dysfunctional in the old sense is still called dysfunctional, but these days it is also typical, much to everyone's relief.
Robert J. Thompson, founding director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University, says that even what many consider the most dysfunctional TV families are "very functional at their roots." Of the three shows with the most beloved dysfunctional families -- "The Simpsons," "Roseanne" and "Married ... With Children" -- only the last had a family "that was really, truly dysfunctional," says Thompson.
"You could make the argument that all four of the people in that show would've been better off if they were not in that family," he says. "But in the case of 'Roseanne' and 'The Simpsons,' for all the trashy qualities on the surface, they are basically families that love each other, support each other, and all the rest of it, though not necessarily in traditional fashion."
(Thompson says he doesn't address the pioneering "All in the Family," which first aired in 1971, because the show featured no young children among the core performers.)
"'The Osbournes,'" Thompson adds, "proves that even a guy like Ozzy Osbourne, once best known for biting the head off a bat during a concert, has absorbed himself in what amounts to a bizarre, kooky and relatively foul-mouthed family, but it's a family nevertheless. People are together, they're coming home every night, it's completely functional. So, ironically enough, on one level pop-culture entertainment has really not let go of the notion of the ideal family."
In the venue of publishing, as in the realm of issue-obsessed daytime TV, where the raw confessional memoir -- on the page or in front of the camera -- dominates, the ideal family has been dismissed as myth. Nothing is forbidden, nothing is particularly embarrassing, all of it -- literate accounts of incest, shouting matches about paternity -- is aired ostensibly in the pursuit of mental health. And it may well be mentally healthy for the writer and the blurter as well as for their audiences. These are vehicles, Thompson says, "that introduce us to things going on with our fellow citizens that we may not be aware of."
Carl Pickhardt, a psychologist and novelist, calls the function of books like Karr's and Harrison's "a memoir catharsis." The writing has "allowed the expression of the dark side of family life to come to the surface," he says. "And I think that's good. It's also allowed some people to talk about and identify behavior that they previously took for granted and never thought had any particular formative effects."
In the process, Pickhardt says, "we've re-normed our view of family life. When we look at it now, we say that every family is a mix: The old notion of the idealized TV family isn't exactly true, but by the same token, the extraordinarily painful and traumatic vision given by a lot of these memoirs is not the whole story either."
Pickhardt, who has a private practice in Austin, Texas, thinks there's also been a shift in how therapists see troubled family relations -- and a change in their approach to helping. In the past, he says, "there was a view [on the part of therapists] of what wasn't there but should have been there, of negative things going on that were having destructive effects, and the power of the past. That needed to be investigated in order to help people heal from what had happened."
"That's still of therapeutic concern," Pickhardt adds, "but there's been somewhat of a shift so that now there's also an appreciation of taking a look at what is there, what is positively present, and focusing on what can be done in the present."
Therapists also tend to use the term 'dysfunctional' with much more restraint than civilians. "We describe families in terms of what their specific issues or problems are," says Dr. Leigh Leslie, a psychologist, family therapist and associate professor of family studies at the University of Maryland. "We have our diagnostic manuals. But [the language in them] is not what's common to the general public. That's not to say that professionals don't use the term, but when they do, they talk about what kind of dysfunctional family. It's not a term professionals use a lot."
Meanwhile, plain folks toss around the word with abandon. "Psychological terms are second nature to us because psychologists are part of our everyday dialogue," says Deborah Tannen, the author of "I Only Say This Because I Love You" and a professor of linguistics at Georgetown University. The down side of this trend, Tannen says, "is what I see as a tendency to pathologize. Sometimes we over-apply these psychological interpretations: We're calling people pathological when in fact they just have a different style.
"So, for example, the New Yorker who talks to the Californian is accused of being hostile when maybe she's just being blunt," Tannen continues. "Or you're accused of being pathologically secretive because you don't think it's right to talk about your personal life. You try to say what you want in an indirect way, you're called passive aggressive, you're called manipulative."
Next page: "You look into the heart of darkness of where a real American family can go"