Books in Brief: The Death of the Family

The Death of the Family, by David Cooper (Pantheon, 145 pp., $5.95).

Cooper, a psychotherapist, believes, like his leader R. D. Laing, that schizophrenics are the only sane people among us. Society is sick and to cure it we must first destroy it. The family is the smallest social unit, the microcosm, so we destroy the family first. How? Well, we go live in communes, “Revolutionary Centers of Consciousness,” where we all become squirrelly, where we’ll each “be able to masturbate in the full vision of the other.” Conversion will be difficult among blue-collar and middle-class types, admits Cooper, but like all humane intellectuals, he has a solution: “This is where . . . bombs and machine guns will have to come in, with a guiding compassion. . . .” The most succinct summary of this book appears at the end, in a comment made to Cooper by a little girl: “Heidi, aged four,” reports Cooper, “after I had taught her the language of the trees, how to shake hands with them the right way, and then to hear their differential responses, how to hear the tree say hello and how to overcome the silent withdrawal of certain other trees: ‘I think you’re just nuts!’ ” Precisely. The problem is, however, that Cooper takes it as a compliment. And there are a few too many Coopers among us these days.

JC

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J. R. Coyne Jr.

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The Death of the Family, by David Cooper (Pantheon, 145 pp., $5.95).

Cooper, a psychotherapist, believes, like his leader R. D. Laing, that schizophrenics are the only sane people among us. Society is sick and to cure it we must first destroy it. The family is the smallest social unit, the microcosm, so we destroy the family first. How? Well, we go live in communes, “Revolutionary Centers of Consciousness,” where we all become squirrelly, where we’ll each “be able to masturbate in the full vision of the other.” Conversion will be difficult among blue-collar and middle-class types, admits Cooper, but like all humane intellectuals, he has a solution: “This is where . . . bombs and machine guns will have to come in, with a guiding compassion. . . .” The most succinct summary of this book appears at the end, in a comment made to Cooper by a little girl: “Heidi, aged four,” reports Cooper, “after I had taught her the language of the trees, how to shake hands with them the right way, and then to hear their differential responses, how to hear the tree say hello and how to overcome the silent withdrawal of certain other trees: ‘I think you’re just nuts!’ ” Precisely. The problem is, however, that Cooper takes it as a compliment. And there are a few too many Coopers among us these days.