Talcott Parsons’s Social Psychological Theory of Family

In this article I provide an overview of Talcott Parsons’s most psychoanalytically orientated book, Family, Socialization and Interaction Process. Additionally, I consider his related writings on life course maturation. My main goal is to introduce a largely neglected aspect of Parsons’s psychoanalytic sociology to a new generation of scholars in social psychology. As such, the article consists of three main parts. In the first I render a renewed reading of FSIP that gives a nuanced assessment of the middle-class post-war American family. I then examine the work of four scholars who were Parsons’s protégés around the time that FSIP was published. I show how Parsons’s ideas were taken in several directions by these family sociologists of the ‘second generation’, the cohort of 1950s students who began their careers under Parsons’s tutelage. I then offer a first intimation as to why Parsons’s social psychological theory of family system did not survive in its totality – as a viable theoretical system – beyond the second generation. Lastly, I propose that Parsons’s theory of family could have relevance for family studies today.