FAMILY PSYCHOLOGY The psychology of the family is concerned with the problems and adjustments of human beings living in intimate association. The very nature of the family organization is dependent upon the limit of elasticity in such adjustments on the part of individual members of the group. Like other social institutions, the family is an outcome of mankind's efforts to find satisfaction for a mul tiplicity of desires. The history of the family is a record of col lective learning, carried out by persons through untold time.
Fundamental, therefore, to an understanding of familial organ ization is knowledge of human nature, and particularly of the processes by which men learn. Much has been discovered about these processes during the present century. Observation of living creatures, experimentally caged and puzzled, has taught psycholo gists that learning proceeds only in dissatisfied organisms. A fundamental principle underlying all social institutions is derived from experimental study of the learning process: a puzzled crea ture tends to learn as fixed habit whatever mode of action happens to bring relief from persistent cravings. Social change occurs be cause some group of persons is unsatisfied. (E. L. Thorndike, The Learning Process, 1913.) To what puzzle is the family, then, a solution? For purposes of ordinary reference, the human family consists typically of children and their parents, though it may include adopted persons, or more remote relatives such as grandparents. Briefly, the puzzle of the family has been how to win satisfaction of the appetites for food, sex, security, self-assertion, play and other urgent needs, and at the same time to carry the burden of involuntary reproduction. The manifold and often conflicting desires of men, of women and of children are involved, so that this puzzle has been and still is extremely complicated and difficult. In striving for a solution that will yield the maximum of satisfaction with the minimum of thwarting to all concerned, mankind has tried almost every pos sible form of familial organization. Like a caged kitten, mankind has done nearly everything that it can do. The form of the family obviously depends largely on the form of mating, and the history of human endeavour shows us (I) group marriage, scarce ly different from promiscuity, in which all the men of a com munity live with all the women of that community and with the children produced by mating at will ; (2) polyandry, in which one wife mates with several husbands, living simultaneously with all of them and with their children borne by her; (3) polygyny, in which one husband lives in a household with several wives, and forms a family with them and his and their children; (4) suc cessive polygamy, as when a man or woman takes various mates in succession, after divorce ; (5) monogamy, in which one man and one woman marry with the sanctioned formalities and live together with their offspring, as life-long mates. (G. E. Howard, The History of Matrimonial Institutions, 19o4.) The times and places in which these various forms of the family occur reveal certain characteristic features of food supply, de population, over-population, etc., which are thought by students of the subject to exert decisive influence. Whatever form is established in any given time or place is regarded by the folk as "right" and "the way." We find every kind of organization receiv ing sanction sometime, somewhere. (W. G. Sumner, Folkways, 1911.) Pair marriage, with monogamy as its ideal, seems most nearly in universal favour to-day as the best solution of the relationship between men and women in the family—best, that is, in the sense that it involves more satisfaction and less annoy ance within the family than other forms, under conditions of human nature and of the environment as now existing. Powerful forces thus favour the unity of the family based on monogamy, but forces nearly as powerful work constantly for its disruption. (E. C. Parsons, The Family, 1906.) It is of interest to notice what these forces are.