Abstract
As we have seen, the family crisis of the 1980s stimulated interest in the family and concerns about its well-being. To grasp the meaning of the changes in the structure and functions of the family that have been occurring, as well as the concerns and pathologies, it will be helpful to look at the history of the family. We shall do so not in terms of Santayana’s famous aphorism—that a person who does not learn the lessons of the past is doomed to repeat it—but more in accord with Benedetto Croce’s (1960) thesis that the past has contemporary significance because it is within us.
We in our time need to recover the past in order to obtain fullness. But this is not so much because history has meant decline, as because the fullness of meaning isn’t available with the resources of a single age. —Taylor (1989, p. 465)
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© 1993 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Schwab, J.J., Stephenson, J.J., Ice, J.F. (1993). History of the Family. In: Evaluating Family Mental Health. Critical Issues in Psychiatry. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-1259-6_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-1259-6_2
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
Print ISBN: 978-1-4899-1261-9
Online ISBN: 978-1-4899-1259-6
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