THE FAMILY AS OBJECT AND SUBJECT OF SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS

K. T. VINICHENKO

The formation and interaction of the various forms of social consciousness is not an abstract process. It is carried out by concrete living people—by society and by individual persons, by large and small social groups, one of which is the family. Like all social institutions, it represents a dialectical unity of the object and the subject of social consciousness, creating the objective basis for its formation and, in a certain respect, creating the spiritual values of society.

The family “represents a product of the social system” (K. Marx). It concentrates within itself the entire complex of human relations, acting as the bearer of these relations and their distinctive miniature expression. In the spiritual life of the family, as in a prism, all forms of social consciousness are refracted: worldview and politics, law and morality, art and science, atheistic and religious consciousness. All these forms exist here both at the level of psychology and at the ideological level. There is, perhaps, no other form of human community in which the ideal and psychological motives of behavior, thoughts and impulses, the most intimate desires, habits, will, tastes, moods, etc., would be represented in such variety. In the spiritual life of the family, all facets of the personality and of its consciousness manifest themselves in the most direct and evident form.

The study of the spiritual processes occurring in the family makes it possible to judge the level of cultural development to which society and the individual have risen. Relations between husband and wife, parents and children are indicators of the spiritual maturity of social relations, a kind of touchstone on which it is tested how far a person has become human. By the character of these ties “one may in general judge the degree of development of man.”

“In the relation to woman, as prey and as an object serving for the satisfaction of social lust, there is expressed the infinite degradation of man when he exists only for himself, for the mystery of the relation between man and man finds its unambiguous, decisive, open, manifest expression in the relation between man and woman and in the approach to this natural, immediate species-relation”¹).

¹) K. Marx. Preparatory works for The Holy Family. K. Marx and F. Engels, Works, ed. 1930, Moscow–Leningrad, vol. III, p. 621.

The natural and social world is the object of a worldview. Nature, as an object of activity, appears not only in the form of objects of labor, but also as a totality of natural-biological laws. People cannot fail to take them into account and, to a certain extent, are compelled to adapt to them. For example, the biological defenselessness of the human skin against low temperature requires the production of warm clothing. The production of foodstuffs depends on such a requirement of nature as the organism’s need for the daily intake of food. Nature itself, as it were, stands guard to ensure that man does not rely too much on its gifts and continuously carries out the process of creating his own conditions of existence.

Society cannot fail to submit to the law of the continuation of the species. The operation of the laws of population is determined by the mode of production of material goods. People can interfere with the laws of heredity, but they are powerless to abolish the natural necessity of the continuation of the species, just as they are powerless against their own social laws. The natural-biological is only qualitatively transformed, but is not excluded from the totality of human relations. Nature, having given birth to its highest blossom—man—has preserved itself both in the sphere of the production of things and in the production of human life itself. In the creation of the instruments of labor it provides the material, leaving, as it were, to man himself the decision of the question concerning the product of his activity. The latter are nature artificially reproduced, its humanized continuation. However, in the reproduction of people by people themselves, nature (at least up to the present time) keeps itself to a greater degree than in the production of things. Here it appears not only as the object of a relation, but also predetermines the very fact of the birth of a child. As though manifesting unceasing concern for self-preservation, it “does not entrust” to people the full resolution of the question of the product of their actions.

The reproduction of the physical and spiritual life of people is realized through marriage and the family.

“The third relation, which from the very outset enters into the course of historical development, consists in the fact that people, who daily remake their own life, begin to make other people, to propagate their kind: this is the relation between husband and wife, parents and children; the family”²).

Consequently, the family, from the standpoint of its natural-material ties, is an object that receives its reflection in social consciousness. It reveals itself above all in those forms of social consciousness which are most remote from direct connection with the mode of social production—for example, in worldview and morality, which include not only socio-class conditions but also the specific individual conditions of people’s lives. In political and legal consciousness, which most closely adjoins the economic structure of society, the natural basis of the family receives the most mediated reflection. In these forms of social consciousness, that part of nature which is the object of specifically social material-production relations extending beyond family ties proper is reflected most deeply and directly.

In light of this fact, the formation of an individual’s worldview, of its moral-psychological reflection, appears as a very complex and many-sided process, presupposing the resolution of contradictions between nature and man, between social and biological

²) K. Marx. The German Ideology. K. Marx and F. Engels, Works, 2nd ed., Moscow, 1955, vol. 3, p. 27.

conditions and needs of life. One can speak of the completion of this process only when, in satisfying his natural-biological needs, the individual affirms his moral-aesthetic perfection. Only when man achieves mastery over his instincts can one speak of the unity of the psychological and the ideological in a scientific worldview, of the transformation of the latter into a single alloy of all facets of the spiritual makeup of the personality.

The achievement of harmony between the natural and the social in man depends on many external natural or social conditions, which may contribute to the usurpation of the moral at the expense of the natural, and vice versa. For example, an established disproportion between the male and female population may lead to the displacement of such a most natural human instinct as fatherhood and motherhood. The possibilities for the development of genuinely human experiences and emotions inherent in this feeling can hardly be fully compensated by any other possibilities. The usurpation of this instinct cannot but have an influence on the consciousness of the individual, on his worldview and perceptions, on the degree of fullness of personal life and satisfaction with it.

However, the achievement of harmony between the natural and the socio-moral is determined to a decisive degree by the level of the individual’s spiritual wealth. Natural needs, as an object of their reflection by man, cannot be abstracted from his social, spiritual content. Under all circumstances he is the subject of interrelations between the physiological and the social. With the emergence and development of the human spirit, natural instincts ceased to exist as forces independent of it. The system of social conditions of life ultimately has a decisive influence on how, in what thoughts and feelings, man reflects his natural needs. That complex of thoughts and feelings which man creates in his relation to society has a decisive influence on his awareness of the role and significance of the physiological factor in his individual life. And this awareness, in turn, determines the direction and character of the satisfaction of instincts. Human intellect can make nature bloom with all the subtlest shades of spiritual beauty. “Sexual maturity is directly dependent on mental and moral development. The healthy development of the mind sets a barrier to the premature and harmful development of sensuality”^3).

Even the most primitive forms of satisfaction of natural inclinations, when the latter become an end in themselves, are manifested in man as spiritualized needs.

“Eating, drinking, procreation, etc.,” wrote K. Marx, “are, it is true, also genuinely human functions; however, in the abstraction which separates them from the rest of the sphere of human activity and makes them the final and ultimate ends, they are animal in character”^4).

The abstraction of natural inclinations from the social is the result of the regulating activity of consciousness itself. Even in their crudest form they are what people themselves make of them.

The history of the development of sexual culture shows that from the time society arose, the sexual instinct ceased to exist in its primordial form. It underwent a transformation in which two directions can be traced. On the one hand, it developed into individual sexual love, into a moral-aesthetic reflec—

^3) M. L. Mikhailov. Works, vol. 3, Moscow, 1958, p. 377.
^4) K. Marx and F. Engels. On Art. Izd. “Iskusstvo,” 1937, p. 55.

…nature. In his work The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, F. Engels shows how already in primitive society there begin to arise mutual attraction and selectivity in relations between the sexes, a sense of aesthetic enjoyment of sexual union. Slavery already knew numerous examples of love that existed outside official society, among slaves and free citizens. Love among the free existed only in the form of adultery, in relations with hetaerae. To marry a hetaera meant to demean one’s honor, to go against society. Yet in ancient Greece there were quite a few cases of marriages with hetaerae. They were active participants in public affairs, enjoyed recognition for their intellectual abilities, and not infrequently displayed traits of genuine nobility in their relations with men. The hetaera Bacchis helps to bring her lover Pamphilus together with his wife and rejoices in his new family happiness. The hetaera Danaë, at the cost of her own life, saves the life of her beloved Sophron from an attempt on it by his wife Laodice. The hetaera Lamia, daughter of the Athenian Cleonor, was the mistress of Poliorcetes, who felt true passion for her and showered her with all gifts and honors. Outstanding examples of love relationships famous in history, in which we find all the joys and sufferings of individual sexual love, are the relations of Menander with Glycera and of Pericles with Aspasia^5).

In the ancient world, love in marriage was considered impermissible. Wives, as a rule, were indifferent to their husbands’ relations with hetaerae. However, ancient Greece knows examples of the grave experience of infidelity as an insult to the dignity of the wife. In Plautus’ play Mercator a scene is described in which the matron Dorippa suffers deeply when she learns that her husband has brought a hetaera into the house^6). Beginning with the epoch of slavery, through the whole history of civilization there runs the transformation of the sexual instinct into the truly human feeling of individual sexual love.

However, this process was highly contradictory. The main immediate spiritual factor regulating the development of the sexual instinct was individualistic consciousness—an inevitable product of private property. The devaluation of productive labor—the basis of the harmony of the natural and the social—the antagonism between mental and physical labor, between classes and sexes—all this conditioned a distorted reflection of nature in consciousness, when the role of the sexual instinct in human life was exaggerated, refined, and overwrought to dimensions such as nature itself does not know^7). Civilization created a multitude of means for the artificial kindling of the sexual instinct. In ancient society, art, for example in the field of dance, often serves for sexual arousal. An entire system of social measures for the creation of sexual perversions takes shape. Love for boys (sixth–fifth centuries B.C.) is widely celebrated by poets and used for political and pedagogical purposes. Plato puts the following words into the mouth of Aristophanes: “Only those men became outstanding in the state who, as boys, experienced the love of a man”^8). There existed public weddings in which society sanctioned unnatural forms of regulation of natural instincts.

The creation of various kinds of spiritual activity became possible only thanks to material-productive activity. But under conditions in which the spirit found itself torn away from its actual ma—

^5) I. Bloch. The History of Prostitution. St. Petersburg, 1913, pp. 388, 239, 243, 244.
^6) Ibid., p. 386.
^7) B. Danielsson. Happy Island. Moscow, 1962.
^8) I. Bloch. The History of Prostitution. St. Petersburg, 1913, p. 192.

of a material basis, an illusory conception of its source is formed. Object-oriented sexual activity, and not social labor, is regarded as the immediate source of human abilities and pleasures. The humanization of man is reflected by the latter as the product of his sexual activity. In this circumstance one should seek one of the reasons for the broad penetration of the sexual element into all aspects of the life of the ancient world. That part of nature where man satisfies his natural-biological needs finds its reflection in social consciousness as the source of the spiritual life of the person earlier than does the other side of nature, which is the object of material-productive activity. The history of cognition begins with the reflection of immediately given empirical reality. Natural-biological needs also were an object of knowledge, which found its abstract expression in the notions of the privileged classes, alienated from social production.

The sexual instinct found an especially distorted reflection in religious consciousness. Religious fantasy created the most repulsive forms of sexual licentiousness. Behind the outwardly somewhat positive role of religion, which sanctified monogamy and the equality of the sexes before God, there is revealed the kindling, by religious feelings, of the most refined unnatural passions.

This refinement of the sexual instinct reaches significant proportions in the Middle Ages. The medieval clergy and various religious sects were the most repulsive hotbeds of sexual debauchery. The mass development of religious consciousness created nourishment for peculiar psychosexual emotions: sadistic-masochistic phenomena, misogyny, witch-mania, Satanism. Belief in Satan and the devil was, in essence, a fantasy permeated through and through with sexual emotions. Tertullian believes that Satan, during service to idols, imitates the sacraments, baptizes his believers and marks them, and when, in conclusion, a depraved orgy takes place, participates in it. The Satanists—sects that worshiped Satan (11th century)—cursed the son of God during their orgies. Demons appeared to them, and then they performed monstrous sexual acts (together with coprophagy and the killing of children) in order to drive out from the soul its divine constituent parts. The Byzantine Michael Psellos testifies to this. The orgies of the Satanic mass were distributed according to the days of the week. “Everything that the most depraved madness can invent in the sphere of lust, that burning sensuality can push up from its depths to the surface; wherever unbridled passions may go astray; all the evil before which even nature itself is frightened—all this was done and practiced there as service to the new god”^9).

The predominance of the natural-biological in the worldview of the individual appears, in the final analysis, as a manifestation of the moral-ethical function of private property. The latter requires monogamy, curbing polygamous instincts from the side of economic interest. As for the natural-moral basis of monogamy (precisely that which is the sole justified motive of the sexual union), it is destroyed by this economic interest, reduced by it to a crudely animal, mechanical act. By alienating the thing from the person, subordinating his thoughts, feelings, and impulses to the domination of property interests, private property thereby deprives the individual of a genuinely human relation to the problem of sex, dehumanizes him. Hence—the preservation of polygamy, the transformation of prostitution into a necess—

^9) Ibid., p. 532.

...a visible supplement to private-property relations, a narrowing of ideals to the cult of money and sex.

The American publicist William Schlamm, in his book The Young Masters of the Old Planet, drawing on the studies of psychologists and sociologists, public-opinion surveys, and statistical data, presents a frightening picture of moral impoverishment in the contemporary bourgeois world. A survey on the aims of life, conducted by Professors Teindas and Tiro among several thousand Frenchmen, showed that the most frequent answer was: “A lot of money and women.” And here are the results of research conducted in England. “The number of violent crimes committed by young people aged 14 to 21 has increased fifteenfold in comparison with 1930” (New Statesman). “A headmistress doubts that in the sixth form (girls aged 14 to 15) there is even a single virgin” (from a statement by the sociologist Ruth Adams, a specialist in the morality of youth, Sunday Times). Data for the USA. In 1960 more than half of sexual crimes were committed by young people under 21. The number of girls under 15 who gave birth to children increased fourfold over ten years (since 1950).¹

With the improvement of private-property relations, people’s moral vices also multiply.

The regular connection between the principles of private property, the individualistic world outlook, and the spiritual degradation of society is manifested in its most concentrated form in the dehumanization of relations between the sexes. For many centuries the family and everyday life were the focus of all forms and levels of individualistic consciousness. The habits and psychology of egoism, “one may say, with the mother’s milk” (V. I. Lenin), were implanted and fixed in consciousness from generation to generation. The repulsive moral vices generated by society and condemned by official morality could reveal themselves with the greatest force in the family, hiding under the cover of intimacy and its closedness from public view. What was secret for society was laid bare in the family in the most explicit form.

Everyday life and the family were among the most conservative aspects of society. No social revolution before communism touched the sphere of family relations in any deep way with its transformations.

One of the fundamental features of the communist formation is the inclusion of the entire system of human relations in the process of the most profound transformations. All previous history had never known such an all-embracing character of the remaking of society, beginning with forms of property and ending with the psychology of the individual and family-and-everyday morality.

Socialism created all the necessary socio-economic conditions for affirming the family as an institution whose chief social value is genuinely humanistic relations, the performance of the function of forming the personality, and the transmission of spiritual riches from one generation to another. It is precisely this function that constitutes the universal human purpose of the family, which has always existed but was subordinated to the domination of economic calculation. The fact that the family historically took shape as a direct element of the mode of production was a natural result of the development of social production, which at a definite stage could not be perfected without “imposing” on the family an economic function alien to it. Characterizing the process of the formation of monogamy, F. Engels pointed out: “It was the first form of the family at whose basis lay not natural—

—rather, economic conditions—namely the victory of private property over the original, spontaneously formed common property”^11).

The function of production (at the early stages of the development of the family) and the distribution of material values do not coincide with family relations proper—the relations between husband and wife, parents and children.

“...marriage,” wrote A. Bebel, “resting on bourgeois property relations, is more or less compulsion, has a mass of shortcomings, and often does not fully fulfill, or does not fulfill at all, its own (emphasis mine.—K. V.) purpose”^12). In the function of the production and distribution of material goods there is realized that which constitutes the essence of society. The family, however, as a specific form of human community, has its own functions, in which it fulfills its social purpose. The American Marxist H. Selsam points out that “...the tendency toward increasing the economic role of the family is rooted not in family relations themselves, but in the nature of a broader sphere of relations, which distort the actual function of the family cell”^13).

The abolition of private property and of antagonism between classes and between the sexes leads to a fundamental change in the household-economic role of the family. The function of establishing property continuity between generations is transformed into a household-consumer function, which no longer confronts the human being as a self-sufficient force, but proves to be one of the means of creating a harmonious life for people, their all-round well-being and happiness. The criterion of the social significance of the family undergoes a fundamental change. The human being becomes the sole goal of the existence both of society as a whole and of the family. Directly human relations, previously pushed into the background, acquire a decisive role in the processes taking place in the family. The criterion of the social value of the family now turns out to be the degree of humanity of its relations, the level of spiritual and moral maturity.

The family loses its value as a cell for the accumulation of material wealth, as an instrument of property interests. From an object of consciousness, passive in relation to its development, it becomes a subject creating the spiritual goods of society, forming the many-sided complex of the collectivist consciousness of the individual. The degree of its strength and stability as a social institution is determined decisively by how the family realizes its universal human purpose—the birth and upbringing of children; how it develops and perfects the spiritual qualities of the individual: his worldview, needs and convictions, feelings and concepts of duty, conscience, dignity and honor; how it forms the will and character of a human being, his tastes and habits, an aesthetic attitude toward reality. That which earlier had subordinate significance acquires the leading role in the functioning of the family. The many-sided feelings of individual sexual love, blood-kinship ties, respect for human dignity, equality, mutuality of pleasures and responsibilities, unity of worldviews, mutual understanding, flexibility of feelings, harmony of characters, tastes, and emotional situational manifestations—all these individual properties, together with all the “trifles” of behavior, insignificant for society, become important for the life of the family.

^11) F. Engels. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. K. Marx and F. Engels, Works, 2nd ed., Moscow, 1961, vol. 21, p. 68.
^12) A. Bebel. Woman and Socialism. Moscow, 1959, p. 150.
^13) H. Selsam. Marxism and Morals. Moscow, 1962, p. 206.

Natural needs cease to be the object of their distorted reflection. In a new quality they return to the bosom of their natural movement. The objective social basis falls away both for their complete alienation from man and for their artificial exaggeration. Debauchery, polygamy, sexual promiscuity—the products of the dominion of human egoism—must of necessity be eliminated as alien to the collectivist principles of social and individual life, as hostile to man. The natural-material basis of the family becomes a means of humanizing the person.

The dependence of the family on society acquires a qualitatively new content. Formerly family relations ennobled a person only insofar as they resisted the influence exerted on them by society. Now the family is capable of becoming the subject, the creator of good, of individual human happiness, only to the extent that it comes under the transforming influence of new social relations.

An analysis of the moral foundations of the family shows that where the process of forming a scientific worldview, communist ideology and morality passes into the sphere of family and everyday relations, an integral personality is created, a happy individual life takes shape, a person most fully reveals his creative abilities, attains the true meaning of life, and experiences a sense of delight in its significance for himself and for society. Conversely, where the remaking of individual consciousness is limited only to the sphere of relations on the social plane, without touching in any deep way the sphere of the narrowly personal, the intimate plane, a ground arises for a split between the ideological and the psychological, the scientific and the moral elements in the consciousness of the personality. And if a person does not seek the resolution of this contradiction along the path of self-perfection, of uniting what he has acquired as a result of the work of thought on the solution of social problems with the whole aggregate of his life manifestations, then the possibilities for the individual development of the personality are thereby limited. The person proves incapable of grasping the world in all its complexity, diversity, and unity. He becomes entangled in understanding the changing situations of his life, expends a mass of physical and spiritual energy on overcoming conflicts created by his own illusions and by the one-sidedness of his thoughts and feelings. Thus the social activity of the personality is reduced, its forces are uselessly squandered, the best inclinations—and perhaps even talent—wither away. In the self-consciousness of the individual, personal life loses its high purpose, giving rise to a feeling of dissatisfaction and disappointment.

Citizen B. is a senior research associate at one of the institutes, a major specialist who has created a design for a new bridge crane. He constantly works on perfecting his scientific and technical thought. But his intellectual abilities do not extend to the sphere of personal life. In the family he is a helpless, weak-willed, pitiful man, incapable of properly understanding his elementary relations with people. He does not develop a consciousness of moral responsibility toward his wife and children, or respect for human dignity. If even the slightest effort of thought is demanded of him, B. is overcome by disappointment. In his own imagination he becomes an unhappy man and leaves one family after another. This intelligent specialist, capable of solving complex technical problems, cannot attain clarity and inner peace in the solution of personal questions. Laziness and rigidity of thought, the element of the unconscious, the absence of a rational approach to the “trifles” of everyday life, the need to turn to oneself in resolving personal conflicts create such confusion—

...ness, an accumulation of failures, the striving to overcome which gives rise to new, still more serious failures. B. had been in three legal and four de facto marriages, had been brought to trial for bigamy, has three children from different marriages, left his last family, where there are two children, and entered into cohabitation with a new woman¹⁴).

One of the contradictions in the development of social consciousness under socialism is the incompleteness of its restructuring in accordance with the principles of collectivism. This finds expression in the fact that the family preserves moral-psychological contradictions between remnants of an individualistic worldview, one-sidedness in the development of thoughts and feelings, on the one hand, and a communist worldview, comprehensiveness, and the dialectical character of the development of thought, on the other.

An analysis of the divorce proceedings of 1,200 families in the Tomsk and Novosibirsk regions made it possible to establish the following moral-psychological deficiencies in the family:

criminality—hooliganism, theft, embezzlement of public property, speculation, acquisitiveness, parasitism—constitutes 5% of the total number of causes of divorce;

drunkenness—18.5%;

facts of moral and everyday depravity, Domostroi traditions, neglect of family duties, egoism, philistinism, rudeness, marital infidelity, jealousy, calculation, petty domestic quarrels, incompatibility of characters, absence of love for children, loss of conjugal trust and respect—all this constitutes 59.5% of the total number of causes of divorce;

conflicts between spouses, on the one hand, and their parents and relatives of the older generation, on the other, arising on the basis of differing conceptions of the meaning and purpose of life, of the welfare and happiness of the family, of tastes and beauty—5.8%;

religious prejudices—1%;

a frivolous attitude toward entering into marriage—6.5%;

a difference in the level of intellectual development of the spouses—2%¹⁵).

These deficiencies reflect the level of the spiritual maturity of socialism. The lower phase of communism, only just emerged from the womb of bourgeois society, which had concentrated within itself all the abominations of exploitation, cannot immediately eliminate them from the sphere of its consciousness. Nor can one fail to take into account the concrete historical conditions of socialist construction in our country, connected with a whole series of difficulties that compelled our state to leave the solution of certain educational tasks to another, more favorable time.

The moral immaturity of the family appears, to a certain extent, also as an expression of the uneven character of the process of formation and development of socialist social consciousness.

The material resources at the disposal of our society at the beginning of its development did not make it possible simultaneously to create a high level of socio-technical conditions for both social and individual life, to raise the sphere of everyday life to the cultural-technical level of social production. This, in the final analysis, conditioned the contradiction between the social and individual being of people, a certain lag of the consciousness of the individual behind the level of social consciousness—

¹⁴) Moscow City Court, case No. 2-2552, 1962.
¹⁵) Divorce proceedings of the Tomsk and Novosibirsk regional courts for 1952–1959.

society as a whole. New principles of life and behavior are formed earlier in the sphere of production and social life, and, moreover, this process, as the facts show, does not end under socialism. The level of the productive forces does not yet make it possible fully to eliminate all forms of social inequality, to create objective conditions for the liquidation of low-skilled labor, or equality of the material conditions of life and everyday existence for different categories of working people. All this cannot fail to find expression in the spiritual phenomena of society and the family.

The nonsimultaneous process of restructuring the objective conditions of people’s lives ultimately also determines a certain unevenness in the change of forms of social consciousness. Political consciousness is subjected first of all to radical transformation. Without the affirmation of socialist ideology in the consciousness of the masses before the revolution, the political upheaval itself is impossible. As for worldview and morality, here what is transformed first and foremost is that part of them which coincides with political consciousness, reflects people’s attitude toward society, the state, classes, nations; and only after this, and on this basis, does a revaluation of values take place in that part of these forms of consciousness which reflects the so-called microenvironment. Since worldview and morality include, to a significantly greater extent, the specific conditions of people’s individual lives in their structure, they require considerably more time for their remaking than, say, political consciousness.

In the processes of education and upbringing there is no complete coincidence; the latter is by no means limited to enlightenment alone; it requires much greater effort on the part of society and the individual than education does. And this means that a discrepancy may arise between knowledge and morality, between intellect and the demands of conscience. Unfortunately, this occurs in our society. There are people in whom a high culture of the mind comes into contradiction with their moral-psychological attitudes. And, conversely, among uneducated people there is moral purity, cordiality, and selflessness.

All these contradictions of life are reflected, as in a focus, in the family. Society’s overcoming of these contradictions is a necessary condition for achieving harmony in the development of the family’s spiritual life.

However, the family is a relatively independent factor in the development of social consciousness. Its spiritual life may anticipate the process of creating new cultural values, proceed together with them, or lag behind it.

To the extent that family relations are subjected to the transforming influence of society, they themselves become a source where the most beautiful and exalted ideals, emotions, and pleasures are born and fully unfold. In the nature of specifically familial relations, not spoiled by perversions of the spirit, there are contained not only elements of the spontaneous and irrational, but also possibilities for enriching the spiritual content of the personality. For example, the instinct of fatherhood and motherhood, the blood ties of kinship and attachment, relations of love and mutual care, which encompass the most intimate feelings, make it possible to reveal in a person his true spiritual wealth and beauty: love for people, responsiveness and cordiality, touching tenderness and warmth of feeling, respect for human dignity. A child’s feeling of love for his parents, the experience of motherhood and fatherhood—this is the first thing that forms the spiritual world of a person, his conscious-emotional attitude toward the external world. That which is instilled in a child by parental love is capable of leaving an indelible mark on the worldview, ideals, feelings, and character of thought of the adult person—

Family is a necessary factor in the normal development of children. “Children brought up without the participation of a family are, to a far greater degree, exposed to the danger of one-sided or delayed development than those children who are members of family collectives”^16).

The family is necessary not only for the formation of the child’s personality, but also for the self-education of the parents. In this respect the following observation by the American sociologist J. Bossard deserves attention: “Family relations include not only what parents pass on to their children and children to one another, but also what children pass on to their parents. These ‘gifts of children’ consist in: 1) the enrichment of intrafamily ties; 2) the broadening of the family’s circle of interests; 3) emotional satisfaction that continues throughout life; 4) the possibility of returning to stages of life already passed through; 5) control over the development of a new human personality; 6) a deeper understanding of the processes of life and of the ‘true meaning of life’”^17).

The best impulses may never awaken in an adult who does not feel the need to give himself to a child. In the final letter of Ashkhen Oganyan—the heroine of Yuri German’s trilogy The Cause You Serve, My Dear Man, and I Am Responsible for Everything—there are these words: “One may not give birth, but one must bring up a child. One may not bring up, but one must give oneself to a child. It is not so important whether he is yours or completely another’s”^18).

Personal feelings, born in the relationships between parents and children, are ennobled by joining with social feelings. “The opposite process is just as important. All-embracing ideological feelings, far removed from narrowly personal feelings, do not possess their trustfulness and tenderness, but they become warmer and more intense thanks to their connection with simple perceptions, personal affects and moods deeply imprinted in memory”^19).

Refracting within itself various social relations, levels and forms of the reflection of reality, the family creates an immediate, warm emotional atmosphere in which social problems are perceived as something close and dear. It is not for nothing that we call the Motherland Mother, Fatherland. Love for it is bound up with a multitude of concrete emotional experiences, thoughts, and representations: it is love for the sounds of one’s native speech, for native nature—the silence of the taiga and the chirping of birds, the Russian birch and the smooth surface of river waters, the clouds in the sky and the harsh Siberian winter; love for the historical past and present of one’s people, pride in its courage and beauty in severe years of trial; it is suffering for the torments that fell to its lot, and joy that it did not bend, but withstood the struggle for its honor and freedom. All these thoughts and feelings acquire their immediate tangible force and sharpness, their concreteness and closeness, when they pass through the prism of the family’s kindred feelings—a distinctive amplifier of social thoughts and feelings.

The Czech ethicist F. Krejčí writes in his work Positive Ethics: “Marriage, successful or unsuccessful, opens the married person’s eyes to the world and to life in a way quite different from that of the unmarried; you cannot better know yourself and others outside the connection of the male and female soul possible only in marriage. That realm of feelings and realm of good into which a person is permitted to look in the family will forever remain unknown to the unmarried person; in this sense he is always poorer than the family person,

^16) A. G. Kharchev, Marriage and the Family in the USSR. Moscow, 1964, p. 270.
^17) Ibid.
^18) Yu. German, I Am Responsible for Everything. Moscow, 1965, p. 417.
^19) I. Popelova, Ethics. Moscow, 1965, p. 626.

what will be said later, when some misfortune befalls him or old age comes. Marriage, the family concentrate the environment around us; the rays of our energy immediately penetrate the external world, but, passing through the condensed medium of the family, are retained in it and warm it, and from there the warmth returns to our heart and does not let it grow cold. The warmth of our heart is not enough for all humanity, because in the world there is much darkness in which the rays of our energy are absorbed without reflexes; in the family environment their intensity is increased many times over...”².

In these words there is an aspiration to fence the family off from the external world, but they also contain a very wise thought: that the practice of family life is one of the factors of a deeper knowledge of life. In family ties, in the view of the author of these lines, there is that which makes it possible to warm the rays of love for the Motherland, for humanity; if they do not pass through the fabric of the family, these rays may acquire an abstract character.

So long as society exists, the family will remain one of the important links in the formation of the personality, possessing certain advantages in its influence on the personality that other links of the educational process lack. The future of the family is inevitably connected with the strengthening of its role in creating the spiritual values of society, with increasing its responsibility before society in the formation of a new generation.

Analysis of the family as a subject of social consciousness, of its active role in the development of both the psychological and the theoretical level of consciousness, in the development of communist morality and worldview, of science and art, and in overcoming religious survivals, makes it possible to solve educational tasks more concretely and to improve the methods and forms of preparing a comprehensively developed personality.

1. Supplement to the newspaper Izvestia, Nedelya, October 20–26, 1963, No. 43, p. 15. ↩

2. Ibid. ↩