Family systems theory posits that the functioning of any individual in a family can be understood only in the social context of the family and in relation to the other people closely involved with him or her. When the founder of family systems theory, Murray Bowen, defined the emotional unit of the family as an ‘‘undifferentiated ego mass,” he helped to explain how the troubled individuals he encountered as a clinical psychiatrist derived their behavior from their family systems.11 Families who develop an “undifferentiated ego mass” establish vague or tenuous emotional boundaries among family members. They encourage members to become emotionally entangled or enmeshed with one another and accordingly (and in some instances unconsciously) block attempts by an individual to differentiate himself or herself emotionally from other family members. Children in such families become entangled in the “family relationship process” as soon as they are born; their self-images are formed in “reaction to the anxi-
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eties and emotional neediness of others,” of parents in particular, and family members tend to define children through their own “emotionally distorted perceptions.”12
Although a detailed analysis of the nature of shame in men as considered by family theorists is beyond the scope of this essay, an overview will be helpful in understanding what follows. Shame is a poorly understood affect, as contemporary Harvard shame psychologists Samuel Osherson and Steven Klugman explain, in part because it is so aversive and associated with infantile states: “Shame refers to a sense of inadequacy or exposure, often of a public nature, in which the sense of self feels in danger of being flooded or overwhelmed with [negative] feeling.”13 Aptly called the “judging companion” by William James (in The Principles of Psychology) in 1890, shame is the self judging the self as an internalized ‘‘other.”14 It has to do with an image you have of yourself and the resulting sense of deficiency or deficit, when you do not measure up.15
Even though it has been argued that women are shame prone, psychologists have come to believe that men are more shame vulnerable.16 It may well be that feelings of shame are central to what leave men feeling bad about themselves. Many men deny themselves self-expression of their own vulnerability, perhaps when most needed. According to Osherson and Klugman, if men do not acknowledge their difficulty with dependency, they can be left struggling with problems of love and intimacy. Men then feel confused and inadequate. They experience a profound sense of social isolation, with defenses that have a narcissistically hardened aspect.17
From Dreiser’s autobiographies, published and unpublished, as well as from his diaries and letters, we know that he struggled with extreme feelings of inadequacy and self-doubt, especially throughout the first half of his life. These caused such emotional and physical symptoms as neurasthenia, bad dreams, and sleeplessness. He also struggled in his personal relationships, most notably with women, with many of whom he became intensely involved and then dropped.18 In the various versions of Dawn, he describes his “war” with shame: “All through the first half of my life, I felt this — this war with age and death and degradation — less desperately … as I neared maturity … [But] all through my youth I ran —. … Ah, the horror…, disgrace, … [the] shame, of being shut out, ignored, forgotten, left to wander friendless. … ”19
And, to Dreiser, his father, in large part, was the villain. Dreiser viewed him as tyrannical and fanatically religious. Dreiser wrote in Dawn that he had “never known a man more obsessed
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by a religious belief” (Dawn, ch. I, 5–6). When his family was hungry, his children without shoes, John Paul, Sr., continued to pay tithes to the church and send his children to parochial school. He believed “that his soul’s salvation depended upon paying dollar for dollar” each expense incurred, even those not fully his responsibility (typescript, ch. I, 2). For John Paul, Sr., accepted “literally the infallibility of the Pope, the immaculate conception of the Virgin … the dogmatic interpretation of mass … and the like” (typescript, ch. I, 3). According to Dreiser, his father condemned anything pleasurable — candy, parties, good clothes, dancing — all the things Dreiser and his siblings craved.20
Dreiser writes repeatedly of the clashes between his father and the children who were “bursting with animal impulses” and who ‘‘did not, … could not, accept his version of how their lives should be lived” (transcript, ch. IV, 28). When Dreiser and the other children would not listen to him, his father “beat … or abused” them21 and charged that they were all “plunging straight to hell.” John Paul, Sr. had come to the “grim realization” that “his children would not do right. They would not go to church as he wished. They would not obey the laws of sobriety and virtue as he conceived them to be” (typescript, ch. IV, 28). Shame psychologists say that the church is often appropriated in this way and used by control figures within the family system as a rule maker and supporter justifying an impossible set of injunctions.22 Members of such families, unable to measure up, live with the hounds of shame in hot pursuit.23
And Dreiser lived with such hounds. As an adolescent, he was perceived by an unkind contemporary as a “gawk … [who] kept to himself, had no dealings with the other boys; [who] went along the street with his head down as if afraid to look anyone in the eye. We boys thought he was ‘queer,’ and in the main were as ready to avoid him as he was to keep away from all companionship.”24 Describing himself as a “lank, spindly youth,”25 Dreiser was intensely self-conscious about the perceived deficiencies of his body: “Someone had once said for instance that my ears were too large, or my teeth, or my mouth. I had been commented on as ungainly or bashful. Now these burned in my brain” (typescript, Dawn, ch. XLVII, 434; emphasis added).
Inevitably, having incorporated a part of his father and his father’s ideals, Dreiser became a self-conscious and withdrawn adolescent. With his voracious appetite for sex, beautiful girls, and gorgeous clothes, he was adhering to standards he could never hope to achieve. Because feelings do not exist unalloyed (for there is no pure hatred just as there is no pure love), Dreiser
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struggled with both shame and guilt (as he himself described): Guilt about his sexual desires and his hostile feelings toward his father, shame that somehow despite all he could not maintain his father’s impossible standards, standards which he had internalized as his own ego ideal.
No aspect of his character remained unaffected by these feelings of guilt — about his physical appearance, his inadequacies, his appetites: “In all my life, I never knew a man more interested in women from the sex point of view” (Dawn, ch. XII, 122), he observed about his brother, Paul, and that other notable exception, himself. Dreiser believed his appetites were too much, that he was too much: “For I was born to want too much, and to long too much, and to think too keenly or comparatively — and perhaps even too erotically [sic]” (typescript, ch. LVII, 524).
Much of his guilt apparently stemmed from early injunctions and manifested itself most extremely in years of depression and bouts of illness and nightsweats because of his “self-abuse” (typescript, ch. IL, 447), as he referred to his masturbation, which “became a habit which endured until I married, at twenty-eight” (typescript, ch. IL, 441): “I cannot tell you how seriously all this affected me — how horribly it depressed me. For a period of at least four or five years, I was thrown into the most gloomy mental state whenever I thought of my condition’’ (typescript, ch. IL, 448). Dreiser believed that he would be punished for his “self-abuse” by the “los[s]” of his “manhood” (typescript, ch. LVII, 522). For his “self-defilement” and “sin,” he would suffer “hell-fire and the like” (typescript, ch. IL, 450). He was troubled by the phrase, “the wages of sin is death,” and that other, “broad is the way and straight the gate which leadeth to destruction” (typescript, ch. LXXVI, 724). In other words, his fears were couched in the biblical language of his accusing father.
For plainly and inescapably, no matter how much he would “run,” Dreiser was his father’s son, as he explains about his youthful state of mind: “I took my opinions of life and morals from what I heard my father and mother say and what they declared I must believe. Thus, my faith in the Catholic church … sprang largely from my father. What people would think and what was right or wrong morally or socially I took jointly from my mother and father. … Between them, however, they had managed to build up for me a gloomy moral code which must be adhered to, I thought and yet against which I was always sinning” (typescript, ch. XLVIII, 441; emphasis added).