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The Making of Pious Persons within Contemporary American Notable Families: On "Old Money: The Mythology of America's Upper Class" by Nelson W. Aldrich, Jr. Author(s): George E. Marcus Source: Sociological Perspectives, Vol. 32, No. 2 (Summer, 1989), pp. 257-272 Published by: University of California Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1389101 . Accessed: 02/05/2011 02:21
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Sociological Perspectives Copyright? 1989 Pacific Sociological Association

Vol. 32, No. 2, pp. 257-272 ISSN 0731-1214

Review Essay THE MAKING OF PIOUS PERSONS WITHIN AMERICAN CONTEMPORARY NOTABLEFAMILIES On Old Money: The Mythology of America s Upper Class by Nelson W. Aldrich, Jr.
Getty Centerfor the History of Art and the Humanities
GEORGE E. MARCUS, Visiting Scholar

In his remarkable recent work of social observation and criticism, Old Money (1988: Alfred A. Knopf), Nelson Aldrich, Jr. combines telling anecdotes and autobiography to provide one of the most profound meditations on the continuing powerful hold of familial and class identity on upper-class Americans in the late twentieth century, despite the severe erosion of both self-confidence within this class as well as its ability to command respect, and indeed, to shape value in the public cultural space of mass, middle-class society. The core chapters on the institutions and customs of the American upper class are written with the distance and intimacy of a skilled ethnographer, while the two framing autobiographical chapters at the beginning and the end are, for me, themselves ethnographic documents. In this essay, I will be focusing entirely on these framing chapters because they so cogently raise issues that have been puzzling me in my own long-term research on wealthy, often dynastic families (Marcus 1980, 1983, 1985, 1986, 1988). Aldrich is the fourth-generation descendant of Nelson W. Aldrich (1841-1915) who rose from grocery clerk to be a powerful U.S. Senator from Rhode Island and key political ally of nineteenth-century captains of industry. In terms of clanship, the Aldriches might be understood as a collateral lineage of matrifiliated kin within the aura of the Rockefeller dynasty. This link was established by the marriage of Senator Aldrich's daughter, Abby, to John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Aldrich is a keen and critical observer of his Rockefeller cousins, and at moments, with a tone bordering on the contemptuous, he attacks their expressions of ancestor worship:
Direct all correspondence to: George E. Marcus, Department of Anthropology, Rice University, Houston, TX77251.

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Volume Number 1989 PERSPECTIVES SOCIOLOGICAL 32, 2, In 1959 Michael [Rockefeller]wrote to his grandfatherJohn D. Rockefeller,Jr.:"On my twenty-first birthday, my father made known to me the trust which you have established out of consideration for me and my future.For this I am deeply grateful.It is unique and extraordinary that the third generationafterGreat will Grandfather be able to share in the privileges and wonderful opportunities coincident with taking responsibility over a trust which he made possible... I will become that much more a partof a wonderful tradition, one which has already exerted a profoundly broadening and morally inspiring influence upon my upbringing"(10-11).

"This is nauseating," says Aldrich, and he goes on to juxtapose what he considers to be an authentic expression of pietas, that special sense of piety on which dynastic continuity depends and in societies, like that of ancient Greece, which valued it centrally: Hippolokhosit was who fithered me, I am proud to say. He sent me here to Troy commandingme to act always with valor, always to be the most noble, never to shame the line of my progenitors,great men first in Ephyra,then in Lykia. This is the blood and birth I claim. As Aldrich then comments, "This is the real thing, this pietas, and it could be that the Rockefellers, modern men after all, never even approached it in their hearts. All I can say is that looking back along the line of their descent, they seem to have been able to take only what they wanted-a fairy tale that would give them the strength and courage to come into their own kingdoms. Clearly they did not want the truth..." In his own family, the skeptic Aldrich did not need to demystify any weighty imposition of pietas upon him by his elders, father and grandfather, because between them there was a complete silence about the first Nelson W. Aldrich: The past was a strong motif in my upbringing,at least so far as was in chargeof it ... but it was history'saccumumy grandfather lated weight and momentum, its tremendous determinacy,that he liked to reflectupon... My fatherwas more liberalin awarding powers to the present to our capacity to shape the future. But neither man cultivated in himself,or in me, that reverentialsense of ancestralprecedence which passes for pietas many founded in (so to speak) families. The reason had to do with the founder.When I was a boy, very little was said about the first Nelson W. Aldrich. There was a libraries, biography of him in both my father'sand grandfather's and I remember being pleased and somehow flattered by the photograph of him in the frontispiece:how handsome he was, with his strong chin, his fine bold nose, and the sharpintelligence

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in his eyes. But I never felt any desire, nor did I get any encouragement,actually to read about his life. On the contrary,my father assured me that the book was dreadfully dull, a hagiographycommissioned by the family,not worth reading (5). In the remainder of the first autobiographical chapter, titled "My Founding Father," Aldrich presents the results of his own scholarly discovery of his namesake, and it reads like a chapter from one of the prominent muckraking histories of American fortunes by Gustavus Myers or Ferdinand Lundberg, in which the emphasis is on hypocrisy, corruption, and the counterfeit invention of standards of character and nobility among America's patricians and aristocrats from the late nineteenth century to the present. Yet, far from despising himself or his family, Aldrich, in the last chapter, finds himself much to his surprise taken with deep feelings of pietas,in the Greek sense, that he celebrates in ironic conclusion, after so much sharp criticism, as the shining virtue of his class (291-292): "not the heritage of a class," he says, "but the legacy of particular families: families like mine, begun with some great crime or success, and continued on with a conscious sense of custom and obligation. For this no class is needed, really, not a great deal of money. All that's needed is pietas. Yet, how can this be? From where comes this presence of the ancestor at the core of his own self-identity-otherwise that of a modern man of liberal sentiment who mocks other families' pathetic attempts to create a tradition based on imposing the ancestral self and authority upon the living, and who finds such attempts missing in his own family? The reflexive, autobiographical dimension that frames Aldrich's insider's ethnography poses eloquently the puzzle that came to centrally occupy me after several years' ethnographic and historic research on American dynastic families of the same cohort as Aldrich's, those that defined a capitalist upper class from the late nineteenth through the first half of the twentieth century, and then lost significant cultural and moral influence in American society. While Aldrich's personal dissociation from obvious and socially explicit modes of dynastic and class authority is certainly more articulate than most descendants organized around old money, I do not at all find his critical point of view, or his final commitment to pietas,atypical. In the life course of many such descendants, there is (and probably always has been in more repressed forms) doubt and a seeing through dynastic discipline by both men and women (but especially by women). Yet, just as Aldrich, I have found them emotionally held, always in very conflicted ways, to the authority of ancestors, vividly evoked and discussed among themselves as specific personalities. This sort of often reluctant, but powerful attachment among descendants of their supposedly autonomous, malleable individual selves to a descent group cannot be simply explained merely by the collective entanglements of sharing great wealth, as I first thought. Indeed, often the mystified construction of great abstract wealth across generations by experts such as lawyers and advisers of various sorts becomes gradually more autonomous from the control of the family and inherently more dynasty-minded than the descendants who in effect

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became clients, or a wholly owned subsidiary, of the fortune and its administration. So, the formal corporate qualities of their families with which British social anthropologists used to associate, say, African descent groups are constructed for descendants by literally incorporating external agents (not ancestors, but lawyers, bankers, and other advisers), and these do provide a basis of continuity and discipline for persons who as they age as adults become more unruly in their imposed collective family life. But, as Nelson Aldrich explained to us, the Aldriches are not the Rockefellers, for whom really complicated wealth structures, trusts and the like, are very animated and intrusive ancestral dead hands upon the living. And there are many more, merely comfortable old-money families like the Aldriches than families like the Rockefellers. Neither do rituals and self-conscious inventions of family tradition, promoted by a latter-day pater- or materfamilias explain the efficacy of pietas among the skeptical. I agree with Aldrich: these efforts at exercising old style tribal authority over old money are nowadays pathetic, and those that undertake them probably know that they are. So, then, how do the many descendants like Aldrich-perhaps more disaffected than him, but less insightful-comi? to be imbued with the power of pietas? There is of course no simple or univocal answer. First, the identity of oldmoney families, as I have suggested above with regard to the construction of its collective property, is the work of many loci of action and discourse, more or less coordinated, more or less fragmented, from family to family. This decenteredness in the construction of family identity is as true of its myths and traditions as of its organization of wealth (see Marcus 1988). Thus, the answer to "how pietas?" is bound to involve processes of communication external to relations among descendants as well as internal to them. Second, when one does look for the elements that in an explicit sociological way stand for the inculcation of pietas in relations exclusively among descendants, that is, unmediated by any external agent, under variant degrees of family control, such as a lawyer, a servant, a journalist, or a therapist, one finds that such elements are very thinly developed indeed. Of course, there are powerful moments for individuals at funerals, births, and other gatherings, but these are not tied in any effective way to complexes of rituals, shrines, and religious specialists that essentially make the psychodynamics of ancestor worship "work" for individuals in the kinds of societies where anthropologists are more accustomed to studying this phenomenon.1 Neither does it seem that the father or the family leader any longer is as powerful or authoritative as family advisers, and other backstage professionals, who manage generational transitions. I would like to argue that pietasinstead is carried or instilled by a more purely, or rather solely, psychodynamic process in late-twentieth-century American society than it has been in other societies where it has been more a value of public culture, however familial this culture might be. Appropriately for America of the classic self-made man, and of the contemporary self-making (narcissistic?) person, the identity process which carries Old Money's collective identity occurs in the idiom of interpersonal, intimate relations, revealed through autobiographical introspection like Aldrich's. In line with the formal theoretical discourses that contemporary Western societies, including American society, have

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adopted to valorize, in secular rather than religious terms, the making of the self through introspection on face-to-face unmediated personal relation, pietasmight be understood to emerge from contexts that can be defined as therapeutic (see Bellah, et al. 1984), therapeutic in the sense that an individual self is disoriented in relation to some other desired state, and there is an intentional effort by the person afflicted at reconciliation, relief, or cure for the self, whether a literal therapist is present or not. In the following sections, I want to explore two quite different contexts of therapy from which pietas emerges also in very different ways, among descendants of Old Money. First, there is a de facto process of dynastic therapy that affects persons like Aldrich, that is, males in a direct line of succession of males (or in rarer cases, females in a direct line of succession of females in a family that has been dominated by females), but that the therapy, or something equivalent to it, occurs in the element of collective identity that works itself out in the intense relations across generations of sons to fathers and grandfathers. What is involved here is an autotherapeutic process that manipulates memory and manifests itself in a work of introspection and partial autobiography like that of Aldrich. So, again, I will want to return to Aldrich and his account of his moment of pietasto capture how the collective identity of the family is reinstilled in himself through his relationships with his father and grandfather, which he himself seems to conceive in psychotherapeutic terms. He struggles with his class,identity, and his clearsighted critique of it, but comes to terms with it at the end of the book through an act of pietasthat he describes in detail. His is a kind of minimal case of a committed descendant-a man who resists pietaswhen it is phonily externalized as in the case of his Rockefeller cousins, but becomes cured or reconciled to his own Old Money identity through the analysis of his relationship to his father and grandfather. He is forced to undertake this analysis when he assumes roles in the family that he never anticipated-the ancestor, pietas, inhabits him on the death of his father, as we will see. My claim is that pietasis like this for many old money descendants; collective representations are always, and perhaps only, very personal ones. The second context of therapy with which I want to deal briefly in the other section is formally external to family relations and concerns the literal use of psychotherapy, most often psychoanalytic therapy, by troubled adult descendants. Children aside, the statistically most frequent users of psychotherapy among descendants are women. Aldrich speaks little of women, and not at all personally of them. They are generally excluded in male-dominated families from the power of internal dynastic therapy and pietas,but the issue of their articulation to an ancestral past and collective identity is just as salient for them as for men. Psychotherapy is thus a setting that opens and explores vividly the silences that are not narrated in the family itself through dialog or reflection. Nevertheless, psychotherapy is far from a neutral ground outside the family for certain of its members to explore their identities in relation to it. It has its own professional interests combined with what it conceives the interests of the patient to be. It takes little note of the special power of dynastic families and does not reckon with the possibility that its own discourse of therapy and clinical process might

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be encompassed,or effectivelyrecontextualized, parallelanalogous processes by working on the patient or client through enduring family relations. In other words, the therapistis likely to be unaware of the presence of the ancestor in his or her own clinical sessions; that pietasmay be emerging through the so-called talking cure. In therapy, compelling fictions of familiesare created as selves are narrated,but who do these fictions, these remakings of family myth as truthtelling, ultimately serve? The interesting question for me, then, is how psychotherapy by its own unintended consequences affects pietas.By presumably strengthening the ego and autonomy of the persons it treats, does it also contribute to diminishing or increasing the power of pietasas it affects women or marginalsin male-focusedOld Money families? Thereis nothing neat about how dynastic therapy and psychotherapyrelateto each other, but any answer to the question posed about the ironicemergence of fromdescendant to descendant in contemporaryupper-classfamiliesmust pietas deal with the complexity of a decentered phenomenon that has several different settings of fragmentedconstructionin which introspectivediscourse occurs.

AND PIETAS DYNASTICTHERAPY

Aldrich'scommitmentto pietas came in reflectingon the alterationof his relationto his father on the latter's death. Aldrichhad always been socially distant ship fromhis father,while he was alive, and had a warm relationshipwith his father's parents, especially his paternal grandfather,the son of the original Nelson W. Aldrich(the frequentrecurrenceof this salience of the allianceof alternategenerations as a structuralfeaturein many differentkinship systems is, of course, one of the contributionsof long-time anthropologicalresearchin this area:
In a sense, my feelings for my father are composed of piety (or impiety) and nothing else. He entered my conscious life when I was ten-too soon or too late for much of anything else. Suddenly he was there, back fromthe war in the Pacific,his presence emanating such tremendous authority he might have been Odysseus and I a timorous Telemachus. I never got over the shock, and for the rest of his life (he died in 1986)I tried to keep him at a safe distance. This was easy... Moreimportant,for most of the overlap between their lives and mine, my Aldrich grandparents and I carried on a shameless family romance-of the Freudiansort, that is. My grandmotheralways used to say that I was old enough, or she was young enough, for me to have been her fourth and youngest child, and as my actual mother was (by her own cheerful admission) a decidedly unmaternalwoman, I was delighted to share my grandmother'sfantasy and add it to my own... My grandfatherlent himself to the arrangementfor motives of his own. What they were may be imagined from the fact that my grandfatherretiredfromthe practiceof architecture (at the age of forty-fiveor so) about the time my fathertook it up, and fromthe fact that they barelyspoke to one anotherfromthen to the day my grandfather died, forty years later. My own

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motives were, as I've said, fear. I feared my father, my grandfatherwas enraged by him;the situation offereda neat parallelto the alliance of nations, whereby the enemy of my enemy is my friend.Also, my grandfatherand I got on well temperamentally. I loved him and he loved me. He, too, spoiled me rotten (285). Then Aldrich describes what he later recognized as his own moment of pietas: This presented a certainproblemwhen the time came for me, his eldest child and only son, to give a eulogy in his memory at Trinity Church in Boston. The problem was how to honor both the father who terrifiedme and the man whom I admired,without being embarrassingabout the one or distant about the other. In a burst of inspiration, I decided to commend his life as an example to his grandchildren. Only laterdid I think to call this by its right name-pietas. At his funeral,this is what I said... (287). Remarkably, he then goes on to quote his eulogy for his father in its entirety. Aldrich, who idealizes ancient Greek culture at a number of points in his book, including the emphasis on pietasitself, is not being immodest. His words were, for him, sacred words, and their recording, I believe, has for him a marked status quite different from anything else in the manuscript. The rest of the book is heavily critical in tone, but the oration is unabashed evidence of "the real thing" (285): "In the end, the best and brightest beacon of the Old Money class may be the one with which I began, pietas.And for pietas-perhaps for all the virtues and values of the class-no money is r.quired." Wealth may entangle old families together, but it is the unexpected identification of individual descendants with ancestors through transcending and mysterious acts of pietas that defines what soul of virtue (and superiority) there remains in the American upper class. So Aldrich finally comes to deal with his father in death by making an ancestor of him for the succeeding generation. The man he never knew becomes an ancestor conceived in the role of another man that he knew intimately, loved, and perhaps understood his own personality as having an affinity with, or maybe even as being a repetition of. We do not have enough from Aldrich to really comment elaborately on the psychodynamics of the tantalizingly complex move of ancestor creation by which he produced in himself a rapturous sense of pietas that he then externalizes in the final passage of the book as the one redeeming virtue of his class. It is interesting, however, that this process of discovering pietas in oneself is embedded in the sociologically common structural feature of kinship systems that I noted: the alternating alliance of generations, children often finding that their parents are strict while their grandparents are permissive. Further, from my own personal experience in American culture and from my research experience among American dynastic families, I have found that the most intimate and effective control of persons (in many middle-class families, but especially in upper-class ones where the pressure to conform is very strong indeed) is embedded in the pervasive evaluative discussions that parents develop about their children and which are based on how children's personalities

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are like or unlike key members of the parents' or an earlier generation, stories about whom are developed in such casual discussions very much as moral tales. Consequently, the gradual recognition among adult descendants that their own identities are bound up with, and are even repetitions of, specific personalities of the family's past is both quite common and disturbing for them. They sense gradually or suddenly that they are not the autonomous selves they thought they might have been (or are supposed to be in American culture), and this more or less vague awareness sometimes leads to involvement in one or another sort of therapeutic process (within the family and by means of introspective autobiography as in Aldrich's case, or outside it by means of professional psychotherapy). I would suggest that any possibility of ancestor worship in WASP America builds from the unsettling experience of seeing one's identity repeating aspects of a forebear's. In order to tell one's own story, say, as autobiography, one has to tell the story of one's family, or in Aldrich's case, one's class. Pietasmight be understood as the therapeutic resolution of this awareness that one's selfidentity is in fact not autonomous, but that there is virtue in this fact, which goes against the grain of American cultural ideology about the endlessly remakeable self. Of course, descendants would come to the experience of pietasin very different ways given the particular sociological configurations of their families and their positionings within them. For the shaping of pietas in Aldrich's case, what is unspoken or silent in the key relationship with the father (and also in the family's silence about the founding father, Senator Aldrich) seems to be of critical importance, for it falls to Aldrich to break this silence in fashioning his father's ancestral identity for the next generation. This he can do by transferring the warm relationship with his own grandfather to the task of constructing his father as grandfather for the succeeding generation. To break the family's silence about the first Nelson Aldrich by his own candid investigation was to overcome the phonyness of family mythology that Aldrich perceived in his Rockefeller cousins; this facing up to the truth, so to speak, created the necessary alleviation of suspicion about the mystifications of one's own past that might have inhibited any heartfelt experience of pietas. Then, to break the silence between himself and his father, Aldrich found a solution in the funereal duty he faced of reimagining him as an ancestor/grandfather. The man he described in his eulogy was not one that he knew intimately; indeed, he was portrayed as a public man of Greek civic virtue. It was in giving voice to this key silence in his own life for others that Aldrich found the experience of pietas by fully imagining a lineage in which his own identity was finally merged unproblematically with that of his grandfather and father. This achievement is fundamentally a therapeutic one and a dynastic one. The sort of intergenerational process I have been describing is very much like that discussed by Michael Fischer (1986) in his paper, "Ethnicity and the PostModern Arts of Memory," in which persons of distinct ethnic origins who consider themselves fully assimilated to middle-class American life experience a return of ethnic identification that is embedded in the psychodynamics of relationships to parents, among other kin. Fischer surveys the narrative strategies of five different kinds of ethnic autobiographies and addresses the cultural critical

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import of this experience of the return of ethnic identification for the authors of these works. He conceives of some of the operative psychodynamics in terms borrowed from psychoanalysis, such as transference and dream-work. The experience of pietas, of the ancestor and the lineage, among highly reflexive and self-critical descendants, such as Aldrich, seems very much like that of ethnicity for the assimilated. The concepts that Fisher uses signals the autotherapeutic nature of the process leading to pietas or ethnic identification in which the key dynamic is a remembering against the grain of modern self-cognition which excludes the collectivity or casts doubt and suspicion on its public expressions. As ethnicity or pietas,the collectivity is sustained through the intimate reproduction of personalities in the act of autobiography. In this regard, pietasarises from the recognition that one cannot narrate one's own autobiography autonomous from that of others-a father, a grandfather, an ancestral lineage, a collectivity. Dynastic therapy, although its subject and medium is the individual, is therapeutic primarily in the interests of and from the perspective of lineage continuity. There may not be a literalpaterfamilias in charge-as there is not in Aldrich's case-but the therapeutic work he accomplishes is as much for the lineage as for himself. The presumptions of professional psychotherapy as to the referent and prime beneficiary of therapy is quite different, as we will discuss in a moment. The process I have discussed in this section, of course, does not occur in every descendant's life course. In fact, if Aldrich is typical, as I believe him to be, it is a fairly exclusive occurrence-largely among men, and prominently positioned men in an Old Money family. Those excluded, especially women, must go elsewhere to deal therapeutically with the same problematic experience of defining self-identity in the shadow of Old Money, and perhaps to discover pietas for themselves. PSYCHOTHERAPY AND PIETAS

My interest in and awareness of the periodic participation in psychotherapy among descendants of the families which I was studying firsthand remained quite peripheral for a long time, but came into focus for me when I began to develop my understanding of the construction of dynastic family culture, including individual identities within it, as a decentered process, occurring in more or less coordinated ways in social settings both internal and external to those of family relations. As noted, I came to see the practice of professional psychotherapy as a very important external setting influencing the hold of collective identity on certain descendants of Old Money. Unfortunately, my own field materials as well as published work are quite spotty on this subject, but they are suggestive enough to make some tentative points about the psychotherapy of the descendants of Old Money in the broader context of their familial collective representations. What is involved is a basic shift in perspective from the way that psychotherapy has been generally viewed and that psychotherapists of various kinds themselves have viewed their own practice. Baldly stated, the interest of most psychotherapies is to produce strong, autonomous selves in persons, to rescue them from family situations that cripple

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processes of self-identity in which the independence of the self should be held as virtually sacred. As a correlative of this primary concern with the individual self, alternative psychotherapies in theory and practice also construct the family in different ways through dialogic narrative with the patient (some, like family therapy, recognize it as a collective entity or system, more often, others, like psychoanalysis, dissolve the family collectivity into sets of dyadic relationships which are the sites for shaping the psychodynamics of the self of the patient to be cured). None, not even family therapy, which does foreground the collectivity in the stilted language of systems theory, see the interventionist therapeutic process in a reflexive way which would allow for the notion that, although formally external to family relations, what is transacted between therapist and patient might develop its authoritative meanings within the family that it backgrounds or believes it encompasses by its theory, knowledge, and practice. None of the therapies consider that they might in fact be encompassed by the power of de facto therapeutic processes inside the family. Or, at least, that this might be the case for some families-families of Old Money that internally engender in certain of their members the processes that I have termed dynastic therapy. So, even using the source materials available on this subject, I would have to read them for my purposes against their own grain, so to speak. From my field materials, I have developed two kinds of sources, neither of which gave me direct access to therapy sessions or reports on such sessions, which would be unethical in any case. In two Texas families with which I worked, psychotherapy has been a part of the autobiographies of four descendants with whom I talked, and in the course of conversations with them, I learned about their experience of therapy. I also interviewed two local psychotherapists (not the ones consulted by the descendants with whom I talked) known for their work with wealthy patients or clients. They discussed with me in general terms and through illustrative, but anonymous citation of cases their practice as clinicians. To my knowledge, published material is very scarce on this topic. There is Robert Coles' well-known volume PrivilegedOnes: The Well Off and the Rich in America,Vol. 5 of Childrenin Crisis (1977), and a small professional literature of a more technical nature (e.g., Stone 1972, 1979; Stone & Kestenbaum 1975; and Wixen 1973). There are a few personal accounts in which psychotherapy figures, like Anne Bernays' GrowingUp Rich (1975) and the articles of Sallie Bingham (e.g., 1986), based on which a book is soon to appear. Finally, I have found very useful the Ph.D. dissertation in sociology (1987) by Joanie Bronfman (of the Bronfman family, which in American terms has achieved the status of Old Money, albeit Jewish Old Money). She includes a very interesting chapter reporting her interviews on the subject of therapy. However, most of the classic cases by the pioneer psychoanalysts (starting perhaps even with Freud's Wolf Man) down to contemporary cases, treated by one or another variety of psychoanalytic therapy, could be read as a relevant, if not the central, literature on the involvement of the rich (including the dynastic rich) in psychotherapy, because given its expense and high culture pretensions, psychoanalysis has always been practiced almost exclusively within the very

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exclusive bounds of the upper, and upper-middle classes in the United States and Europe. All four of the descendants in my field materials who frequented psychotherapists used psychoanalytically trained psychiatrists. This also seemed to be the case with most of the persons that Bronfman interviewed about therapy. Aside from their own frequent personal class pretensions and fantasies in the direction of the worlds from which their Old Money patients come, psychoanalysts have tended to be unreflective, if not oblivious to the fact that ancestors, or at least that pressures of pietason their patients, might be invading the clinical setting. Bronfman reports the following rather horrifying responses from wealthy persons (mostly women) who had been in therapy: I was in therapy for a while and one of the things that my therapist could never understand was that I felt badly about the fact that we had money. The therapistcouldn't understand.That was not within his realmof understanding. The other therapists would not know how to deal with [my wealth]... They always felt like it was a world they didn't know anything about and they were embarrassedabout the fact that they didn't know anything about it. They didn't want to say the wrong thing, and it was very difficultfor them to know how to be in there with me and help me. One of them said to me at one point, "It's funny. You're not so fucking special."I said, "I am. You'rewrong and you don't want to deal with it. You don't know how to deal with my specialness."He just sat there and looked at me. He didn't expect that. He thought I was going to be somehow helped by realizing that I wasn't special. I said, "That'snot what I need. What I'm trying to do is take my specialness by the horns and control it and not have it control me and not feel driven by it but use it in the best way. I'mnot going to do that by denying it." So there is a sense where I have felt that I have often been my own best therapist. That'sone of the realproblemswith wealthy people is that therapists love to have them as clients because they can pay. Thereare always situationalfactorstrying to keep them dependent on the therapist. It was one of the worst experiencesof my life because at the end I realized or it seemed clearerand clearerto me that he was very interested in my money. There was a lot of personal attention to me that seemed to be to be a thin cover and I held back fromthe relationship in terms of money and he pulled back in terms of affection.Eventuallyhe killed himself afterhaving told me that if I would leave him he would kill himself.So it was pretty awful. It was cruel because my issues with men were so difficult(331-334). Theoretically and clinically, psychoanalytic therapy takes little or no note of significant features that pertain to the special (read, cultural, collective, or social

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class) family circumstances of patients. Instead, psychoanalytic therapists routinely offer relationship-specific, generalized medical diagnoses, which while they may pertain to and be valid for socially particular kinds of families, they formally deny this broader context in their rhetoric and conceptual framework (this is not the case for therapists who have specifically written on wealthy patients, but they are the exception). There are two kinds of therapy that do foreground the collective family situation and culture. One is family therapy that I mentioned, but its patients, or clients, tend to be middle, lower-middle, or lower class, and are often referred to such therapists by public agencies. Family therapy, which works by literally encompassing and orchestrating family groups in its sessions, would unlikely find cooperative subjects among the Old Money wealthy, because this would be a direct assault on the pattern of silences and denials that make their own internal and powerful dynastic therapies work. Besides, family therapy, in theory, has invested in a very scientistic conceptual scheme for what it performs clinicallyrooted in the metaphors of systems theory, feedback, and so forth. However well and specifically a particular clinician in fact listens to his or her clients, the theory, at least, does not promote the sort of respect for clients' language that would allow for the discovery of pietas within the therapy session, even if Old Money families chose to avail themselves of this kind of therapy. The other kind of therapy that foregrounds the family collectively is the eclectic and loosely structured service of the family business consultant (a growing specialty service in the United States during the 1980s). Such consultants are used by families whose wealth varies widely in magnitude and age. However, Old Money families tend to use such services less because often they have already domesticated a line of internal advisers who serve the same function as consultants, but who are more within the family's aura, and because such families, while they indeed have painful problems of generational transition, are usually not directly involved any longer in the businesses that founded their fortunes. In any case, even though they are most effective as pragmatic thinkers for their client families precisely because they are detached outsiders, such consultants also theorize their work through the use of psychotherapeutic concepts and rhetoric, modified for their purposes, and thus tend to miss the ironic Durkheimian dimensions (collective representations) embedded in the psychodynamics of clients with which they conceive themselves to be dealing. As I have noted, I think it can be well established that most voluntary, nonclinical adult Old Money patients of psychotherapy have been women. Three of the four cases in my field materials were women. The professional literature that I mentioned recounts almost exclusively the cases of women or family problems that deal with the clinically diagnosed cases of mental illness among women as mothers and wives. Any suggestions or reasons for this predominance of women among Old Money descendants in therapy must remain highly speculative, as must an understanding of their experience of therapy, pending further study. It will be recalled that the tentative suggestion I offered about why it is mostly women who appear in therapy, when Old Money descendants do avail themselves of it, relates to their exclusion from the process of dynastic therapy that

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goes on in the variably tense and affectionate relationships among prominent males cross-generationally. This accords with the existing literature that emphasizes the strong lines of gender separation and exclusion in wealthy families and the general dependency that men assume and encourage in women in matters related to the management of ancestral wealth. This is the barrier that must be breached, if they have the will to do so, by women when they become widows, or when as sisters and daughters they come to insist on independence and respect as descendants. The most interesting broader context for a case of psychotherapy, in my view, is precisely when particular women in Old Money families are asserting independence, attempting to break through the mystications of family rules, silences, and the construction of abstract ancestral wealth-in other words, when they have entered a cognitive and emotional state of suspicion and critical insight analogous to that of males like Nelson Aldrich, and feel impelled to act on it. Rather than coming to pietas in such a state, as did Aldrich, by finding themselves in the particular troubling bind, characteristic of the workings of dynastic therapy, of having to deliver funeral orations, they have to more thoroughly redefine themselves. And through a different route that promises a desired autonomous selfdefinition separate from the family (which is what psychotherapy at least offers hope of), they might happen upon the experience of pietasthat Aldrich did. Two of my psychotherapy cases from fieldwork did indeed concern women who were in an act of adult rebellion against their families,2 and in which their therapy could easily be understood to figure, at least from the accounts these women gave me. From these accounts, also, it seemed clear to me, and to them, that their therapists were not at all aware of this broader context, or acknowledged only a vague awareness of it, or had no interest in focusing on it directly; rather, they seemed to be after a "deep structure" exclusive to the self that was insensitive to the specifics of family history. Precisely and specifically how psychotherapy shaped the experience of the women in my cases is much more difficult to discuss. If one takes as a suggestion Michael Fischer's conceptualization borrowed from psychoanalytic therapy itself of ethnic or dynastic identity processes operating through the equivalent of transference in key cross-generational family relationships, then it might be that the transference in the psychotherapeutic process is also the moment or "space" in therapy when work both crucial for the self and the dynasty might be accomplished for its female "Old Money" patients. The following conclusion from the Stone and Kestenbaum (1975) study is interesting in this regard: One recurring feature in the psychotherapy of our patients (noted in two-thirds of the cases) was the greater ease with which transferenceissues stemming from the father-relationship could be broached and resolved, in comparison to issues stemming from the mother relationship... (99). Maternal deprivation seems to be the great therapeutic problem for wealthy female patients to face in order to improve self-esteem and achieve a more

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autonomous identity (such deprivation is very common in wealthy families given the pattern of women being more interested in mothering their husbands than their children, and given the ability to afford extensive mother surrogates). The problem with fathers (and ancestors) while present seems more easily resolved, and in relation to the noted difficulty with mother-related transference, the easier resolution of father-related issues is likely to support the reservoir of feeling that might lead to female pietas. Although I am unable to sort out these complex issues surrounding transference in the two cases of rebellious women I noted, I would only say that the therapeutic process of transference can work in two ways at the same time. It can bring about a sense of personal liberation, while at the same time it can increase attachment, and make more powerful an already powerful family collectivity. The distant father and ancestral legacy is reenacted in the transference. In this sense, it is not as important that a patient derive from therapy positive, negative, or even ambivalent feelings about the family, as that such feelings themselves remain vital and vivid. Whatever the outcome of therapy regarding the curing of the self, its main object, this outcome is unlikely to be at the expense of the interests that one might attribute to continuing dynastic power over descendants. Such a hold does not depend on positive feelings toward the family, just on very strong feelings about the family-period-that continue to intrude in the self-definition of descendants and perhaps become more clarified through therapy. In this usually, unintended way, psychotherapy builds dynastic identity in those excluded from the internal process of dynastic therapy that I discussed. Finally, therapy is only a site at which the potential for the feeling of pietasin women, similar to that described by Aldrich in himself, is engendered; it rarely "happens" there. Rather, it is likely to arise from a subsequent family event like a funeral or the reconciliation after a bitter quarrel (as it occurred in one of the rebellious women, to whom I alluded previously, after a long period of litigation, during which she was in therapy for over a year). I would argue, however, that for women it is not the experience of internal family relations during such tense periods that leads to the transcending commitment of pietas, despite suspicion and ambivalence toward the family, but rather the experience of the work done externally in therapeutic settings.

CONCLUDING NOTE
Like all ethnography, no matter how broad or holistic its rhetoric, Aldrich's remains partial, limited (and enriched) by authorial point of view and biography. Writing neither as a professional sociologist, as does E. Digby Baltzell, whom he criticizes, nor as a muckraking social critic, as does, say, Ferdinand Lundberg, whom he far surpasses in depth of insight, Aldrich "places himself" in his work through the autobiographical chapters on which I have focused. In these, as much is hidden (especially the pain of family relations) as revealed. But in the narrow space between the said and the unsaid at the margins of this work are issues that leave the professional social scientist something left to puzzle and ponder in the wake of the bravura performance of this aristocratic "amateur."

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NOTES
1. One thinks here perhaps of the classic work of Meyer Fortes (1961) on ancestorfocused descent groups in Africa, especially because he too, like Aldrich, made use of the Greek idea of pietas in his Henry Myers Lecture of 1960, "Pietas in Ancestor Worship," to explore the complex psychology of descendants mainly among the Tallensi, but also comparatively. Having trained originally in psychology, Fortes was extremely sensitive to the psychodynamic and conflicted dimension of pietas, especially in the relationship of father to first-born son, and perhaps understood it to be an expression of the same kind of de facto therapeutic process to which I will be alluding in "Old Money" American families, but because he was indeed dealing with a society where much of this was externalized in institutions, rituals, and wellarticulated social norms, his analysis of the psychodynamics or therapeutics of pietas is masked or submerged in primarily sociological terms, which was the idiom of Radcliffe-Brown style analysis, in any case. This masking, I believe, allowed for the attribution of generalized social psychological account of pietas which was not sensitive enough to catch Tale ethnopsychology, something that the current interest among social and cultural anthropologists in interpretive approaches and the culturally specific construction of personhood would probably remedy. As such, Fortes' generalized (but I would thus suspect subtly ethnocentric) account of pietas among the Tallensi is a lot like the pietas that Aldrich discovers in himself in relation to his father and grandfather, but without the external institutional apparatus. There is nothing puzzling in that there should be pietas among the Tallensi; there is indeed something puzzling for Aldrich that it should invade his own sense of self. 2. This brings to mind the recent very public exposure of the breakup of the Bingham dynasty of Louisville and Sallie

Bingham's part in this drama. Both in the Bingham case and in that of a family I studied firsthand, it was the rebellion of women, who also had a history of therapy, that precipitated the end of dynastic structures that had been held together by male authority.

REFERENCES
Bellah, Robert, et al. 1984. Habitsof theHeart. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bernays, Anne. 1975. Growing Up Rich. Boston: Little, Brown. Bingham, Sallie. 1986. "The Truth About Growing Up Rich." Ms. 14 (12): 48-50, 82-83. Bronfman, Joanie. 1987. "The Experience of Inherited Wealth:A Social-Psychological Study." Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Sociology, Brandeis University. Ones:TheWellColes, Robert. 1977.Privileged and theRich in America. Vol. V of ChilOff drenin Crisis.Boston: Little, Brown. Fischer, Michael M.J. 1986. "Ethnicity and the Post-Moder Arts of Memory." In WritingCulture:The Poeticsand Politicsof Ethnography,edited by James Clifford and George E. Marcus. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fortes, Meyer. 1961. "Pietas in Ancestor Worship, the Henry Myers Lecture 1960." The Journal of the Royal AnthroInstitute Great Britain Ireland and pological of 91 (2): 166-191. Marcus, George E. 1980. "Law in the Development of Dynastic Families Among American Business Elites: The Domestication of Capital and Capitalization of Family." Law & Society Review 14 (4): 859-903. _.1983. "The Fiduciary Role in American Family Dynasties and Their Institutional Legacy: From the Law of Trusts to Trust in the Establishment." In Elites: Issues, edited by G.E. MarEthnographic cus. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. _. 1985. "Spending: The Hunts, Silver, and

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Dynastic Families in America." The Journalof Sociology26: 224-259. European _. 1986. "Generation-Skipping Trusts and Problems of Authority: Parent-Child Relations in the Dissolution of American Families of Dynastic Wealth. In The Frailtyof Authority,PoliticalAnthropology, Vol. V, edited by Myron J.Aronoff. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books. _. 1988."The Constructive Uses of Deconstruction in the Ethnographic Study of Notable American Families." Anthro61 pologicalQuarterly (1): 3-16. Stone, Michael, H. 1972. "Treating the

Wealthy and Their Children." International Journal of Child Psychotherapy1: 15-46. . 1979. "Upbringing in the Super-Rich." in In ModernPerspectives Psychiatry,edited by J.G. Howells. New York: Brunner/Mazel. Stone, Michael H., & Clarice J. Kestenbaum. 1975. "Maternal Deprivation in Children of the Wealthy: A Paradox in Socioeconomic vs. Psychological Class." 2: Historyof ChildhoodQuarterly 70-106. Wixen, Burton N. 1973. Childrenof theRich. New York: Crown Publishers.