Old Money Dynasties 2

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Pacific Sociological Association

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

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Sociological Perspectives Vol. 32, No. 2, pp. 257-272Copyright? 1989 PacificSociological Association ISSN0731-1214

Review EssayTHEMAKING OFPIOUS PERSONSWITHINCONTEMPORARYAMERICANNOTABLEFAMILIESOn OldMoney:TheMythology ofAmerica s UpperClassby Nelson W. Aldrich,Jr.GEORGE E. MARCUS, Visiting ScholarGettyCenter or theHistoryof Art and the Humanities

In his remarkable recent work of social observation and criticism, Old Money(1988:Alfred A. Knopf), Nelson Aldrich, Jr.combines telling anecdotes and auto-biography to provide one of the most profound meditations on the continuingpowerful hold of familial and class identity on upper-class Americans in the latetwentieth century, despite the severe erosion of both self-confidence within thisclass as well as its ability to command respect, and indeed, to shape value in thepublic cultural space of mass, middle-class society. The core chapters on theinstitutions and customs of the American upper class are written with the dis-tance and intimacy of a skilled ethnographer, while the two framing autobio-graphical chapters at the beginning and the end are, for me, themselves ethno-graphic documents. In this essay, I will be focusing entirely on these framingchapters because they so cogently raise issues that have been puzzling me in myown 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 andkey political ally of nineteenth-century captains of industry. In terms of clanship,the Aldriches might be understood as a collateral lineage of matrifiliated kinwithin the aura of the Rockefeller dynasty. This link was established by themarriage of Senator Aldrich's daughter, Abby, to John D. Rockefeller, Jr.Aldrich is a keen and critical observer of his Rockefeller cousins, and atmoments, with a tone bordering on the contemptuous, he attacks their expres-sions of ancestor worship:Direct all correspondence to: George E. Marcus,Department of Anthropology,Rice University, Houston,TX77251.


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SOCIOLOGICALERSPECTIVESolume 2,Number ,1989In 1959 Michael [Rockefeller]wrote to his grandfatherJohn D.Rockefeller,Jr.:"On my twenty-first birthday,my fathermadeknown to me the trust which you have established out of con-sideration for me and my future.For this I am deeply grateful.Itis uniqueand extraordinaryhat the thirdgenerationafter GreatGrandfatherwill be able to sharein the privilegesand wonderfulopportunitiescoincident with taking responsibilityover a trustwhichhe madepossible... I will become that much morea partofa wonderful tradition, one which has already exerted a pro-foundly broadening and morally inspiring influence upon myupbringing" 10-11).

"This is nauseating," says Aldrich, and he goes on to juxtapose what he considersto be an authentic expression of pietas, that special sense of piety on whichdynastic continuity depends and in societies, like that of ancient Greece, whichvalued it centrally:

Hippolokhosit was who fithered me,I am proudto say. He sent me here to Troycommandingme to act always with valor,always to be the most noble,never to shamethe line of my progenitors,greatmenfirst in Ephyra, hen 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 thatthe 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 havebeen able to take only what they wanted-a fairy tale that would give them thestrength and courage to come into their own kingdoms. Clearly they did notwant the truth..."

In his own family, the skeptic Aldrich did not need to demystify any weightyimposition of pietas upon him by his elders, father and grandfather, becausebetween them there was a complete silence about the first Nelson W. Aldrich:The past was a strong motif in my upbringing,at least so farasmy grandfatherwas in chargeof it ... but it was history'saccumu-lated weight and momentum,its tremendousdeterminacy, hathe likedto reflectupon... Myfatherwas more liberal n awardingpowers to the present to our capacity to shape the future. Butneither mancultivated in himself,or in me,that reverential enseof ancestralprecedencewhich passes forpietasn many founded(so to speak)families.The reason had to do with the founder.When Iwas a boy, verylittle was said about the first Nelson W. Aldrich. There was abiographyof him in both my father'sand grandfather'sibraries,and I rememberbeing pleased and somehow flatteredby thephotographof him in the frontispiece:how handsome he was,with his strongchin,his fine boldnose,and the sharp ntelligence

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in his eyes. But I never felt any desire, nor did I get any en-couragement,actuallyto read about his life. On the contrary,myfather assured me that the book was dreadfully dull, ahagiographycommissionedby the family,not worth reading(5).

In the remainder of the first autobiographical chapter, titled "My FoundingFather," Aldrich presents the results of his own scholarly discovery of his name-sake, and it reads like a chapter from one of the prominent muckraking historiesof American fortunes by Gustavus Myers or Ferdinand Lundberg, in which theemphasis is on hypocrisy, corruption, and the counterfeit invention of standardsof character and nobility among America's patricians and aristocrats from the latenineteenth 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 deepfeelings of pietas, n the Greek sense, that he celebrates in ironic conclusion, afterso much sharp criticism, as the shining virtue of his class (291-292): "not theheritage of a class," he says, "but the legacy of particular families: families likemine, begun with some great crime or success, and continued on with a con-scious sense of custom and obligation. For this no class is needed, really, not agreat deal of money. All that's needed is pietas.Yet, how can this be? From where comes this presence of the ancestor at thecore of his own self-identity-otherwise that of a modern man of liberal senti-ment who mocks other families' pathetic attempts to create a tradition based onimposing the ancestral self and authority upon the living, and who finds suchattempts missing in his own family?The reflexive, autobiographical dimension that frames Aldrich's insider's eth-nography poses eloquently the puzzle that came to centrally occupy me afterseveral years' ethnographic and historic research on American dynastic familiesof the same cohort as Aldrich's, those that defined a capitalist upper class fromthe late nineteenth through the first half of the twentieth century, and then lostsignificant cultural and moral influence in American society. While Aldrich'spersonal dissociation from obvious and socially explicit modes of dynastic andclass authority is certainly more articulate than most descendants organizedaround old money, I do not at all find his critical point of view, or his finalcommitment to pietas,atypical. In the life course of many such descendants, thereis (and probably always has been in more repressed forms) doubt and a seeingthrough dynastic discipline by both men and women (but especially by women).Yet, just as Aldrich, I have found them emotionally held, always in very con-flicted ways, to the authority of ancestors, vividly evoked and discussed amongthemselves as specific personalities.This sort of often reluctant, but powerful attachment among descendants oftheir supposedly autonomous, malleable individual selves to a descent groupcannot be simply explained merely by the collective entanglements of sharinggreat wealth, as I first thought. Indeed, often the mystified construction of greatabstract wealth across generations by experts such as lawyers and advisers ofvarious sorts becomes gradually more autonomous from the control of the familyand 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 administra-tion. So, the formal corporate qualities of their families with which British socialanthropologists used to associate, say, African descent groups are constructed fordescendants by literally incorporating external agents (not ancestors, butlawyers, bankers, and other advisers), and these do provide a basis of continuityand discipline for persons who as they age as adults become more unruly in theirimposed collective family life. But, as Nelson Aldrich explained to us, theAldriches are not the Rockefellers, for whom really complicated wealth struc-tures, trusts and the like, are very animated and intrusive ancestral dead handsupon the living. And there are many more, merely comfortable old-money fami-lies like the Aldriches than families like the Rockefellers. Neither do rituals andself-conscious inventions of family tradition, promoted by a latter-day pater- ormaterfamilias explain the efficacy of pietas among the skeptical. I agree withAldrich: these efforts at exercising old style tribal authority over old money arenowadays pathetic, and those that undertake them probably know that they are.So, then, how do the many descendants like Aldrich-perhaps more disaffectedthan 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 old-money families, as I have suggested above with regard to the construction of itscollective property, is the work of many loci of action and discourse, more or lesscoordinated, more or less fragmented, from family to family. This decenterednessin the construction of family identity is as true of its myths and traditions as of itsorganization of wealth (see Marcus 1988). Thus, the answer to "how pietas?"isbound to involve processes of communication external to relations amongdescendants as well as internal to them.

Second, when one does look for the elements that in an explicit sociologicalway stand for the inculcation of pietasin relations exclusively among descen-dants, that is, unmediated by any external agent, under variant degrees of familycontrol, such as a lawyer, a servant, a journalist, or a therapist, one finds that suchelements are very thinly developed indeed. Of course, there are powerfulmoments for individuals at funerals, births, and other gatherings, but these arenot tied in any effective way to complexes of rituals, shrines, and religious spe-cialists that essentially make the psychodynamics of ancestor worship "work" forindividuals in the kinds of societies where anthropologists are more accustomedto studying this phenomenon.1 Neither does it seem that the father or the familyleader any longer is as powerful or authoritative as family advisers, and otherbackstage professionals, who manage generational transitions.I would like to argue that pietas nstead is carried or instilled by a more purely,or rather solely, psychodynamic process in late-twentieth-century Americansociety than it has been in other societies where it has been more a value ofpublic culture, however familial this culture might be. Appropriately for Americaof the classic self-made man, and of the contemporary self-making (narcissistic?)person, the identity process which carries Old Money's collective identity occursin the idiom of interpersonal, intimate relations, revealed through autobio-graphical introspection like Aldrich's. In line with the formal theoretical dis-courses 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 selfthrough introspection on face-to-face unmediated personal relation, pietas mightbe understood to emerge from contexts that can be defined as therapeutic (seeBellah, et al. 1984), therapeutic in the sense that an individual self is disoriented inrelation to some other desired state, and there is an intentional effort by theperson afflicted at reconciliation, relief, or cure for the self, whether a literaltherapist is present or not.In the following sections, I want to explore two quite different contexts oftherapy from which pietasemerges also in very different ways, among descen-dants of Old Money. First, there is a de facto process of dynastic therapy thataffects persons like Aldrich, that is, males in a direct line of succession of males (orin rarercases, females in a direct line of succession of females in a family that hasbeen 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 intenserelations across generations of sons to fathers and grandfathers. What is involvedhere is an autotherapeutic process that manipulates memory and manifests itselfin 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 pietastocapture how the collective identity of the family is reinstilled in himself throughhis relationships with his father and grandfather, which he himself seems toconceive in psychotherapeutic terms. He struggles with his class,identity, and hisclearsighted critique of it, but comes to terms with it at the end of the bookthrough an act of pietas hat he describes in detail. His is a kind of minimal case ofa committed descendant-a man who resists pietaswhen it is phonily external-ized as in the case of his Rockefeller cousins, but becomes cured or reconciled tohis own Old Money identity through the analysis of his relationship to his fatherand grandfather. He is forced to undertake this analysis when he assumes roles inthe family that he never anticipated-the ancestor, pietas,inhabits him on thedeath of his father, as we will see. My claim is that pietas s like this for many oldmoney 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 othersection is formally external to family relations and concerns the literal use ofpsychotherapy, most often psychoanalytic therapy, by troubled adult descen-dants. Children aside, the statistically most frequent users of psychotherapyamong descendants are women. Aldrich speaks little of women, and not at allpersonally of them. They are generally excluded in male-dominated families fromthe power of internal dynastic therapy and pietas,but the issue of their articula-tion to an ancestral past and collective identity is just as salient for them as formen. Psychotherapy is thus a setting that opens and explores vividly the silencesthat are not narrated in the family itself through dialog or reflection. Neverthe-less, psychotherapy is far from a neutral ground outside the family for certain ofits members to explore their identities in relation to it. It has its own professionalinterests combined with what it conceives the interests of the patient to be. Ittakes little note of the special power of dynastic families and does not reckonwith the possibility that its own discourse of therapy and clinical process might

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SOCIOLOGICALERSPECTIVESolume 2,Number ,1989be encompassed,or effectivelyrecontextualized,by parallelanalogous processesworking on the patient or client through enduring family relations. In otherwords, the therapist s likelyto be unawareof the presenceof the ancestor in hisor her own clinicalsessions; that pietasmay be emerging through the so-calledtalkingcure.In therapy,compellingfictions of familiesare created as selves arenarrated,but who do these fictions,these remakingsof family myth as truth-telling,ultimatelyserve? The interesting question forme, then, is how psycho-therapy by its own unintended consequences affects pietas.By presumablystrengthening the ego and autonomy of the persons it treats,does it also con-tribute to diminishingor increasingthe power of pietasas it affects women ormarginals n male-focusedOldMoney families?There s nothingneat abouthow dynastic therapyandpsychotherapyrelatetoeach other,but any answer to the question posed about the ironicemergenceofpietasrom descendant to descendant in contemporaryupper-classfamiliesmustdeal with the complexityof a decenteredphenomenonthat has several differentsettings of fragmentedconstruction n which introspectivediscourseoccurs.

DYNASTICTHERAPYAND PIETASAldrich'scommitment to pietas amein reflectingon the alterationof his relation-ship to his father on the latter's death.Aldrichhad always been sociallydistantfromhis father,while he was alive,and had a warmrelationshipwith his father'sparents, especially his paternal grandfather, he son of the originalNelson W.Aldrich(the frequentrecurrenceof this salience of the allianceof alternategener-ations as a structural eature n many differentkinship systems is, of course,oneof the contributionsof long-timeanthropological esearch n this area:

In a sense, my feelings for my father are composed of piety (orimpiety) and nothing else. He entered my conscious life when Iwas ten-too soon or too late for much of anything else. Sud-denly he was there,backfromthe warin the Pacific,his presenceemanating such tremendous authority he might have beenOdysseus and I a timorous Telemachus.I never got over theshock,and for the rest of his life (he died in 1986)I tried to keephim at a safe distance.Thiswas easy... More mportant, ormostof the overlap between their lives and mine, my Aldrichgrand-parents and I carried on a shameless family romance-of theFreudiansort,that is. My grandmotheralways used to say that Iwas old enough, or she was young enough, forme to have beenher fourth and youngest child,and as my actual mother was (byher own cheerfuladmission)a decidedly unmaternalwoman, Iwas delighted to share my grandmother's antasyand add it tomy own... My grandfather ent himself to the arrangement ormotives of his own. Whatthey were may be imaginedfrom thefact that my grandfather etiredfrom the practiceof architecture(atthe age of forty-fiveor so) about the time my fathertook it up,and fromthe fact thatthey barelyspoketo one anotherfromthento 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 grand-fatherwas enragedby him;the situation offereda neatparallel othe alliance of nations, whereby the enemy of my enemy is myfriend.Also,my grandfatherand Igot on well temperamentally.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:Thispresenteda certainproblemwhen the time cameforme,hiseldest child and only son, to give a eulogy in his memory atTrinityChurchin Boston. The problemwas how to honor boththe father who terrifiedme and the man whom I admired,with-out being embarrassingabout the one or distant about the other.In a burst of inspiration,I decided to commend his life as anexampleto his grandchildren.Only later did Ithink to callthis byits right name-pietas. At his funeral, his 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 pietas tself, is not being immodest. His words were, forhim, sacred words, and their recording, I believe, has for him a marked statusquite different from anything else in the manuscript. The rest of the book isheavily 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 bethe one with which I began, pietas.And for pietas-perhaps for all the virtues andvalues of the class-no money is r.quired." Wealth may entangle old familiestogether, but it is the unexpected identification of individual descendants withancestors through transcending and mysterious acts of pietasthat defines whatsoul 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 ancestorof him for the succeeding generation. The man he never knew becomes anancestor conceived in the role of another man that he knew intimately, loved,and perhaps understood his own personality as having an affinity with, or maybeeven as being a repetition of. We do not have enough from Aldrich to reallycomment elaborately on the psychodynamics of the tantalizingly complex moveof ancestor creation by which he produced in himself a rapturous sense of pietasthat he then externalizes in the final passage of the book as the one redeemingvirtue of his class. It is interesting, however, that this process of discovering pietasin oneself is embedded in the sociologically common structural feature of kinshipsystems that I noted: the alternating alliance of generations, children often find-ing that their parents are strict while their grandparents are permissive.Further, from my own personal experience in American culture and from myresearch experience among American dynastic families, I have found that themost intimate and effective control of persons (in many middle-class families, butespecially in upper-class ones where the pressure to conform is very strongindeed) is embedded in the pervasive evaluative discussions that parentsdevelop 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, storiesabout whom are developed in such casual discussions very much as moral tales.Consequently, the gradual recognition among adult descendants that their ownidentities are bound up with, and are even repetitions of, specific personalities ofthe family's past is both quite common and disturbing for them. They sensegradually or suddenly that they are not the autonomous selves they thoughtthey might have been (or are supposed to be in American culture), and this moreor less vague awareness sometimes leads to involvement in one or another sort oftherapeutic process (within the family and by means of introspective auto-biography as in Aldrich's case, or outside it by means of professional psycho-therapy). I would suggest that any possibility of ancestor worship in WASPAmerica builds from the unsettling experience of seeing one's identity repeatingaspects of a forebear's. In order to tell one's own story, say, as autobiography, onehas to tell the story of one's family, or in Aldrich's case, one's class. Pietasmight beunderstood as the therapeutic resolution of this awareness that one's self-identity is in fact not autonomous, but that there is virtue in this fact, which goesagainst the grain of American cultural ideology about the endlessly remakeableself.

Of course, descendants would come to the experience of pietas n very differentways given the particular sociological configurations of their families and theirpositionings within them. For the shaping of pietas in Aldrich's case, what isunspoken or silent in the key relationship with the father (and also in the family'ssilence about the founding father, Senator Aldrich) seems to be of critical impor-tance, for it falls to Aldrich to break this silence in fashioning his father's ancestralidentity for the next generation. This he can do by transferring the warm rela-tionship with his own grandfather to the task of constructing his father as grand-father for the succeeding generation. To break the family's silence about the firstNelson Aldrich by his own candid investigation was to overcome the phonynessof family mythology that Aldrich perceived in his Rockefeller cousins; this facingup to the truth, so to speak, created the necessary alleviation of suspicion aboutthe mystifications of one's own past that might have inhibited any heartfeltexperience 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 anancestor/grandfather. The man he described in his eulogy was not one that heknew 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 Aldrichfound the experience of pietas by fully imagining a lineage in which his ownidentity was finally merged unproblematically with that of his grandfather andfather. This achievement is fundamentally a therapeutic one and a dynastic one.The sort of intergenerational process I have been describing is very much likethat discussed by Michael Fischer (1986) in his paper, "Ethnicity and the Post-Modern Arts of Memory," in which persons of distinct ethnic origins who con-sider themselves fully assimilated to middle-class American life experience areturn of ethnic identification that is embedded in the psychodynamics of rela-tionships to parents, among other kin. Fischer surveys the narrative strategies offive 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 ofthese works. He conceives of some of the operative psychodynamics in termsborrowed from psychoanalysis, such as transference and dream-work. The expe-rience of pietas, of the ancestor and the lineage, among highly reflexive andself-critical descendants, such as Aldrich, seems very much like that of ethnicityfor the assimilated. The concepts that Fisher uses signals the autotherapeuticnature of the process leading to pietasor ethnic identification in which the keydynamic is a remembering against the grain of modern self-cognition whichexcludes the collectivity or casts doubt and suspicion on its public expressions.As ethnicity or pietas, he collectivity is sustained through the intimate reproduc-tion of personalities in the act of autobiography. In this regard, pietasarises fromthe recognition that one cannot narrate one's own autobiography autonomousfrom that of others-a father, a grandfather, an ancestral lineage, a collectivity.Dynastic therapy, although its subject and medium is the individual, is thera-peutic 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'scase-but the therapeutic work he accomplishes is as much for the lineage as forhimself. The presumptions of professional psychotherapy as to the referent andprime 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 everydescendant's life course. In fact, if Aldrich is typical, as I believe him to be, it is afairly exclusive occurrence-largely among men, and prominently positionedmen in an Old Money family. Those excluded, especially women, must go else-where to deal therapeutically with the same problematic experience of definingself-identity in the shadow of Old Money, and perhaps to discover pietas forthemselves.

PSYCHOTHERAPY AND PIETASMy interest in and awareness of the periodic participation in psychotherapyamong descendants of the families which I was studying firsthand remainedquite peripheral for a long time, but came into focus for me when I began todevelop my understanding of the construction of dynastic family culture, includ-ing individual identities within it, as a decentered process, occurring in more orless coordinated ways in social settings both internal and external to those offamily relations. As noted, I came to see the practice of professional psycho-therapy as a very important external setting influencing the hold of collectiveidentity on certain descendants of Old Money.Unfortunately, my own field materials as well as published work are quitespotty on this subject, but they are suggestive enough to make some tentativepoints about the psychotherapy of the descendants of Old Money in the broadercontext of their familial collective representations. What is involved is a basicshift in perspective from the way that psychotherapy has been generally viewedand that psychotherapists of various kinds themselves have viewed their ownpractice. 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 asvirtually sacred. As a correlative of this primary concern with the individual self,alternative psychotherapies in theory and practice also construct the family indifferent ways through dialogic narrative with the patient (some, like familytherapy, recognize it as a collective entity or system, more often, others, likepsychoanalysis, dissolve the family collectivity into sets of dyadic relationshipswhich are the sites for shaping the psychodynamics of the self of the patient to becured). None, not even family therapy, which does foreground the collectivity inthe stilted language of systems theory, see the interventionist therapeutic pro-cess in a reflexive way which would allow for the notion that, although formallyexternal to family relations, what is transacted between therapist and patientmight develop its authoritative meanings within the family that it backgroundsor believes it encompasses by its theory, knowledge, and practice. None of thetherapies consider that they might in fact be encompassed by the power of defacto therapeutic processes inside the family. Or, at least, that this might be thecase for somefamilies-families of Old Money that internally engender in certainof their members the processes that I have termed dynastic therapy. So, evenusing the source materials available on this subject, I would have to read them formy purposes against their own grain, so to speak.From my field materials, I have developed two kinds of sources, neither ofwhich 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 withwhom I talked, and in the course of conversations with them, I learned abouttheir experience of therapy. I also interviewed two local psychotherapists (notthe ones consulted by the descendants with whom I talked) known for theirwork with wealthy patients or clients. They discussed with me in general termsand through illustrative, but anonymous citation of cases their practice asclinicians.

To my knowledge, published material is very scarce on this topic. There isRobert Coles' well-known volume PrivilegedOnes: The Well Off and the Rich inAmerica,Vol. 5 of Children n Crisis (1977), and a small professional literature of amore technical nature (e.g., Stone 1972, 1979; Stone & Kestenbaum 1975; andWixen 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 usefulthe Ph.D. dissertation in sociology (1987) by Joanie Bronfman (of the Bronfmanfamily, which in American terms has achieved the status of Old Money, albeitJewish Old Money). She includes a very interesting chapter reporting her inter-views on the subject of therapy.However, most of the classic cases by the pioneer psychoanalysts (startingperhaps even with Freud's Wolf Man) down to contemporary cases, treated byone or another variety of psychoanalytic therapy, could be read as a relevant, ifnot the central, literature on the involvement of the rich (including the dynasticrich) 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 Statesand Europe. All four of the descendants in my field materials who frequentedpsychotherapists used psychoanalytically trained psychiatrists. This also seemedto be the case with most of the persons that Bronfman interviewed abouttherapy.Aside from their own frequent personal class pretensions and fantasies in thedirection of the worlds from which their Old Money patients come, psycho-analysts 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 clinicalsetting. Bronfman reports the following rather horrifying responses from wealthypersons (mostly women) who had been in therapy:

I was in therapyfor a while and one of the things that my thera-pist could never understand was that I felt badly about the factthatwe had money.Thetherapistcouldn't understand.Thatwasnot within his realmof understanding.The other therapists would not know how to deal with [mywealth]... They always felt like it was a world they didn't knowanything about and they were embarrassedabout the fact thatthey didn'tknow anything about it. They didn't want to say thewrong thing,and it was very difficult or them to know how to bein there with me and help me. One of them said to me at onepoint, "It'sfunny. You're not so fucking special."I said, "I am.You'rewrongand you don't want to dealwith it. You don't knowhow to dealwith my specialness."He just sat there andlooked atme. He didn't expect that. He thought I was going to be some-how helped by realizingthat I wasn't special.I said, "That'snotwhat I need. What I'mtryingto do is takemy specialness by thehorns and control it and not have it control me and not feeldrivenby it but use it in the best way. I'm not going to do thatbydenying it."So thereis a sense whereI have felt that Ihave oftenbeen my own best therapist.That'sone of the realproblemswith wealthy people is that thera-pists love to have them as clients becausethey canpay.Therearealways situational factorstryingto keep them dependent on thetherapist.It was one of the worstexperiencesof my lifebecauseat the end Irealizedor it seemed clearerand clearer to me that he was veryinterestedin my money. There was a lot of personalattentiontome that seemed to be to be a thin cover and I held back from therelationshipin terms of money and he pulled back in terms ofaffection.Eventuallyhe killed himselfafterhaving told me that ifI would leave him he would killhimself.So it was prettyawful.Itwas cruelbecausemy issues with men were so difficult 331-334).

Theoretically and clinically, psychoanalytic therapy takes little or no note ofsignificant features that pertain to the special (read, cultural, collective, or social

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class) family circumstances of patients. Instead, psychoanalytic therapistsroutinely offer relationship-specific, generalized medical diagnoses, which whilethey may pertain to and be valid for socially particular kinds of families, theyformally deny this broader context in their rhetoric and conceptual framework(this is not the case for therapists who have specifically written on wealthypatients, but they are the exception).There are two kinds of therapy that do foreground the collective family situa-tion and culture. One is family therapy that I mentioned, but its patients, orclients, tend to be middle, lower-middle, or lower class, and are often referred tosuch therapists by public agencies. Family therapy, which works by literallyencompassing and orchestrating family groups in its sessions, would unlikelyfind cooperative subjects among the Old Money wealthy, because this would bea direct assault on the pattern of silences and denials that make their own inter-nal and powerful dynastic therapies work. Besides, family therapy, in theory, hasinvested in a very scientistic conceptual scheme for what it performs clinically-rooted in the metaphors of systems theory, feedback, and so forth. However welland 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 wouldallow for the discovery of pietaswithin the therapy session, even if Old Moneyfamilies chose to avail themselves of this kind of therapy.The other kind of therapy that foregrounds the family collectively is the eclec-tic and loosely structured service of the family business consultant (a growingspecialty service in the United States during the 1980s). Such consultants areused by families whose wealth varies widely in magnitude and age. However,Old Money families tend to use such services less because often they havealready domesticated a line of internal advisers who serve the same function asconsultants, but who are more within the family's aura, and because such fami-lies, while they indeed have painful problems of generational transition, areusually not directly involved any longer in the businesses that founded theirfortunes. In any case, even though they are most effective as pragmatic thinkersfor their client families precisely because they are detached outsiders, such con-sultants also theorize their work through the use of psychotherapeutic conceptsand rhetoric, modified for their purposes, and thus tend to miss the ironicDurkheimian dimensions (collective representations) embedded in the psycho-dynamics of clients with which they conceive themselves to be dealing.As I have noted, I think it can be well established that most voluntary, non-clinical adult Old Money patients of psychotherapy have been women. Three ofthe four cases in my field materials were women. The professional literature that Imentioned recounts almost exclusively the cases of women or family problemsthat deal with the clinically diagnosed cases of mental illness among women asmothers and wives. Any suggestions or reasons for this predominance of womenamong Old Money descendants in therapy must remain highly speculative, asmust an understanding of their experience of therapy, pending further study. Itwill be recalled that the tentative suggestion I offered about why it is mostlywomen who appear in therapy, when Old Money descendants do avail them-selves 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 prominentmales cross-generationally. This accords with the existing literature that empha-sizes the strong lines of gender separation and exclusion in wealthy families andthe general dependency that men assume and encourage in women in mattersrelated to the management of ancestral wealth. This is the barrier that must bebreached, if they have the will to do so, by women when they become widows, orwhen as sisters and daughters they come to insist on independence and respectas 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 indepen-dence, attempting to break through the mystications of family rules, silences, andthe construction of abstract ancestral wealth-in other words, when they haveentered a cognitive and emotional state of suspicion and critical insight analogousto that of males like Nelson Aldrich, and feel impelled to act on it. Rather thancoming to pietas in such a state, as did Aldrich, by finding themselves in theparticular troubling bind, characteristic of the workings of dynastic therapy, ofhaving to deliver funeral orations, they have to more thoroughly redefine them-selves. And through a different route that promises a desired autonomous self-definition separate from the family (which is what psychotherapy at least offershope of), they might happen upon the experience of pietas hat Aldrich did.Two of my psychotherapy cases from fieldwork did indeed concern womenwho were in an act of adult rebellion against their families,2 and in which theirtherapy could easily be understood to figure, at least from the accounts thesewomen 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 acknowl-edged 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 wasinsensitive to the specifics of family history.

Precisely and specifically how psychotherapy shaped the experience of thewomen in my cases is much more difficult to discuss. Ifone takes as a suggestionMichael Fischer's conceptualization borrowed from psychoanalytic therapy itselfof ethnic or dynastic identity processes operating through the equivalent oftransference in key cross-generational family relationships, then it might be thatthe 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 accom-plished for its female "Old Money" patients. The following conclusion from theStone 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 withwhich transference ssues stemmingfromthe father-relationshipcould be broached and resolved, in comparisonto issues stem-ming from the motherrelationship... (99).

Maternal deprivation seems to be the great therapeutic problem for wealthyfemale 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 familiesgiven the pattern of women being more interested in mothering their husbandsthan their children, and given the ability to afford extensive mother surrogates).The problem with fathers (and ancestors) while present seems more easilyresolved, and in relation to the noted difficulty with mother-related transference,the easier resolution of father-related issues is likely to support the reservoir offeeling that might lead to female pietas.Although I am unable to sort out these complex issues surrounding transfer-ence in the two cases of rebellious women I noted, I would only say that thetherapeutic process of transference can work in two ways at the same time. It canbring about a sense of personal liberation, while at the same time it can increaseattachment, and make more powerful an already powerful family collectivity. Thedistant 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, oreven ambivalent feelings about the family, as that such feelings themselvesremain vital and vivid. Whatever the outcome of therapy regarding the curing ofthe self, its main object, this outcome is unlikely to be at the expense of theinterests that one might attribute to continuing dynastic power over descen-dants. Such a hold does not depend on positive feelings toward the family, juston very strong feelings about the family-period-that continue to intrude in theself-definition of descendants and perhaps become more clarified throughtherapy. In this usually, unintended way, psychotherapy builds dynastic identityin 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 pietas nwomen, 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 afuneral or the reconciliation after a bitter quarrel (as it occurred in one of therebellious 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, thatfor women it is not the experience of internal family relations during such tenseperiods that leads to the transcending commitment of pietas,despite suspicionand ambivalence toward the family, but rather the experience of the work doneexternally in therapeutic settings.

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

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NOTES1. One thinks here perhaps of the classicwork of Meyer Fortes (1961) on ancestor-focused descent groups in Africa, espe-cially because he too, like Aldrich, madeuse of the Greek idea of pietas in hisHenry Myers Lecture of 1960, "Pietas inAncestor Worship," to explore the com-plex psychology of descendants mainlyamong the Tallensi, but also compara-tively. Having trained originally in psy-chology, Fortes was extremely sensitiveto the psychodynamic and conflicted di-mension of pietas, especially in the rela-tionship of father to first-born son, andperhaps understood it to be an expres-sion of the same kind of de facto thera-peutic process to which I will be alludingin "Old Money" American families, butbecause he was indeed dealing with asociety where much of this was exter-nalized in institutions, rituals, and well-articulated social norms, his analysis ofthe psychodynamics or therapeutics ofpietas is masked or submerged in pri-marily sociological terms, which was theidiom of Radcliffe-Brown style analysis,in any case. This masking, I believe, al-lowed for the attribution of generalizedsocial psychological account of pietaswhich was not sensitive enough to catchTale ethnopsychology, something thatthe current interest among social and cul-tural anthropologists in interpretive ap-proaches and the culturally specific con-struction of personhood would probablyremedy. As such, Fortes' generalized (butI would thus suspect subtly ethnocen-tric) account of pietas among the Tallensiis a lot like the pietasthat Aldrich discov-ers in himself in relation to his father andgrandfather, but without the external in-stitutional apparatus. There is nothingpuzzling in that there should be pietasamong the Tallensi; there is indeed some-thing puzzling for Aldrich that it shouldinvade his own sense of self.2. This brings to mind the recent verypublic exposure of the breakup of theBingham dynasty of Louisville and Sallie

Bingham's part in this drama. Both in theBingham case and in that of a family Istudied firsthand, it was the rebellion ofwomen, who also had a history of ther-apy, that precipitated the end of dynasticstructures that had been held together bymale authority.

REFERENCESBellah, Robert, et al. 1984.HabitsoftheHeart.

Berkeley: University of California Press.Bernays, Anne. 1975. Growing Up Rich.

Boston: Little, Brown.Bingham, Sallie. 1986. "The Truth AboutGrowing Up Rich." Ms. 14 (12): 48-50,82-83.

Bronfman,Joanie.1987. "TheExperience ofInheritedWealth:A Social-PsychologicalStudy." Unpublished Ph.D. Disserta-tion, Department of Sociology, BrandeisUniversity.Coles, Robert. 1977.PrivilegedOnes:TheWell-Offand theRichinAmerica.Vol. V of Chil-dren n Crisis. Boston: Little, Brown.

Fischer, Michael M.J.1986. "Ethnicity andthe Post-Moder Arts of Memory." InWritingCulture:ThePoeticsand PoliticsofEthnography,edited by James Cliffordand George E. Marcus. Berkeley: Uni-versity of CaliforniaPress.Fortes, Meyer. 1961. "Pietas in AncestorWorship, the Henry Myers Lecture1960." The Journalof the Royal Anthro-pologicalnstituteofGreatBritain ndIreland91 (2):166-191.

Marcus, George E.1980. "Lawin the Devel-opment of Dynastic Families AmongAmerican Business Elites: The Domesti-cation of Capital and Capitalization ofFamily." Law & Society Review 14 (4):859-903._.1983. "The Fiduciary Role in AmericanFamily Dynasties and Their Institu-tional Legacy:From the Law of Trusts toTrust in the Establishment." In Elites:Ethnographicssues,edited by G.E. Mar-cus. Albuquerque: University of NewMexico Press.

_. 1985."Spending: The Hunts, Silver,and

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Documents

Old Money Dynasties 2