ABSTRACT
The personal task and crisis of separation for the women was at the same time a task and crisis of the marital family unit. At this level of analysis, the crisis of separation refers to the separation of families, parental from marital, and the separation of roles in the new family, especially those of children from those of parents. In each of the separation cases, the members of the marital family attempted to establish a separate, relatively self-contained nuclear family. The family organization which has designated conversion differs from the other variants in the absence of a continuing triad. It suggests that marital family cannot maintain this type of organization, especially when children are present. The triadic arrangements present in both of the other forms of family organization may bear some relation to observations made by others of persisting mother-child symbioses in the parental family.
