ABSTRACT
The family is an exceedingly complex living organism, a social entity and psychological subject that both mirrors and meshes with its environmental/social context and the cultural history it is steeped in. When viewed across the centuries, the family’s ability to transform itself is truly surprising. A temporal perspective as long as this is essential if we are to avoid the foreshortening effects of a merely descriptive approach and instead arrive at a deeper understanding of the family as a phenomenon that satisfactorily explains both the varying and the permanent features that constitute what we call the “family-ness.”
