ABSTRACT
The modern family alone can secure and stabilise the personal identities of adults in the face of a world which judges them by abstract, universal, impersonal and affectionless standards. The realm of the family not only becomes the last refuge of intimate relations but also intensifies this intimacy. The impersonal and affectionless cash bonds which bring people together in the marketplace ‘generated new needs—for trust, intimacy and self-knowledge, for example—which intensified the weight of meaning attached to the personal relations of the family and encouraged the creation of a separate sphere of life in which personal relations were pursued as ends in themselves. The transformation of intimacy leads to a ‘democratisation of personal life’. The pure relationship, generally, accurately describes contemporary expectations about intimacy, even intimacy between parents and children. The chapter shows what aspects of contemporary family relationships are the focus of normative expectations and how these expectations have been transformed.
