Familialism

Familialism is the ideology that promotes the family of the Western tradition as an institution. Familialism is usually considered conservative or reactionary. Familialism advocates the family values of the Western tradition and usually opposes any other social forms and models that are alternative to such family values.

A typical trait of familialism is the obsessive insistence that normalcy resides in the nuclear family.

The embracing of familialism by psychoanalysis
Deleuze and Guattari, in their now-classic  1972 book Anti-Oedipus, stated that psychiatry and psychoanalysis, since their incept, have been affected by an incurable familialism, which is their ordinary bed and board. Psychoanalysis has never escaped from this, having remained captive to an unrepentant familialism.

Michel Foucault said that through familialism, psychoanalysis completed and perfected what the psychiatry of 19th century insane asylums had set out to do; and that it enforced the massive structures of bourgois society and its values: Family-Children (paternal authority), Fault-Punishment (immediate justice), Madness-Disorder (social and moral order). Deleuze and Guattari added that "the familialism inherent in psychoanalysis doesn't so much destry classical psychiatry as shine forth as the latter's crowning achievement," and that since the 19th century, the study of mental illnesses and madness has remained the prisoner of the familial postulate and its correlates.

Through familialism, and the psychoanalysis based on it, the clear habit is to posit the guilt upon the family's smallest member, the child, and absolve the parental authority.

According to Deleuze and Guattari, among the psychiatrist only Karl Jaspers, and then Ronald Laing, have escaped familialism. This was not the case of the culturalist psychoanalysts, which, despite their conflict with orthodox psychoanalysts, had a "stubborn maintenance of a familialist perspective," still speaking "the same language of a familialized social realm".