What If There Is a Drive to Dis-Affiliate?

Under the "What if?" category:

Many times in counseling, therapists are confronted with families torn apart, brothers from sisters, children from parents, friends from friends, business partner from business partner.  This often follows, and maybe always follows, an angry episode.  And usually I would interpret this as a result of anger.  People cut off from others simply because they are angry and perhaps don't handle anger well.

But what if there was an additional reason related to anger but going beyond it?  What if there was a a drive in humans to affiliate and also a drive to disaffiliate?

It happens in families, and it happens in organizations.  In churches, we sometimes see a life cycle.  People come together.  They enjoy the advantages of affiliation and bonding (social, emotional, intellectual, and financial).  Then some issue (often not really that big when looked at objectively by a third party) drives a wedge between groups, and people leave.  Churches split.

The issues which drive wedges between people often mystify counselors because they simply aren't as big as one would think they would have to be to cause such a rift.  There are many psychological reasons why a seemingly small event could cause an overreaction.  But what if there was a drive in people to disaffiliate?

Oftentimes, family divisions occur after the funeral of the parent.  The splitting up of the parent's belongings can be a particular trigger.  Again, this has always seemed logical to me from a psychological point of view.  If in childhood, the children felt they had to compete for their parent's attention and love, then it would seem to make a least a little bit of sense that they might squabble over these remnants of their parent's love in the form of belongings left in the estate.  Mixed in with the squabbling over possessions would be all the old resentment and anger, leading them to cut off from each other, now that the "glue" of the parent was gone.

The fact that families sometimes split up after the funeral of a parent may also suggest that the tendency to divide and separate from one another is continuous and ongoing.  Perhaps, it is the presence of the parent which keeps that from occurring.

Freud famously postulated in one of his theories that there is an eros drive (love, sex, and the desire for the other) and a death, or thanatos, drive.  The theory may have been stimulated by World War I and the death and destruction which came from it.  The possibility of a disaffiliation drive would be analagous to thanatos because there is a destructive quality to it.  But it doesn't involve killing people.  It involves killing bonds of affection and attachment.  It kills group loyalties. It would probably have to be rooted in some evolutionary need (such as the need to strike out from one's own cave to cover new territory).  After all, what made our ancestors leave Africa and spread to Europe and Asia and the Americas?  The search for food and territory would certainly have caused the human species to spread.  But what if there was actually a drive to split off and break bonds of attachment?  That would have caused the species to spread, too.

I am not suggesting that we take a fatalistic stance towards the loss of relationships and group loyalties.  I would personally tend towards the religious value which promotes harmony and attachment.  Or the Rodney King point of view, "Can't we all just get along?"  But sometimes, despite our very best efforts, nothing works.  And maybe there is a just a grain of solace in thinking that perhaps, just perhaps, we are made that way.