Written by the South African psychiatrist who helped name the anti-psychiatry movement, The Death of the Family is an incendiary attack on the family as both intimate structure and political institution.

First published in 1971, the book belongs to the radical counterculture surrounding R. D. Laing, anti-psychiatry and experiments in communal living, though Cooper’s position is more revolutionary and less clinically cautious than the label often suggests. Cooper argues that the bourgeois family does not merely nurture its members: it manufactures obedience, fixes people into prescribed identities and teaches them to internalise authority long before the state or psychiatric institution needs to intervene. The family, in this account, is society’s smallest police station—staffed by love, guilt and fear.

He moves through psychoanalysis, Marxism, mysticism, sexual politics, diagrams, aphorisms and deliberately unstable language, seeking forms of thought capable of escaping the very order he is describing. The writing is ecstatic, erratic and occasionally absurd, but its excess is part of the project: theory attempting to break out of the respectable household built for it. It remains a provocative historical document for readers interested in family abolition, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, queer theory and the political construction of private life. 

First Pelican edition, 1972. Paperback with substantial rubbing, creasing and edgewear; pages age-toned but clean and firmly bound.