This Master’s Thesis is a psychoanalytical investigation into the critical interpretation of the traditional family practice taking place within contemporary American society as it is vividly mediated out to the viewing masses of the world by Ryan Murphy in his 2011 FOX series American Horror Story: Murder House.
By making an individual analysis of each relevant episode with the theoretical propositions made by psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud such as that of ‘the unconscious’, ‘the perceptive aspects of the primary and secondary processes’, ‘the repetition compulsion’, as well as the ‘final model of the mind’ and the theoretical composition of ‘the abject’ by philosopher Julia Kristeva readily at hand, this Master’s Thesis functions to bring a critique of how the American nuclear family remains an unchangeable product of its past sociological definition that places the validating notion of embodying the American (nuclear family) dream on a pedestal never to be obtainable to the desire driven psychological being of the American individual, who is indeed forever expected to pursue it, even in death. The main oppositional focus of the thesis is centered on sociologist George Peter Murdoch’s 1949 definition of ‘the nuclear family’ and its compatibility with the society in which it is expected to manifest itself by viewing it in the contextual framework of yet another cornerstone that can be found at the baseline of American society, one that is commonly known as the American dream. Furthermore, the analyses of the various relational narratives vividly demonstrate how this traditional nuclear family structure is problematically critiqued by Murphy as being not only outdated in its implementation of the gender bias that is represented in between the various inhabitants of Murder House, but also overtly reliant on the cultural entity of religion and the definition of proper familial conduct that is forwarded within Christianity, making it ignorant of the basic (Freudian) psychological functions that constitute human behavior, and therefore, downright incompatible with the internal structure of any American family, past or present, ultimately documenting the message of lethal failure that is left behind in each horrifying attempt to inhabit a standard of social acceptability that was determined in 1949 and seemingly never to be revised in accordance with the nature and circumstances of the American people expected to uphold it.