Summary
Contents
Subject index
Also with Melanie K. Barnes, Sheryl Perlmutter Bowen, Heather R. Carlson, Marilyn Coleman, Lawrence H. Ganong, Jeffrey Haig, John H. Harvey, Renee F. Lyons, Darlene Meade, Paula Michal-Johnson, Suzanne M. Retzinger, James T. West, Jacqueline P. Wiseman, Katherine D. Wright & Paul H. Wright “Highly recommended.” –Mark Waldman in Contemporary Psychology “Each chapter of Confronting Relationship Challenges has something new to say. … The chapters offer rich opportunities for researchers to expand their investigations and their conceptualizations. … This book will challenge the reader to enhanced understanding and increased commitment to appropriate intervening when others (and ourselves) are overwhelmed by the ‘dark side’ of relationships.” –Judith L. Fischer in Journal of Marriage and the Family Addressing the difficult side of relationships, Confronting Relationship Challenges moves forward in the Understanding Relationship Processes Series by taking an honest look at what can go wrong with relationships and highlighting some of the challenges partners might face while struggling to comprehend their connectedness to one another. Edited by Steve Duck and Julia Wood, discussion in this volume moves away from any implication that relationships are only good and delightful. Even in the very closest of relationships, pain and suffering are inevitable and the contributing scholars examine the management and tolerance skills required of participants in order to construct meaningful interpretations of themselves, each other, and the relationship as all components evolve and interact in continually changing contexts. Relationship challenges examined in this book include conflict, enemies, the reconfiguring “family” after a divorce, codependency, interpersonal violence, HIV/AIDS, chronic illness, and managing grief over a partner's death. Students and scholars in interpersonal communication, social psychology, clinical/counseling psychology, family studies, psychology and sociology will find this volume to be a valuable resource.
Having and Managing Enemies: A Very Challenging Relationship
Having and Managing Enemies: A Very Challenging Relationship
The present series concerns processes of relationships and deals with matters of long-term importance in relationships rather than the short-term interactions or thoughts of individuals only at the point of initial “attraction” that used to be so prevalent in social psychology. This volume deals with relationships that offer challenges to their participants, leading up to the final volume in the series on relationships that have not been studied very much. These two contexts make the topic of “enemies” a natural one for discussion in this volume, because the relationships of enemies are continuously and pervasively difficult challenges that are not well studied. Attention to enemies is also consistent with the series and volume emphasis on everyday relationship life, because most people at some point in their lives have enemies and must find ways of dealing with these negative relationships.
There has been very little detailed research conducted in the area of personal enemies (in fact, we had to coin the term enemyship to give that relationship the same kind of shorthand label that friends use to describe their association). For this reason, we depart from the form used by the other chapter authors in this series. Rather than surveying existing work in a summary fashion, we present exploratory research that provides initial insights into enemyship and that generates ideas and hypotheses for future research on enemies. This chapter is also revealing in the degree of concordance between qualitative sociology and quantitative communication studies that can be noted in citations for research touching on aspects of the enmity relationship. This demonstrates that these two research perspectives—often assumed to be in diametric opposition—can be compatible and complementary.
Enemyship: Introduction and Methods
Enemyship is a kind of relationship in which negative feelings and actions are part and parcel of the ongoing daily nature of the relationship. People have friends, but they also have enemies, antagonists, and opponents who try to make their lives more difficult and to interfere with their attainment of goals. Enemies are not merely conceptual abstractions; they are experienced as real people who interfere with the processes of social life. They represent a particularly important and interesting relationship challenge for ordinary folks and also offer scholars of social relations some important theoretical challenges.
Researchers have shown interest in the ways that people describe and interact with their friends, but less in how they actually manage interactions with them (but see Volume 4 in this series, Dynamics of Relationships). By contrast, the question of how people mentally sort out their personal enemies and handle them has received virtually no attention from researchers, even though enemies are common in everyday life.
Short of Machiavelli (1532/1947), who wrote about how to handle enemies, there is very little direct work to guide us here, and even the recent growth of interest in the “dark side” of relationships (Cupach & Spitzberg, 1994; Duck, 1994c) has not covered the topic. There is some previous work on related matters, and Harré's (1977) speculations about Feindschaft appear to be some of the first to address the issue directly. There are other sources of indirect inspiration on the topic, such as Goffman's (1959) work on face management and Garfinkel's (1956) considerations of degradation ceremonies. However, historically, sociologists have spoken of conflict and the natural succession of groups as a result of group conflict, but not of the relationships that result from conflict. Likewise, psychologists, clinicians, and communication scholars have tended to overlook such relationships or to focus only on conflict in kin or marital relationships.
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