Professional Incest

There’s a troubling phenomenon in artistic circles these days – what I call professional incest. Perhaps mine is an old-fashioned idea, but I don’t think that it’s necessary, or even healthy, for people to know intimate details about their colleagues’ personal lives. Of course for decades – even centuries – people have wanted to inquire about, gossip about, and know as much as possible about nobility, celebrities, and other assorted famous persons. What I’m speaking of is a much different, and significantly more dangerous, trend.

The recent upsurge of blogging, and internet activities in general, are indications that people these days are in fact creating their own families and support systems, and often in a very public way. Considering that “dysfunctional family of origin” is such a common term these days, it would seem that there are a large number of people lacking (and wishing for) nurturing and loving families, and understandable that they would take steps to create their own. Of course the goal would be for these to be healthy; otherwise one is caught up in the same old (or new, but similar) problems.

In most professional circles, colleagues gather for various conferences at regular intervals. They swap stories, and engage in some mild (or not so mild) gossip. At times advice is asked or received, and/or relatively harmless but competitive bantering occurs.

But there exists a more alarming variation of this in the arts, particularly among the younger set, which can result in slander, abuse, cruelty, falsehood, defamation, and in some situations, the endangerment of people’s careers, sanity, and even lives. Sound melodramatic? You’d be surprised.

The beginnings are understandable. Intense friendships and intimacies often occur in college or young adulthood, when one’s friends are one’s future colleagues. Vacations are taken together, extensive “partying” occurs, work projects are undertaken together, friends turn into (and out of) bed partners, professional critiques are given, personal critiques are given, and some pretty strong bonding occurs. This can all feel great at the time: one big happy family.

So what’s the problem? How, when, and why does this dynamic turn from nurturing and supportive into abusive and libelous?

To see this with any clarity, it’s necessary to turn to basic psychology for the definitions of a healthy family: love, respect, concern for the individual, concern for the group, and appropriate boundaries. In other words, an atmosphere of what might be termed mutual thriving. If at any time the group significantly fails in any one of these, the family becomes dysfunctional, whether it be a family-of-origin, or one of choice.

In point of fact, an intimate group of colleagues may, by definition, never have appropriate boundaries. How is it possible to be into each other’s personal business, to be colleagues (and thus rivals to some extent) in the work business, and have real concern for individual thriving? I’ve actually seen people gang up on a friend to try to convince them they shouldn’t take a certain job that had been offered, ostensibly for psychological reasons. Family? This is nuts!

Another variation arises when the circle expands (sort of) to include other colleagues, whose willingness for intimacy may not be the same, and about whom the others can only gossip, not actually knowing the truth. In this case, the “family” is protected, at the expense of truth, and of the newer members’ reputations. What kind of collegiality is this? Finally, when personal or professional difficulties arise, people tend to take sides, because they think they know what’s going on. Sadly, just as in real, dysfunctional, families, this often isn’t the case.

Perhaps the biggest question is whether one can in fact be working in the same field and be intimate friends or family. The word colleague means “fellow worker”, but in our modern culture carries the connotation of a competitor, and thus this may be well nigh an impossible task in the end. But if one is indeed able to forge personal/professional relationships that contain the qualities of love, respect, concern for the individual, concern for the group, and appropriate boundaries, what could possibly be wrong with that?

I would venture to answer this question thusly: that one might ask if those qualities were fostered in all of one’s collegial relationships. And if the answer is no, something profound then might come of the question: “Why not?”