subject: My Family Is Me: I Am My Family - Part Three [print this page] Since the family is a system, everyones behavior influences, and is influenced by, every one elses behavior. Much to the painful surprise of some parents, their children display what they did not know or recognize in themselves.
Children may take over from their parents what was repressed deep in the unconscious or expressed only in complex, neurotic ways. This is what is most feared - that the child will expose the parents faults, forcing them to defend themselves against what they feel to be obvious accusations. Indeed there are children who bring out the worst in their parents! The Austrian poet Wildgans, addressing his newborn son, summed it up by saying, our judge you may become - you are he already.
The behavior of any one member of the family, often it is a child who is identified as the patient and brought for guidance, psychotherapy, etc., may be understood as manifesting any one or all of the following:
1. His symptoms may reflect the psychopathy of the family;
2. His behavior may create familial stabilization;
3. By being sick, he may be the healer of a family disorder; or
4. He may epitomize the current growth potential of the group.
In somewhat simplistic terms, family interrelationships can be viewed in the following framework:
1. Stable, satisfactory relationship '
All parties explicitly reach an understanding of each other and their own roles and functions. Indeed, this may be offered as the ideal family in that spouses form a coalition as members of the parental generation, maintaining their respective gender-linked roles, and are capable of transmitting instrumentally useful and satisfying ways of adaptation suited to the society in which they live. This stability is unshaken by the slings and arrows to which we are all subject, but rather is utilized to resolve such problems.
2. Unstable, satisfactory '
This differs only in the length of periods of relative instability - for example, during economic crisis, the normal adolescent rebellion of the children, or newlyweds first struggling to achieve and establish stability. Nonetheless, reasonably meaningful expectations for behavior emerge, and the experience becomes a useful one for continued building of a healthy relationship.
3. Unstable, unsatisfactory '
There is no explicit or implicit agreement on roles within the relationship. Interactions become characterized by helpless maneuvers and great attention to superficialities. This is the commonest type seen, and the members of such a unit represent the paradox of not being able to live with or without the family. Chaos, seemingly without relief, reigns supreme.
4. Stable, unsatisfactory '
Here, the partners have agreed never to make any issue of who is to function and perform any role, nor do they dare signal dissatisfaction or recognize such signals. As parents these people rarely come to psychiatric attention - but their children surely do! This constellation represents the most difficult one to reach as the cardinal rule is that no one must comment on the nature of the others behavior.
A poignant example may help clarify and emphasize this.
Jackson cities that during a session with a hospitalized young mans brother, mother, and father, the brother gingerly and tenderly volunteered the suggestion that, perhaps the mother was a bit overly critical of the patient. For the first time, the father, ever so gently, joined in agreement with the brother. This occurred toward the end of the hour, and the mother seemed to accept what was said. The therapist did not make any comment.
By the next morning, the mother had to be rushed to the hospital because of an acute gall bladder attack, although she had no previous history of such difficulty. When she was discharged, the father suffered a coronary occlusion and was hospitalized. During this period, the brother, who had a previously excellent driving record, had three auto accidents in which he drove into the rear end of cars.
There are three major theories, all set within a broad, psychoanalytic framework, to help understand, explain, and approach the originating stresses that produce symptoms in children.
Bateson and co-workers have observed a basic communication problem that they have characterized as the double bind. Stop and think for a moment of the injunction, I order you to disobey me. Punishment, based on the premise that there is no escape from such messages, follows from any direction the child may take. Repeated exposure to this double bind causes the individual to strip his responses of any understandable meaning, that is, to escape by being crazy. This results in a loss of the ability to discriminate the true meaning of his own and others messages, which carries over into all interpersonal relationships.
Lidz and his group emphasize the age-sex disjunction in parents that results in inappropriate interactions between parent and child. Parental response, not only to external reality problems, but also to the internal stresses of the normal development of their children, becomes that of an ineffectual child unable to distinguish the recrudescence of old conflicts from current reality. In other words, the child adapts to his family by learning such inappropriate behavior. Because normal psychosexual developmental phases of the child elicit immature parental responses, the stress becomes especially flagrant during the normal adolescents tumultuous psychological growth, when the child has not only the ideas, but also the necessary physiological equipment with which to act. The threat thus created for the parents may leave the child with only the choice of psychiatric symptoms as a way out.
Wynnes group views the adequate and healthy functioning of the ego as requiring not only a stable and coherent environment, but also an opportunity to test and select a variety of roles as part of ones own identity during development. This freedom for role-taking is blocked in the child who develops symptoms, and, furthermore, the blocking takes place in an unstable environment.
