Figure 2.1 Projection in a family
Men from whom my ways begin, here
I know you by your ground
Edward Blunden, Forefathers
And since time never pauses but
Change must ensue
Let us wish that old things may
Fit well with the new
Tennyson, Queen of the Isles
In this chapter I hope to weave together threads of previous social and dynamic theories so as to provide a substrate out of which transgenerational concepts naturally grow. Large areas of important and interesting psychological, social, and biological thinking will necessarily be omitted. Other texts on family therapy have been written which include and integrate some of the omitted materialNote 1.
It is not often realised that the field of family therapy owes an immense debt to the original contributions made by Alfred Adler to psychological theory and practice. He had been credited by EllenbergerNote 2 with the launching of modern psychosomatic medicine, group psychotherapy, and the first unified system of concrete psychology and the social approach to mental hygiene.
Adler's pragmatic psychology attempted to develop axioms and methods by which a working knowledge could be obtained of one's inner self or the inner selves and behaviour of others without resorting to an abstract and complicated theory. His basic principles are worth recounting and seem surprisingly avante-garde considering that they were systematised in 1927Note 3.
First is the principle of unity which states that a human being is indivisible and must be treated as such; such a stance would be agreeable to the most radical of family therapy systems purist. Second, the principle of movement states that life without goals and movement is incomprehensible, a position taken by most behaviour therapists, as well as will as goal-orientated psychotherapists. The third principle is that of cosmic
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influence. Sounding very much like a family therapists' credo it states than an individual does not and cannot exist isolated from his family, community, and environment. Community was defined as the structure of familial and social ties. His fourth principle asserts that the parts re spontaneously organised into a structural whole; a very similar statement was posited ten years later by von Bertalanffy in his general systems theory. The fifth principle, that of action and reaction, says that every individual action brings on a reaction from society and vice versa. Baldly summarised these five principles claim that no individual can be considered except in his context, both social and environmental. The relationships of the indivisible individual with his family and community are crucial areas for therapeutic work. His sixth and last principle sets out a standard of normality, adjustment, and mental hygiene for the individual which is defined as the ideal balance between individual needs and community needs. Pathology is then measured by the amount of deviation from this ideal balance. Mental disturbance was not seen as illness, but as a faulty life style. The neurotic life style and life plan were held to originate in one of three aggravated conditions; organ inferiorities [which was Adler's term for congenital and genetic influences], a neurotic family tradition, or existing family pressures.
The step from these Adlerian principles to the treatment of families seems a small one with hindsight. Adler may even unknowingly have developed a rudimentary form of family treatment. Unlike Freud who enjoined analysts from involving themselves with family members, Adler stated 'I always find the hostile reaction of the patient's relatives to the physician of advantage and I sometimes have carefully attempted to stir it up. Since generally the tradition of the entire family of the sick person is neurotic it is possible by uncovering and explaining it to greatly benefit the patient.'Note 4
His therapeutic model of child psychotherapy was more directly related to the family therapy model. He never treated a child without requiring the parent's presence in at least some of the therapeutic sessions. He often did home visits and treated the child at home in the parent's presence.
Adler's interest in the family environment led him to investigate the importance of sibling position in the family as a determinant in producing personality traits. He found that each child in a family acquires a certain personality based on his sibling position. The oldest brother for example is raised with the conviction that he is the stronger and more responsible of his siblings. He tends to be more bourgeois, traditional and conservative. In contrast, the youngest brother is likely to be over-protected and
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spoiled by virtue of his position as the defenceless child surrounded by older siblings and parents. The second child attempts to compete with the older brother while looking over his shoulder in fear of being over-taken by the younger one. In a similar way and in more detail Adler described the personality traits which tended to accrue to only children, only boys in a family of girls and other combinations. The importance of this work has not gone unrecognised. TomanNote 5 expanded this concept into a two-generational model and detailed the personality traits within various family constellations of spouses, parents and children. This Adlerian contribution to family therapy is incorporated into the process of transgenerational analysis.
Despite his social and pragmatic theoretical positions, Adler did not fully develop his concepts to include the basic tenet of family therapy which distinguishes it as a new and different approach. He continued to treat the individual as the patient in need of treatment, however strongly he stressed the importance of social and familial influences. He may have viewed the family as an organism but he did not take that further crucial step towards treating the family as a patient. But his influence on succeeding generations of doctors, psychiatrists, social workers and therapists directed them towards the social and familial factors which he emphasised.
In contrast to Adler's pragmatic social psychology, Freud conceived of the individual as a seething conflictual system locked within itself. He was occupied with the puzzle of the structure and organisation of the human mind rather than the interactions between one mind and another.
His attitude towards the relatives of his patients was one of strict abstention from contact. 'The most urgent warning I have to express is against any attempt to engage the confidence or support of parents and relatives.' Freud felt that 'the interference of relatives in psychoanalytic treatment is a very great danger',. and cautioned his fellow analysts from getting involved with themNote 6. His only foray into the field of family involvement was the case of Little Hans.
Little Hans was the eldest son of a close psychoanalyst colleague who developed a phobia to horses at the age of five. His father reported the child's material to Freud who interpreted its meaning. The father then returned to his son to explain the meanings. Freud actually saw the child once. But Freud, far from pursuing an interest in family relationships, had reluctantly broken his rule of non-involvement in order to acquire direct evidence for his theory of infantile sexuality? His interest lay
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only in the direction of the intrapsychic functioning.
However valuable Freud's theories are in explaining intrapsychic phenomena, it is a one-sided view when attempting to translate his theoretical position into interpersonal relationships. Although personality is seen as being rooted in the interplay between parents and children in infancy and childhood, the possibility of developing an interpersonal and family relational theory was sidestepped for the postulation of a codified developmental theory which concentrates on intrapsychic development within the well defined oral, anal, and genital stages. Relationships with other human beings are viewed as internally crystallised 'objects', discounting the subtlety of relationship interactions. The oedipal complex is a wholly intrapsychic development although it grows more naturally from the real interactions between parents and children. The living father in real conflict with the mother for the re-establishment of a previously existing relationship which was actually disrupted by the needs of rearing the child have been encapsulated by way of theory and explanation as an internalised conflict within the developing psyche of the child.
The effect of this emphasis on internalising the external has been to place the Freudian analyst in an awkward position when attempting to elucidate family and interpersonal relationships. His language requires that everything be understood starting from the point of view of the analyst examining the internal workings of the psyche of the patient. Relationship rules are first seen as internalised objects which then must be externalised, rather than simply examining the relationship itself. The double reflection which results has exercised the most brilliant minds in the psychoanalytic movement to develop the field of ego psychology in order to deal with the inevitable distortions. The interaction between transference and counter-transference has also required further theoretical models to be developed.
If the preceding few paragraphs seem unjust they are not meant to be. Freudian psychology has laid the foundation of the intrapsychic working of the mind, which was its main purposeNote 7. The usefulness of these concepts lies in the area of the individual as an encapsulated entity, but falls short when trying to develop interactional theories. Just as the elucidation of atomic structure has been of immense help to the understanding of chemistry, Freudian psychology has helped establish a part of the ground rules regarding the limits imposed on relationships between people. But chemistry is interested in the relationships between atoms and the compounds they form. The study of subatomic structure in finer and finer detail is of little value to the chemist who is concerned with
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the subtleties of the interactions between atoms, mixtures and compounds and their stability under differing noxious stimuli. This metaphor applies as well to the focus of interest in a detailed psychoanalysis of the individual being which is irrelevant to the understanding of the present, past and future relationship rules between family members.
Although the confusion of using the terminology of an intrapsychic theory to describe relationship concepts had led me to discard them, the concepts are an important historical antecedent. Freud did develop certain ideas from dealing with intrapsychic phenomena which have been expanded into the relationship between individuals.
The first of these concepts is that of transference. Transference is defined as the phenomenon occurring when the patient transfers on to the figure of the analyst a repetition of a relationship towards an important figure in the patient's pastNote 8. More generally it is used as the passing of an attitude or reaction from any person in the past to any person in the present. For example, the feeling that a stranger passing in the street would be friendly is based on the connection of past emotional contacts, some aspect of which is unconsciously stimulated by the sight of the of stranger. 'Love at first sight' can also be explained as a generalization of the term transference. Freud used the term increasingly to indicate that the analysis of the 'transference neurosis' in psychoanalysis was the most necessary of tasks in psychoanalysis.
Transference should be an interpersonal and relationship concept by definition. Although originally employed as a means of understanding the intrapsychic structure of the individual it necessitates a concentration upon the relationship between the analyst and his patient. This concentration led to the realisation that the analyst may also transfer attitudes reactions and feelings on to the patient (counter-transference). From the resulting complex interactions between the transferred feelings coupled with the true relationship between two individuals a dyadic phenomenon develops which is much more than is meant by the original terminology.
It is a short conceptual step to postulate a family transference. Walrond-SkinnerNote 9 has summarised the concept of family transference, but the summary points out the difficulty of adapting individually based nomenclature in order to describe relationship rules. Family transference should describe the transference of affect by one family member about another family member on to a third family member. But it is used to describe the entire network created by interlocking transferences as well as the projections which develop between family members. Projections refer to the attribution of one's unconscious thoughts, attitudes or feel-
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ings directly to another. For example, Mrs Jones disliked her youngest daughter intensely. She was transferring on to her daughter her intense dislike for her own mother. If Mrs Jones disliked her own daughter rather than face her own self-dislike, she would be projecting. Since the interlocking network implies the presence of both projection and transference, the use of these terms has become almost interchangeable, doing a disservice to the original concepts and sowing the seeds of confusion.
Another thread running through Freudian psychology is the link between mourning and psychopathologyNote 10. Freud noted the correlation between the clinical presentation of his cases of melancholia and the normal process of mourning. His attention to the way in which the dead or lost person (object) became incorporated within the psychological structure of the bereaved was of particular interest. He related pathological mourning to 'the shadow of the object' which continued to influence the bereaved in distorted ways. It was as if a person, rather than mourn the loss of a loved one, incorporates aspects of that loved one within themselves and continues to be influenced by them. The effect of this mechanism has immediate implications for those around them.
The importance of mourning and its pathological effects have been taken up by other analytically trained workers. Bowlby has devoted
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his life to the synthesis of psychoanalytic and ethologic theories and in the process has moved attachment, separation and loss into a central position within his theory of individual psychopathologyNote 11. His thesis is to a large extent an interpersonal one.
The presumed presence of an intrapsychic 'object' (defined as the representation of a dead relative) which might operate on the bereaved so as to alter his relationships was concept which was later adapted by therapists in the family field. Since losses occur in families, each family member would share the loss and the internalised representation. Paul developed this concept through his allusion to 'ghosts from the past'. He defined them as dead family members pathologically surviving as living systems within several members of the same familyNote 12. A major non-specific effect in pathological families was postulated as a 'fixed family equilibrium'. Any loss was collectively denied as an important affective event. Other therapists have also incorporated the importance of mourning and its links with individual depression and family quandaries into their concepts of the familyNote 13.
Freud's concentration on the formative nature of the first six to eight years of life is another important strand in the transgenerational tapestry. Although the details of the moulding of charaterologic traits are not
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accepted, the premises that there is a qualitative difference between the type of learning which occurs during those early years and that which occurs in later years is acknowledged. Early learning experience imply other influences than the internal stages of libidinal development. Behavioural concepts such as conditioning, imprinting and modelling as well as social concepts such as the effects of early socialisation are also important influences on the psychological development of an individualNote 14.
This is an opportune place to introduce the work of Melanie Klein, whose conceptual theories grew out of her work with very young children. There is no reason to attempt to summarise her theory since in most parts it is of little relevance to the elucidation of relatednessNote 15. SkynnerNote 16 has attempted to integrate some of her concepts with more behaviourally and ethologically based concepts in his model of family therapy.
I wish to concentrate on the development of a new defensive process and mechanism postulated by Klein, projective identification. In projective identification, parts of the self and internal objects are split off and projected into an external object. This concept was originally postulated as having taken place in the very earliest stage of developmental psychological life when the infant is less than four months old. It was then felt to exist throughout childhood and adulthood. The infant's mind introjects (takes in or models on) persons or parts of persons or behaviours of persons outside themselves. These external objects become owned or incorporated into the infant and are hereafter termed internal objects. Having acquired an internal object it is combined with pre-existing bits of the infant's psychological structure and this combination can then be projected into an external object (person or bit of a person) as an unconscious defensive manoeuvre in order to ward of psychological distressNote 17.
For example, an infant may experience a painful hunger when mother's breast (or bottle) is emptied without satisfaction. The experience is part self and part relationship with mother, the combined whole being introjected. This total experience is then projected into the mother who is experienced as a person who causes the internal hunger pains rather than recognising that the pain comes wholly from within.
This concept has been used by family therapists in an attempt to understand and label the subtle interactions between living, existing relatives and experiences which occurred with those relatives in the early
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years of life and which continue to influence the current interactions. In a similar manner dead relatives can be seen to continue their influence on interactions between living relatives through the process of projecting the internally absorbed object (relative) on to an outside relation such as a wife or child. The operative conscious statement would be, "My son is just like my father in his laziness." The unconscious defensiveness is, "I am lazy having acquired this trait from my father as a model, but I cannot acknowledge this trait as it is too disturbing; I will project it into my son." This differs qualitatively from the previously encountered 'family transference', where the operative conscious statement would be, "I can't stand my lazy son." The unconscious statement would be, "I can't stand my lazy father." In neither case do the actual traits of the perceived individual intrude upon the fantasies.
This Kleinian concept, which is so dense and rich in its meaning when applied to the intrapsychic life, still does not adequately describe the complexities of relatedness which we see in families. A physicist trying to define the configuration of electron clouds within a compound in terms of the complex language of nucleonics would come to a similar impasse. Projective identification is a valuable concept to the family therapist only in that it is descriptive of the mirroring of perturbations in the relationship field externally as represented within intrapsychic life.
The contributions of the analytic schools of thought have provided valuable insights into the intrapsychic life of individuals. But a larger structural framework has been developed by another Viennese scientist, the biologist Ludvig von Bertalanffy. Whereas previously described concepts were a product of the nineteenth century preoccupation with analysis, causality and reductionism as a means of explaining the mind and the observed real world, von Bertalanffy developed a general system theory which sought to bring under scientific scrutiny the exploration of 'wholes' and 'wholeness' which were previously the province of metaphysics. The real world and the mind observing it are no longer clockwork mechanisms whose components are the total explanation of the way in which things work. Its basic postulate is that for an understanding of the world and the mind which observes it, not only the elements which make up a system, but the interrelationships between them are essential for understanding.Note 18
Before proceeding into an explanation of systems theory as it applies to families the following models will be used to define some general concepts.
My dessert last night was a bowl of strawberry flavoured jelly. It was composed of various molecules of sugar, protein, colouring flavouring, and water. These species of elements were present in a finite but large number. Their relationships with each other are such as to assume the shape of the bowl in which they are placed and to exist as a wobbly red mass. When separated the species of elements exhibit the same summative properties as when combined, such as weight, mass, and volume. But only when combined will they form a tasty, wobbly red gel, the constitutive characteristics of the jelly. Questions may be asked of the jelly.
These questions are based on the terminology of systems theory. What is the boundary of the jelly, the interface between it and its external environments? In this case it is the ceramic of the bowl although on a molecular level it might penetrate into the ceramic by one or two molecules. What is its hierarchical structure? A hierarchy of structure would involve delineation of the jelly's subatomic elements and their interrelationship, atomic elements and their relationship, molecular elements and their relationships, and larger aggregates and their relationships. Besides structural hierarchy there also exists geographic and temporal hierarchy. Does the jelly possess the characteristic of wholeness, in which changes in every element depend on all the other elements changing? Wholeness implies constitutive properties. For example the jelly can be mashed or diced yet still retains its recognis-
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able identity, but when it is eaten, as it slithers into the stomach its wholeness is destroyed and it can no longer wobble, taste pleasant or retain its colour. What equilibrium does it maintain with its environment? Jelly being organic but not living is a closed system which by definition is not involved in a dynamic interchange with its environment. Jelly therefore, exhibits positive entropy, slowly but predictably and steadily decaying away into its elements. It may also be attacked by open systems such as bacteria or man. In order to deal with the open system concept our bowl of jelly must be abandoned for a living jelly, the amoeba. The amoeba is an open system in that it maintains a steady state within its environment through a constant interchange with it, maintaining its structure despite a continuous changeover in the elements. It possesses negative entropy as well as the property of equifinality, the characteristic of being able to reach the same final state starting from different initial conditions. The amoeba is actually a hierarchical order of open systems, each apparently solid structure at one level being maintained by a continuous exchange of elements at the next lower one, giving the appearance of a long-lived structure. This active steady state differs fundamentally from the homeostasis of closed systems.
But general systems theory is a theory about order and the rules of order in relationship to time as well as space. For example the fertilised ovum begins as a unitary whole. It passes through progressive states of differentiation until tissues, organs and a much greater complex whole develops. There occurs a progressive centralisation, which is the time dependent evolution of a decider or leading part, such as the development of the central nervous system as a control centre. Progressive segregation occurs in which the tendency of a system is to pass from a state of wholeness where each of the elements exhibits similar summative and constitutive properties to a state of independence of the elements or differentiation. Progressive mechanisation occurs with every step in differentiation since every step in evolution of the parts of a whole prevent others from occurring.
General system theory has been cited as an authoritative theory upon which a more circumscribed interactional or psychological model can be based or with which other models in family therapy may be integrated. In a similar way general system theory provides a basic conceptual framework upon which transgenerational theory draws. The important difference is the emphasis which will be placed on those aspects related to the dimension of time.
Mathematically a system is defined as a set of elements standing in
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relation; the elements may consist of points, lines, people, houses or planets. Complexes of elements are distinguished by :-
(a) their number;
(b) their species;
(c) their relations.
In a family, the Randolph family, the system is described as follows. The Randolph family is a complex of elements (individuals). The family is defined by its numbers, as a family of six individuals; by its species, three male and three female; and by its relations, parental-child bonding, emotional bonding. Number and species are summative characteristics. They are the same characteristics whether the family member exists within or outside of the family.
A system is defined so as to include not only spatial conditions (three dimensions within a frozen instant of time); it defines a system based on the previous history. The system under consideration should be not only a spatial but a temporal whole. Much of the conceptual and terminological borrowing done in family therapy from system theory derives from the special circumstances of a family frozen in time. The family thus frozen is assumed to be a whole rather than a conglomerate of disparate individuals. The phenomenon of wholeness in a family is illustrated by the following case. Mrs Galway was treated individually for three years in psychoanalytic sessions and lost her cloying dependence upon her husband. This relative independence from her husband seemed to lead directly into symptoms occurring in her son of overactivity, while her husband began drinking excessively. There was no visible change in any of the other children, although this may have been due to my inability to detect such change in a few short interviews. Nevertheless, a change in one element (Mrs Galway) led to a change in the other elements in the family system. One cautionary note must be sounded. The assumption that the family members under treatment comprise a system exhibiting wholeness is a fundamental starting point for many family therapists. This dogmatic assumption is best reserved until the family is observed and understood, which leads directly to a discussion of the concept of boundaries.
A boundary defines the limit of a system or the interface between suprasystems or subsystems. The family described was treated as a nuclear family whole. Difficulties arise when a wrong assumption is made about boundaries in determining the limits of the system and its quandary. The death of Mr. Galway's aunt directly preceded his drinking by a matter of months and may have been a more important factor in his symptoms. The family boundary arbitrarily set by me may have been too limited. It may just as well have been too wide, for Mr. and Mrs Galway were so closely tied in a mutually interdependent relationship
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that they may have more effectively been treated as a subsystem. Leaving aside the question of wholeness and boundaries, a family would seem to fall logically into the open system category.
An open system possesses the property of equifinality. In a closed system, the final state of the system is determined by the initial conditions. An adequate example in family terms is difficult to imagine. Perhaps the closest one can come to a family as a closed system would be that of a sterile couple living in absolute isolation with enough pre-packaged food and water to maintain them at subsistence level for the rest of their lives. The point is that families are by definition open systems in that they interact and interchange with their physical and social environment, growing and/or declining in relationship to that environment. The same final state in the family may be reached from different initial conditions and in many different ways. Mrs Galway's independence, Mr. Galway's bereavement or many other factors may have resulted in the final state in which the family were first referred. In a similar vein it is prudent to note that the family therapist and his intervention are only one of many alternate or simultaneous influences on the outcome of the sessions.
Since transgenerational theory encompasses a model of the family as a spatiotemporal whole the interesting aspect of general system theory lies not in its description of closed systems but in its usefulness in predicting certain properties of open systems in the time continuum. For example Mrs Galway was once a child in her own family of origin. She progressively grew and eventually differentiated from her parents and siblings. When she married she merged herself into her husband but as time passed she moved from her state of relative wholeness with her husband to one of increased segregation and differentiation. This progressive segregation in their marital relationship altered the family system. The concepts of progressive segregation, centralisation and individualisation can all be translated into patterns of development in families over time.
General system theory with its concentration on the properties of relatedness, order and hierarchy provides an epistemology for the belief that families act as if they are whole. But is has also added a scientific explanation for the teleology of families through its exposition of the spatiotemporal rules governing systems.
Murray Bowen is one of the original small group of researchers into the families of schizophrenics in the early 1950's. Working at Bethesda
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originally and now active as Professor of Psychiatry at Georgetown University he has been a most original contributor to the theory of family therapy. He has attempted to develop a family systems theory based on his own research and has devoted three decades to this effort. Much of his thinking may parallel and intertwine with transgenerational theory. But he states, 'I have never been happy about my efforts to present my own theory. I can be perfectly clear in my own mind, but there is always the problem of restating it so others can hear'.
His theory at present consists of eight interlocking conceptsNote 19. He declaims any influence from general system theory although he admits having read extensively in the biological field of science when these concepts were being vigorously and thoroughly debated in the literature. One can interpret much of his theory as an attempt to delineate constitutive and summative properties within human relationships.
He postulates that there are two main variables in all human relationships; the degree of anxiety and the degree of integration of self. Integration of self refers to the level of fusion as opposed to differentiation of the emotional versus intellectual functioning. Differentiation of self is defined in such a way that it is a summative property of the individual rather than a constitutive one. Because of the fixed nature of this concept within the individual, profiles of various levels of differentiation of self have been developed. The profiles describe individuals with a low degree of fusion (highly integrated emotional and intellectual functioning), whose emotion and intellect are balanced so that while the intellect is in touch with the emotional part of his being the individual nevertheless maintains an intellectual control, as well as those with a high degree of fusion, and individuals on levels between.
The development of these concepts leads to the distinguishing of the solid self, which is the summative property of the individual, and the pseudo-self which is the constitutive element of self that enters into relationships and is modified by them. The summative or unnegotiable solid self is the core of the individual which in effect states: 'This is who I am, what I believe in, and what I will or won't do no matter what relationship I am in'. The constitutive property of pseudo-self implies a relationship fusion which is linked with the fusion property of the individual, so that those people who are poorly differentiated would have a greater pseudo-self and lesser solid self. A husband and wife each possessing large amounts of pseudo-self would fuse with each other readily. Therapeutic goals based on this property would attempt to increase the amount of differentiation and strengthen the solid self.
The level of anxiety is a variable which illuminates an individual's
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level of differentiation. The longer and more intense the level of anxiety for an individual, the easier it is for an observer to distinguish the pseudo-self from the solid self of an individual.
A second postulate states that the triangle, a three-person emotional configuration, is the smallest stable relationship system. It consists of two persons in reasonably close emotional contact and one person who is more of an outsider. In emotionally tense situations the outside position is the more comfortable position. Two persons isolated together will tend to 'triangle in' a third person whenever the tension is increased. This process is illustrated by the common phenomenon of two people trying to establish that there is a common third person of mutual acquaintance about whom they can gossip.
Families are seen to consist of an interlocking series of triangles whose composition is dependent on the amount of anxiety and tension present at any given moment. The concept of triangles in human relationships seems to be an attempt to develop a constitutive characteristic similar to that of valence in chemistry which predicts the combination properties of differing atoms one with another.
Therapeutically this postulate would predict the following method of treatment. The therapist could exclude the most vulnerable member of the triangle and meet with the other two. By persistently preventing the remaining twosome, usually the parents, from triangling in the therapist, while the therapist remains in emotional contact with them, a new situation would be forced upon the twosome. Their triangling moves could be revealed and they would be forced into an alteration with the hope that it would increase their level of differentiation.
The nuclear family emotional system is a postulate describing the patterns of emotional functioning in the parental generation of a nuclear family. It refers to the interactions between sexual partners who have established a current long-lasting relationship. The patterns within family culture are thought to be due to the fact that partners will pick each other based on the level of differentiation. A presumption is made that spouses automatically choose their mates from those individuals with the same level of differentiation. Since assortative mating is assumed, it is stated that the lower the level of collective differentiation the more intense and problematic is the fusion of pseudo-selves in the marriage. The fusion can result in family quandaries of three different sorts or in combinations of more than one of them. First, it can be expressed in overt conflict between the marital partners. Second, it can be expressed as an individual problem within one of the partners. The third possibility is the impairment of one or more of the following
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generation. These three mechanisms are proposed as the manner in which the undifferentiation of the parents, passed on to them from the experiences they underwent in their families of origin, are expressed in their own family relationship. This concept begins to define specific open system characteristics of the family organism.
The family projection process is a postulate that elaborates the way in which parental undifferentiation impairs one or more of their children. This impairment is felt to begin with the birth of the child and is initiated through maternal anxiety. Mother-child fusion occurs which is instrumental in causing impairment of the child and the whole process, if followed over succeeding generations, may produce impaired individuals with symptomatic schizophrenia through the production of individuals in each succeeding generation with lower and lower levels of differentiation. The use of this postulate as an explanation for the cause of schizophrenia seems to weaken its value as a concept, since it ignores much of the evidence which suggests that schizophrenia is a multi-factorially-determined syndrome which includes a strong genetic influence. The concept is of more value in its attempt to delineate the development of the family organism over time. A similarity to progressive segregation in system theory can be seen.
Emotional cutoff is a postulate which refers to certain rules governing the attachment between members of different generations in the same family. If children cannot resolve their fusion with their parents the unresolved emotional attachment is mirrored in the undifferentiation to be dealt with in present (marital) relationships and is passed on to future generations. If the attachment is handled by an emotional cutoff either through an internal operation or through geographic distance, the attachment remains unresolved and no orderly process of differentiation occurs through the life of the individual. The result is the passage of a lower level of differentiation to the children, coupled with a repetition of the emotional cutoff between children and parents in the next generation. Emotional cutoff can be seen as a pathological method of separating from the past in order to live a life in the present generation.
This concept implies that a therapeutic technique can be developed to prevent emotional cutoff from occurring, or to modify the process if it has already occurred. Such a technique was devised by Bowen in which he coached family members to re-establish links with their families of origin in order to reverse the emotional cutoff and proceed with a proper differentiation from their parents.
The multigenerational transmission process postulates the passage of
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the family projection process from generation to generation. The family time scale it refers to is measured in three or more generations. It refers to a very specific type of transmission rather than applying to the whole of family culture. The multigenerational transmission process specifically applies to the transmission of levels of differentiation. Those children triangled into a lower level of differentiation than their parents as part of the family projection process tend to marry a spouse at the lower level of differentiation which they occupy. One or more of their children may become the triangled child and the same process will repeat itself until one of the triangled children becomes so grossly impaired as to develop symptoms of a mental illness. The process describes a downward trend in the level of differentiation over many generations. The same process may occur in reverse to produce descendants with higher and higher levels of differentiation. The process also implies a lack of homogeneity in the siblings' level of differentiation.
The sibling position postulate is one which had already been described by Adler and elaborated by TomanNote 20. The concept as Bowen applies it is that important personality characteristics are due to the sibling position in which one is born and raised. Detailed personality profiles have been constructed of these sibling positions such as the elders or youngest brother or sister, the only child and twins. These profiles will be described in greater detail in Chapter Five. Bowen uses these profiles in an attempt to predict the personality traits of family members in previous generations about whom details are lacking. He also uses the profiles to determine levels of differentiation in various family members by comparing the ideal profile with the actual personality characteristics of the individual.
The last of Bowen's postulates is the first to expand into the realm of social science, the next level of social organisation. His postulate of societal regression states that chronic anxiety in a society causes that society to resort to more and more emotionally determined decisions and eventually results in regression to a lower level of functioning, just as it does in the family. He bases this extension of his family-based theory on the supposition that societal unrest has been steadily increasing due to the chronic anxiety resulting from unique modern stresses including increasing population, decreasing resources and increasing pollution of these resources.
Bowen's theoretical concepts seem to include statements of a confusing and contradictory nature. He implies that his concepts are highly specific yet uses the same word to describe different processes. For example he uses the word 'fusion' to signify an intrapsychic process and
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sn intergenerational process between parents and children. Perhaps his unhappiness with the clarity of his explanation of his theory lies in its written contradictions. The importance of his family systems theory lies in the summative and constitutive relationship rules which are postulated between the different hierarchical levels of family structure. The postulates of sibling profiles, differentiation, solid self and pseudo-self refer in great part to summative properties of individuals. His postulates then proceed to elaborate constitutive rules within the nuclear family such as the nuclear family emotional system, triangles, emotional cutoff and the family projection process. The multigenerational transmission process is a postulate which narrowly defines an element of the transgenerational transmission of levels of differentiation. It encompasses the idea that patterns develop over long periods of time in families and can be followed in retrospect. The relationship rule is one between succeeding generations leading from the past to the present to the future.
There are two further criticisms which I would make of the Bowen theory. The first is that it is an attempt to provide a basic systems theory of family organisations, relationship and structure without an acknowledgement of the principles of general system theory. If general system theory has any scientific validity (and it would appear to have, due to its wide successful applications in the fields of communication theory, cybernetics, biology and many other fields), then it must also apply to human aggregates including families. The second criticism is that his concepts are applied to human relationships with little exposition of clinical or experimental detail or examples of the source of these concepts. Nevertheless, the Bowen theory remains valuable as one of the first attempts to provide a cohesive theory of family organisation, relationships and structure.
Transgenerational analysis as a phrase originated with Norman Paul. He defines it as the decoding of influences such as patterns of behaviour, patterns of communication, memories, habits, and learned emotional responses to sexuality, death and other life experiences. The goal of the analysis is the attainment of self-knowledge needed for mature and satisfying relationships with other family members. His thesis is that the quality of the relationship between an individual and the members of his family of origin form a crucial and often unrecognised influence upon the success or failure of that individual's subsequent marriage, including the functioning of the children produced by that marriage.
Although his training is rooted in the psychoanalysis of individuals,
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Paul realised that patterns of response in his patients could be traced to patterns present in their families of origin. In a study of seventy-five families he was able to connect the identified patient's inability to cope with small losses to patterns of inflexible interaction extant in the family of origin, in some cases long before the birth of the patientNote 21. He expanded this observation when writing about the effect that secrets can have in families. He held the view that secrets can be especially damaging when the older generation mould the younger one based on their experience of secret events or emotions without sharing the event or emotion with the children. In a book written jointly with his wifeNote 22 he described in detail a seven-session marital therapy based on transgenerational analysis. The analysis includes most areas of common human emotional experience, although he continues to emphasise reactions to loss.
No systemic theory has been constructed by Paul. But his clinical work provided a model in which he dealt with the untangling of the influences of the families of origin through the use of family charts, conjoint marital and family interviews, task assignments outside of the sessions including visit to the important members of the family of origin, audio-and-video-feedback, and the stimulation of emotional expression through cross-confrontation. Cross-confrontation refers to a technique pioneered by Paul in which emotionally charged material from interviews with one family are used to stimulate the expression of emotions in other client familiesNote 23.
Great emphasis was placed on the transmission of family culture from generation to generation to generation. Unlike Bowen he did not restrict his view of this process to levels of differentiation. He includes a host of other influences as each generation in turn married and the spouses were required to deal with the complex, often unconscious, and subtle collisions of two differing family life styles. The clients he faced originally were at the end of a long history of these collisions and the marital problems could often be traced back to the conflict in two disparate transmitted family life styles. Because of his lack of an organised theory it is difficult to provide full details of the innovative concepts and techniques which are encountered in his clinical work. He was the first to develop a clinical transgenerational approach and my attempt to develop a transgenerational theory owes much to his influence.
Attachment theory has been elaborated by Bowlby into a major psychological theory. His emphasis on the nature of the emotional bonds between individuals is of particular interest. He has defined three differ-
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ent forms of bonding; attachment, caretaking and heterosexual. The first two are thought to be the more important and stronger of the three. These bonds will be defined in the next chapter. The description of attachment as a major goal-directed behaviour in itself rather than as the result of other drives is an abandonment of the Freudian concept that all motivational behaviour has its roots in either sexual or aggressive drives. Briefly, attachment bonds are those emotional bonds which are established and maintained by proximity-seeking behaviour, such as clinging, crying out, following or any other such behaviour meant to keep two or more individuals close to each other.
In a recent paperNote 24 the family and family therapy have been described in the language of attachment theory. Families are classified by the degree and quality of their attachment and caretaking bonds and the manoeuvres developed in order to enable family members to deal with these bonds.
In the historical development of family therapy many of the concepts such as family homeostasisNote 25, double bindNote 26, marital schism and skewNote 27 and pseudomutualityNote 28 were developed during the search for etiological causes in the families of schizophrenics. These concepts in fact apply to all families as universal rules of communication between family members. Their originators have gone on to become distinguished family therapists whose contributions to family therapy have been primarily in the communicative school.
It is difficult to detail all of the other influences which have entered into the crystallisation of my thinking. Many of the concepts prevailing in the literature of family therapy have been studied and absorbed. Behavioural principlesNote 29 are particularly influential on the way in which the task setting and other techniques of treatment are used and have not been fully acknowledged in this historical review.
Finally the whole of biological science has had an influence on the development of a transgenerational theory with special emphasis on the science of genetics. Genetics has the distinction of being the first attempt of science to understand the way in which characteristics are passed from one generation to the nextNote 30. The geneogram is a direct descendant of the family chart already so familiar to geneticists.
Throughout this historical review an attempt was made to plait together those theories and concepts which have influenced my thinking in the development of a transgenerational theory. From Adler and his early emphasis on social context as a major factor in the production of mental
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illness, a historical thread was picked which led through the Freudian elucidation of intrapsychic phenomena and the interpersonal rules governing psychoanalysis. Interwoven with these influences are those of Melanie Klein and her highly internalised models of external relationships and the elegant and universally applied general system theory of von Bertalanffy. His theoretical treatise on the importance of properties of relatedness combined with the characteristics of the individual elements determining the properties of the resulting wholes, whether they be atoms, planets or people, prepared the way for a revolutionary way of viewing social aggregates.
All of these prior influences set the stage for the concept of the family unit as a whole organism, especially when view on a short time scale. Much of family therapy tasks takes its therapeutic time scale as the one or two hours during which the family are seen functioning together as an unhealthy unit in the therapy session. But system theory defines most living systems as open systems both in time and space.
Bowen attempted to define postulates which would explain the open nature of family systems. His attempts to develop a coherent theory has led me to think about my own practice of family therapy, much of which was learned from the innovative and intuitive clinical work of Norman Paul. Many other ideas have entered into the development of a transgenerational theory which seeks to explain family quandaries as a product of the multiple and repetitive collisions of family subculture which occur in families viewed over several generations.
An attempt has been made to weave a tapestry of past and present influences on my thinking in preparation for the task of organising and developing the concepts which I apply to a transgenerational model of the family.
1. A.R.C. Skynner, One Flesh, Separate Persons (Constable, London 1976) S. Walrond-Skinner, Family Therapy: The Treatment of Natural Systems (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London 1976)
2. H.F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious(Basic Books, New York, 1970), Chap. 8.
3. A. Adler, 'Individual Psychology Therapy' in W.S.Sahakian (ed), Psychotherapy and Counselling (Rand McNally, Chicago, 1969) Chap.2.
4.Ibid., p.71
5. W. Toman, Family Constellation (Springer Publishing Company, New York 1961), pp 2-15
6. S. Freud, 'Recommendations for Physicians on the Psychoanalytic Method of Treatment', Collected papers, vol. 2 (Hogarth Press, London, 1966-74)
7. D. Stafford-Clark, What Freud Really Said (Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1965), p.141.
8. J. Sandler, C. Dare, and A. Holder, 'Basic Psychoanalytic Concepts, III Transference', British Journal of Psychiatry, vol.116 (1970), pp 667-72
9. Walrond-Skinner, Family Therapy, pp. 29-31
10. S. Freud, 'Mourning and Melancholia', Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14 (Hogarth Press, London, 1966-74). pp. 243-8
11. J. Bowlby, Attachment and Loss, vols. 1 and 2 (Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1971). These first two of three volumes comprehensively put the case for a synthesis of psychoanalytic and ethologic theories into a theory of attachment.
12. N.L. Paul and G.H. Grosser, 'Operational Mourning and its role in Conjoint Family Therapy', Community Mental Health Journal, vol. 1 (Winter, 1965), pp. 339-45.
13. R.D. Scott and P.L. Ashworth, 'The Shadow of the Ancestor', British Journal of Medical Psychology, vol. 42 (1969), pp. 13-32;
J.Byng-Hall, 'Family Myths in Family Therapy', British Journal of Medical Psychology, vol. 46 (1973), p.239.
14. W. Sluckin (ed.), Early Learning and Early Experience (Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1971). An excellent collection of original research papers devoted to this controversial area. Seminal papers on imprinting, conditioning, maternal deprivation, environmental enrichment and socialisation are included.
15. H. Segal, Introduction to the Work of Melanie Klein (Hogarth Press, London, 1975) A comprehensive summary of Kleinian theory including a useful glossary of terms.
16. Skynner, One Flesh, Separate Persons.
17. Segal, Melanie Klein
18. L. von Bertalanffy, General System Theory (Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1973). It is well worth reading this book in order to recognise the true scope of the applications of general system theory to family therapy, psychology and many of the related sciences.
19. M. Bowen, 'Theory in the Practice of Psychotherapy', in P.J.Guerin (ed). Family Therapy (Gardner Press, New York, 1976), pp. 42-91.
20. W. Toman, 'Family Constellation as a Basic Personality Determinant', Journal of Individual Psychology, vol. 15 (1959) pp. 199-211.
21. Paul and Grosser, 'Operational Mourning', p. 340.
22. N. Paul and B. Paul, A Marital Puzzle (W.W.Norton, New York, 1975)
23. N. Paul, 'Cross-Confrontation', in P.J. Guerin (ed), Family Therapy (Gardner Press, New York, 1976), pp. 520-30
24. D.H. Heard, 'From Object Relations to Attachment Theory: A Basis for Family Therapy', British Journal of Medical Psychology, vol. 51 (1978), pp. 67-76.
25. G. Bateson, D. Jackson, J. Haley, and J. Weakland, 'Towards a Theory of Schizophrenia', Behavioural Science, vol. 1 (1956), pp. 251-64. A concept which refers to the family as a feedback system which is designed to maintain itself in a relatively stable state, so that when the whole family or any part of it is upset the system will attempt to operate to restore the pre-existing balance.
26. Ibid. Double-bind refers to pairs of communications, closely related but on different levels. In order for a double-bind to exist two or more people must be involved with (a) primary negative injunction at one level which includes a threat of punishment; (b) a conflicting secondary injunction; and (c) a third injunction preventing escape from the field of interaction.
27. T. Lidz, S. Fleck, and Cornelison, Schizophrenia and the Family (International Universities Press, New York, 1965). Dysfunctional families were divided into those with marital schism in which each spouse competed for their children's support and marital skew in which one parent allied with a child against
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the other parent who maintained a dependent position.
28. L. Wynne, I. Ryckoff, J. Day, and S. Hersch, 'Pseudo-mutuality in the Family Relations of Schizophrenia', Psychiatry, vol. 21 (1958), pp. 205-220. A surface alliance that obscures underlying conflicts and differences.
29. V. Meyer and E.S. Chesser, Behaviour Therapy in Clinical Psychiatry, (Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1970).
30. A.M. Srb, R.D. Owen, and R.S. Edgar, General Genetics (W.H.Freeman, San Francisco, 1965).
