When I started private practice in the 1980's, in my spare time I began reading books by most of the major gurus of psychotherapy describing their school of thought, since the psychoanalytic model I had been taught in my residency had some (to me) obvious major flaws. I had the grandiose goal of coming up with a treatment that integrated the best parts of all of the main schools for use in the treatment of patients with personality disorders, or who exhibit repetitive self-destructive behavior, into a unified framework.
I was especially intrigued by the works of the three major sub-schools of family systems therapy: those of Haley, Minuchin, and Bowen. Bowen was the last theorist I happened to come across, and I was highly impressed. Finally, someone who really looked at the bigger picture - over three generations, no less. He sent his patients back to their families of origin to renegotiate their rules of behavior.
One other guy I later read, Daniel Wile, wondered why Bowen trained his patients to use Haley's strategies with their families and not Bowen's own strategies.
I also became acquainted with something called dialectics that helped me to understand how members of a family determined the motives of their parents when the parents constantly send out double messages about what was expected from their children. And thus was born my therapy model, which I somehow managed to write a whole book about and that actually got published (In 1988).
Some of the primary
features and consequences of a unified or dialectical view of the self and the
family system were summarized in the book (Allen, 1988, pp. 353-354):
1. The relationship between self and system is not a constant but
a variable that changes over time, despite the maintenance of a lot of the same patterns of interactions.
2. The self differentiates from the system in a process known
as separation–individuation.
3. All individuals go through this process as they negotiate the
passages of individual psychological development.
4. At each stage of human history, individuals have been able to differentiate more and more from their ethnic and kin groups. These changes took place as human culture evolved throughout history, as described in Erich Fromm's amazing book, Escape from Freedom.
5. Consensual validation from the other members of the kin group is necessary for individuals to feel comfortable expressing individualized behavior.
6. Because individuals have an innate biological propensity to
concern themselves with the survival of the species (kin selection in
evolutionary biology), they are willing to sacrifice themselves, or aspects of
themselves, in order to further what they perceive to be the greater good of
their family. Especially that of its leaders, their parents.
7. When individuals find that certain differentiated aspects of
self seem to threaten the immediate representatives of the species — the family
system — they will attempt to suppress or even sacrifice those self-aspects.
Even if expressing their true selves would be highly beneficial to them
personally.
8. In order to do so, they develop a false self,
or persona, which is maintained by a variety of self-suppressive
devices such as self-scaring or self-mortification. Their
self-destructive behavior patterns seem to help stabilize highly unstable
parents.
Another theorist named Sam Slipp described frequently observed patterns of family behavior creating the personae of patients with particular personality disorders. I found this a new and very powerful way to understand my patients' behavior, and I began to ask them questions that the analysts never taught me to ask. I worked with them to trace relevant family history over at least three generations to see why their parents act the way they do.
I found strategies for my patients to confront their parents one at a time in ways designed to stop destructive patterns of interactions. When they did their homework, this worked quite well.
