Commentary by a Psychoanalytical Family Therapist

I have been asked to comment on a family therapy session where the use of ‘ritual’ as

a therapeutic process to mark and facilitate an important transition in the lives of members of a family is discussed.

The material that I saw is a very moving account of what feels a real experience of loss, separation and mourning, helped by a gentle and firm therapist who enabled the family to move from pathological mourning to real sadness. The therapist used what for me are ‘interpretations in action and movement’ which is a different perspective from the one I would like to follow. My comments on the family evolution and the session described offer a different point of view, not better or worse, than the theoretical model used by the therapist. I think that the symptomatic presentation could be seen as the experience of the family's shared, unconscious fantasies or defence mechanisms, and the way they have been used by the family members to modify or evade the reality of their experience of loss and pain.

The first question one has to ask oneself is, who is the family who is consulting, is it the family of origin, which is probably no longer the real family, or the parents and their partners, and their children? It is a difficult decision. I tend to choose to see those who are living together because I think that those persons are the ones who will probably go on enacting, in a shared manner, some of their unconscious fantasies about their anxiety and their defence mechanisms.

The family could be described also as a group oscillating between a mental state of a basic assumption and a work group: