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What delights immediately about this volume is its altogether lucid prose. The author respectfully leads the analytically informed reader toward an improved comprehension of family pathology and treatment. Object relations theory, presented in a straightforward, jargon-free fashion, is extended beyond its customary pale of borderline and narcissistic states and is shown to have real utility for understanding the family.
The author's premise is that lack of differentiation among family members manifest through splitting, projective identification, denial, and idealization is at the heart of family pathology. Lack of differentiation is sustained by negative feedback: maladaptive fantasies and their accompanying social roles inhibit growth for all family members. In order to maintain a stable core identify, the preneurotic individual has projected internalized parts of self or objects to others, who are then induced into playing out the assigned role. In this way, the external world corresponds with the internal world, however maladaptive that may prove. What is gained is cohesiveness and stability of the self, at least for the parents, or some minimum self-esteem experienced as crucial for psychological survival. In pathological family systems there is a stable assignment of roles resulting from the interplay of projected parts of self and object for each family member into the others. Only with the introduction of new information that alters the system can lasting change be effected.
Wisely, Slipp provides a history of the family therapy movement, an appraisal of psychoanalytic theory and how it bears on contemporary family therapy, and certain epistemological insights that place his own construct in context. The plight of family therapy, which Slipp addresses, lies in its springing from a rejection of the analytic model, notably in the pioneering work of Jackson. Psychoanalysis, for its part, too heavily empahsized the intrapsychic. With Bateson and Laings, Slipp rega