Meetings of the New York Psychoanalytic Society

DISCUSSION: Dr. John McDevitt noted that Dr. Galenson's paper illustrated how neurotic conflicts in a mother led to neglect of and developmental disturbances in her child. Through repression of hostility and identification with the aggressor (her own mother), the patient had repetitively acted out with her young daughter the displaced hostile feelings she had experienced in her childhood toward her mother. The treatment design reduced the mother's hostility and her identification with the aggressor. It helped her to unravel her pathological relationship with her daughter who, in turn, soon made progress in her development.

Dr. Fred Sander, after noting the problematical place of the family in the evolution of psychoanalytic theory and practice, turned to Dr. Galenson's conjoint treatment of mother and daughter and the concurrent individual treatment of the mother. This unusual treatment structure suggested the possibility, heretofore neglected, of some form of psychoanalytically oriented family treatment when classical psychoanalysis is not indicated or practical. When psychological conflicts are insufficiently internalized, family treatment may be the only way to gain access to certain forms of preoedipal and largely interpersonal pathology. The family in treatment may try to get the therapist to enact with them some shared unconscious wishes, fantasies, and conflicts—for example, by getting the therapist to form alliances or to exclude certain family members. In the case described, as Dr. Sander understood