Theory of Family Dynamics

At a recent meeting of the Academy of Psychoanalysis in San Francisco, Gregory Bateson made two interesting comments. He suggested that a psychoanalytic meeting devoted to the theme of family had the flavor of something unique and that it could, in fact, be history making. Later, in informal conversation, he predicted that in not too long a time, perhaps five years, we would succeed in evolving a satisfactory theory of family. That gave me good cheer, but I felt that the time estimate was rather too optimistic.

The explicit confrontation in psychiatry of the need for a family approach to mental illness parallels the recognition of specific deficiencies in the theory of personality.

In the exploration of human behavior, there is surely no end, and we hardly agree as to where to seek the beginning. Among students of personality we find two types of people. There are those who hang doggedly on a single theoretical limb, and those others who swing freely from one theoretical limb to another. The first type adheres to his single-minded faith, places a high value on consistency, but tends to be omniscient-minded and elaborates his views within a closed system of thought. He is disposed to ignore those phenomena which do not fit snugly into his preferred theory. The second type is more open and venturesome in spirit. He toys with multiple theories or tries to merge them in the effort to explain contradictory evidence. Often he is pilloried as inconsistent, unscientific, blind to the collision of irreconcilables. He may, nonetheless, make useful discoveries. In moving into uncharted territory, researchers frequently do not adhere to a single theoretical scheme. They try rather to combine several