A Synthesis of Individual Theory and Therapy with Family Concepts*

New parameters for understanding individual behavior have emerged from the theory and practice of family therapy during the past twenty years. However, they have yet to infiltrate the theory and practice of individual therapy. As an individual psychoanalyst who then also became a marital and family therapist, I changed my treatment of the individual as I synthesized my experiences with both modalities. This synthesis led me to formulate new concepts and procedures for individual therapy.

The patient in individual therapy, like each family member in family therapy, is impaled on the dilemma of resolving what seems to him to be an incompatibility between a sense of self and a sense of belonging. He needs help to concurrently differentiate himself and relate to others. Avenues to the solution of his problem may be found in the principle common to family theories that the individual is a segment of the family organic system with which he maintains a reciprocal homeostatic balance through interlocking subsystems that assign role relations to the members.1

The first hypothesis I advance is that the intrapsychic dynamics of the individual evolve from the intrafamilial dynamics. The family dynamics determine the social operational pattern that characterizes the family role of the members in the family interactional system; in turn, the family role assigned the child determines his intrapsychic dynamics. Another hypothesis is that the family role is a major key to the individual's capacity to develop a sense of separate identity compatible with a sense of social relatedness. I suggest that a distinction be made between roles in the family relational system that