A Single Intervention: A Visit to the Family

The following letter is reported unchanged except for disguised names. Concern with repairing disrupted relationships of adult members of a family with their own parents has been a matter of growing interest to a number of family therapists; Bowen (1), Boszormenyi-Nagy (2), and Framo (3), among others have stressed the importance of sending family members back to their families of origin. This report makes no effort to formulate the process in any particular theoretical framework (i.e., as reestablishing connectedness after an “emotional cut-off” or rebalancing a ledger of fairness, or whatever) but is intended only to illustrate the kind of outcome one may hope for in prescribing such a maneuver. It is offered simply as a clinical note. The letter needs little prefatory explication. Mr. Jack Newburgher had been a patient in psychoanalytic treatment for four years, with a quite successful outcome. On two occasions in the course of his therapy a joint session had been held with Mr. Newburgher and his wife, Muriel, when changes in his behavior had precipitated crises in the marital relationship. His therapy had terminated about two years before the visit referred to in the letter. Mr. Newburgher had called and asked for a joint consultation with Muriel about an acute family problem they were experiencing. Some — not all — of the background material was described, not nearly as coherently as it is reported in Muriel's letter, but in sufficient detail to make it plain that she was in distress about having to withdraw completely from her parents and that their family was in disarray as a consequence of her distress. The acuteness of the emotional disturbance, against a background of a lifelong adversary relationship between Muriel and her father and a history of ten years of illness on her fathers' part, suggested that the distress was the product of Muriel's anxiety and guilt over a decision to cut herself off completely from her parents. As a consequence, Muriel was urged to visit her family of origin, with the caveat that she might indeed discover them to be malignantly self-centered people indifferent to their effect on her and her family, but that she would at least have the gratification of having tried. The reference to “speaking French” was to the therapist having suggested that, on the other hand, she might find that her parents expressed their feelings in a different modality from her definitions of how feelings should be expressed, much as though their native tongue were French and she were insisting that they must speak to her in English.