Family constellation and State preaching – 10/09/2023 – Vera Iaconelli

Freud begins his clinic with Joseph Breuer discovering that remembering traumatic experiences promotes therapeutic effects. We are in 1893, a time when we seek to understand the conditions for curing mental illness.

The attentive, non-judgmental listening and the encouragement — true pressure — to say everything that came to mind in the sequence in which it appeared culminated in a memory full of affection.

The cathartic method, as it became known, is centuries old and stems from Freud’s abandonment of the use of hypnosis, a passage enshrined in his “Studies on Hysteria”. Hypnosis and the cathartic method, although they have been overcome, form the basis of fundamental discoveries in psychoanalysis, such as transference.

The recognition that the patient transfers and updates the relationship with the main figures in their life to the doctor was crucial for understanding and managing what is happening in the treatment. Books and articles continue to be produced on this fascinating topic.

It is in the wake of the discoveries of Freud and other great researchers of the human psyche that we see therapeutic “innovations” emerging here and there, sometimes as misuse, sometimes as recycling of discarded theories. They are usually presented to the layman with expressions like “Eureka, now the cure will be easy, quick and guaranteed!”.

Figures of supposed authority coercing users of the justice service to participate in family constellation sessions paid for by the taxpayer are an unprecedented example of abuses in this area. The episode on the topic on the podcast O Assunto is a class on how techniques that have no commitment to science and ethics are misused. There we see the criminal manipulation of transference and catharsis to impose ultra-conservative values ​​down the throat of the unsuspecting user.

Family above all, woman submissive to man, the non-negotiable hierarchy of generations, belonging to the group of origin under any conditions, regardless of the amount of violence involved in the case: contrary to the most basic psychoanalytic ethics, the “constellator” starts from his own convictions —conscious or not— to impose them on others.

Interpretations that are the result of unelaborated unconscious values ​​— a form of acting — reappear in the staged scenes as if they were the ultimate truth taken from a superior and ineffable knowledge. (Jacob Levy Moreno, the Romanian psychiatrist who invented psychodrama in the 1920s, is turning in his grave at the nefarious use of his techniques.)

We see the gap through which, once again, the secularism of the State is attacked by an ultra-right program that aims to impose the maintenance of inequality, privileges and violence in the name of “good”.

The histrionic effects of these interventions are highly questionable and affect the final outcome of the trials. An increase in the number of conciliations does not always mean an increase in justice, since choices based on unconscious, unnamed affections tend to repeat patterns of alienation and violence.

The violent or abusive family member returns to the family, which should not reject them (law of belonging); the victim must forgive him (law of hierarchy); the dysfunctional family must remain (family above all) and so we continue to reiterate the worst.

Without the practice of a theory in permanent review that has ethics as its basis, any intervention leads to barbarism.

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