Roles, functions and myths in the family group of the psychotic patient
Gallego Lluesma, O.; Pugliese, R.
Acta Psiquiatrica y Psicologica de America Latina 32(4): 313-322
1986
ISSN/ISBN: 0001-6896 PMID: 3591403 Document Number: 285368
With the study of two families in treatment we can see the roles that each one gets, and the functions that the psychotic assumes. Because the family has a particular story, a lot of myths appear and the interpretation is the hermeneutic method which serves to explain them. This fact is very important because some of those myths show the pathologic unconscious of the family. Through the myths, the family expresses the values, the credences, the familiar ideology and the ideals, which generally are neither possible, real nor concrete. To consider the clinic material, we start from the description of a pathological family and we continue with the theoretical approximation of Pichon Riviére: the antipsychiatry, the structuralism and the theories about the communication of Palo Alto. Then, we arrive at universal situations about the roles in the psychotic's family: fixation and immobility, stereotypy and aupplementarity, double vinculum situation, the family gives up modifying the structure and the patient who assumes the family pathology is almost permanently disqualified. There is a downfall in the identity of the psychotic mainly because the father's function is perverted (in both families, the father appears as "powerful" and considered in society, but disqualified in the family).