"Aquilo que não se exprime, se imprime." Anne Ancelin Schutzenberger
Anne Ancelin Schutzenberger, a French psychologist, developed a method based on various transgenerational studies, which she began to explore in depth in the 1950s while she was in the United States.
The issue of unconscious psychic transmissions between generations had been understood to a certain extent by Jung, among others, but it was Anne Ancelin who, starting from Josephine Hilgard’s statistical studies on family repetitions, combining the systemic theory of the Palo Alto school and Boszomenyi-Nagy’s analyses on invisible loyalties, was able to synthesise and propose a theoretical and practical model.
Anne Ancelin proposes Henry Colomb’s genosociogram as a therapeutic tool that combines Edgar Moreno’s genogram and sociometry with Bert Hellinger’s graphic representation of the family constellation with its disorders and problems.
The work with the genosociogram or psychogenealogical tree is called psychogenealogy.
According to this method, traumas, secrets and conflicts experienced in a dramatic way can affect descendants through transgenerational transmission, who may become carriers of disorders, illnesses or strange and inexplicable behaviours. By increasing awareness of these transmissions, they help to break free from repetitions.
The objectives of psychogenealogy are:
- to talk about one’s life and clearly show the history of one’s current family and family of origin, highlighting the relationships between the different people who make it up;
- to place oneself in a transgenerational perspective and search for one’s roots and identity;
- to highlight the processes of transgenerational transmission and the phenomena of repetition;
- to understand the effects of unresolved grief and unspoken issues, and to understand situations such as that of the replacement child;
- highlight the different family roles and the rules that maintain them in order to understand the transactional modalities at play in that family.
The psychogenealogical model works on several levels simultaneously:
- Boszonenyi-Nagy’s concept of invisible loyalty regarding justice, injustice, debts and merits within the family – the family account book;
- Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torök’s notions of crypt and phantom (shameful deaths and secrets);
- the substitute child, a family member who phantasmatically replaces another person and carries with them the family’s unprocessed grief
- the anniversary syndrome, repetitions, on the same dates, of events (births, deaths, illnesses, accidents, etc.) important to the family, discovered by Josephine Hilgar;
- class neuroses, which French sociologist Vincent de Gauléjac explains in relation to certain phenomena of economic and social self-sabotage, especially in people who have surpassed their parents and moved from one social class to another;
- family alliances with the exclusion or integration of some members and not others.
He also distinguishes between:
- intergenerational transmission (conscious), which considers the verbal transmission of family habits and stories, for example;
- transgenerational transmission (unconscious), which is not expressed in words: these are secrets, things left unsaid, things hidden out of shame, sometimes even forbidden in thought, which pass through generations without ever being thought about or metabolised.
Everything happens as if everything that cannot be forgotten is passed on from generation to generation. As if one could not forget an event in life, as if one could not forget, but also could not talk about it, passing it on in silence. Anne Ancelin Schutzenberger
Clinical practice
The psychogenealogy proposed by Anne Ancelin is a work of observation and synthesis in collaboration with the client in the Rogerian sense: there is no illness, so the patient/client is on the same level as the therapist who seeks solutions with them.
The approach must be centred on the other person, on verbal and non-verbal communication, on the indirect expression of feelings and sensations through body language, posture, gestures, breathing rhythm, occupation of space, micro muscle tensions, etc. The therapist must be able to pick up on all the significant signals that help them formulate hypotheses and ask relevant questions that can help the person in their family memory work.
Psychogenealogy work begins with a session in which the person talks about themselves by drawing their family tree with important events in the lives of family members: marriages, births, departures, moves, divorces, separations, deaths, etc.
Through this practice, Anne Ancelin has shown that highlighting a past family trauma and talking about it allows it to come out of its crypt and, although it is often not enough to change one’s life or health, it helps and is a first step towards improvement.
Anne Ancelin spent many years accompanying terminally ill cancer patients and, as early as 1993, before the publication of her book My Ancestors, she had collected an archive of almost four hundred genosociograms.
“Throughout my life as a therapist, I have seen families reproduce illnesses, accidents or accidental deaths, one, two or even more generations without understanding why, like a mark on the body or an incision in time.”
Anne Ancelin Schutzenberger
SYSTEMIC PSYCHOGENEALOGY APPLIED
- Psychogenealogy is a relatively new subject, and psychologist and psychotherapist Jaqueline Cássia de Oliveira is one of the pioneers of these studies and works in Brazil.
- She trained in psychogenealogy through courses and studies on her genossociogram in Italy and Argentina with leading teachers and theorists.
- She has developed teaching materials on this subject: Psicogenealogia Sistêmica – O romance familiar contado pelo genograma (with over 1,000 readers) and Quem são os antepassados? (2018), for Interação Sistêmica Edições.
- She has translated and presented the book: Jung, Psicogenealogia e Costellazioni Familiari© (Jung, Psychogenealogy and Family Constellations) by Maura Saita Ravizza, for Interação Sistêmica Edições.
- She presented the book Psicogenealogia: Um Novo Olhar na Transmissão da Memória Familiar (Psychogenealogy: A New Look at the Transmission of Family Memory), by her colleague and pioneer Monica da Silva Justino.
- From 2011 to 2016, together with Interação Sistêmica®, she organised and held courses and workshops on the theme of transgenerationality and Systemic Psychogenealogy, bringing together more than 700 professionals, including psychologists, systemic psychotherapists and family constellators from different regions of Brazil.
- She has named her studies and work on transgenerationality (within the framework of Complex Systemic Thinking, Psychogenealogy, Systemic Family Therapy and Archetypal and Imaginative Psychology) as Applied Systemic Psychogenealogy.
- He organised the short virtual course – Basic Concepts of Systemic Psychogenealogy.
- He organised the virtual course – Applied Systemic Psychogenealogy (forthcoming).
- She organised the first edition of the Systemic Psychogenealogy Study Group – LA PATRIA E LA MATRIA (The Fatherland and the Motherland) – Pinerolo, Turin, Italy, January 2020.
- In 2020 – two editions of the 8 online seminars APPLIED SYSTEMIC PSYCHOGENEALOGY
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