EXPANDING CONCEPTS
"E o que um dia eu vou saber, não sabendo, eu já sabia." Milton H. Erickson
PSYCHISM
THE CONSCIOUS
– What I know I know.
THE UNCONSCIOUS
– I know and I do not know that I know. Everything is contained in the unconscious. It is the great ocean that contains the primitive as raw material.
THE IMAGINARY
– It means mental representation (conscious or not) of an object or mental reproduction of a sensation in absence. It is characteristic of it to reduce the other to itself, the different to the identical, the foreign to the similar. The imaginary, always in this sense, feeds on synonyms, analogies, isomorphisms. We consider everything that is similar and familiar to be good or normal, even if it involves violence, abuse, paedophilia or any other negative model. The way in which these unconscious experiences become fixed is called imprinting.
IMPRINTING
– Imprinting is a term proposed by Konrad Lorenz to explain the indelible mark left by the first experiences of a newborn animal (as in the case of a chick that, upon hatching, follows the first living being that passes by, as if it were its mother). Cultural imprinting marks human beings from birth, first with the mark of family culture, then with that of school, and then continuing at university or in professional life. Imprinting is a pattern of invisible repetition, passed down from father to son and transferred to subsequent generations. Example: family myth.
REPETITION
– The unconscious has a mind that always chooses what is comfortable, familiar, easy and without responsibility – it makes a copy. The person creates a mental model for a certain thing and even when they no longer need it, they continue to repeat the behaviour because the mental model has not been reversed.
MENTAL MODEL
– It is a thought mechanism through which a human being tries to explain how their world works. It is the way in which the person acquires language and from there perceives and thinks about the world. The mental model starts with language; as language and perception are formed, the mental model is formed.
GENEALOGICAL PROGRAMME
– A computer programme is a set of instructions coded in such a way as to obtain a specific result in the machine that runs it. Programme means written in advance and indicates the intentions that are intended to be implemented.
Sometimes, as in the case of the parental project, our ancestors act within a genealogical programme through a family name or beliefs. This programme is created spontaneously, after one or more traumas, and certain descendants are chosen to heal them. In most cases, attempts at repair remain unconscious, fail and become consolidated through a repetition of the problem across several generations.
CLOSED MENTAL MODEL
– The person lives according to the principle of determinism or linear causality. Gabriela model – I was born this way, I grew up this way…
COMPLEMENTARY MENTAL MODEL
– Principle of plasticity, zig-zag, complementary, reversible. The therapist’s task is to help the person ‘flexibilise’ their mental model, which has become rigid due to trauma. But in order to change a person’s mental model, they must have permission to do so.
PERMISSION
– This is a rule of the mental model. Only someone with authority equivalent to that established in the initial organisation of this model can grant this permission.
COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS
– Carl Gustav Jung – In developing his theory on the functioning of the psyche, he postulated the existence of a collective unconscious in addition to the individual unconscious. According to this concept, the human psyche also records the history of our family, the feelings experienced by our predecessors, as well as traumas and sufferings, just as the physical characteristics inherited from our ancestors are recorded in the body. This family memory is part of what Jung called the collective unconscious.
FAMILY UNCONSCIOUS
– The family unconscious speaks through the person. In individual therapy, the search for therapy is personal and non-personal. It is the entire family system that seeks therapy through this person. The client has their own personal functioning model and also the family/systemic functioning model.
FAMILY UNCONSCIOUS AND PHYSICAL BODY
– The client’s body is also a tool for identifying problems. It contains information stored and transmitted through family genes. We have billions of cells and therefore billions of pieces of information stored within us, from our parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and accessible within us. Physical and psychological structures contain the history of that species, which can become more rigid due to trauma. Positive experiences are also stored, but what remains most are the traumas.
TRAUMA
Unlike animals, which are less prone to trauma, we, as so-called rational animals, are more prone to trauma because we are able to dissociate emotion from thought. On a physical level, the adrenaline released gives a huge boost to fight or flee. In general, animals engage in physical activity and the adrenaline and hormones released are utilised, so no information remains in the body to remember the event. But when a human being experiences an unpleasant event, in addition to the options of fighting and fleeing, they have the option of freezing in the rational freezer. Adrenaline kicks in, you are ready to act, and then the rational freezer kicks in, dissociating emotion from thought. On a physical level, this chemical information is stored in the body, in the cells, in the muscles, in the structure as trauma, making it more rigid. In this way, the emotional flow is less accessible and can be transmitted unconsciously from generation to generation. There can be dozens of generations. When the client arrives at the studio, pay attention to how they behave, what their symptoms are.
THE SYMPTOM TELLS A STORY
"O que é calado na primeira geração, a segunda geração carrega no corpo."
Françoise Dolto
When a client arrives at our practice with a symptom, as psychotherapists we must ask: who else in this system has or has had this symptom? The father, mother, uncles, grandparents, great-grandparents? There is no feeling, no emotion that has not been experienced countless times in that system.
Clinical case report
Male patient, approximately 30 years old, married, referred by a psychiatrist, with persistent thoughts of strangling his six-month-old daughter. To protect the patient’s identity, names have been changed.
The patient reported that one day, returning from work, while playing with his daughter on the bed, he went out to get a towel and his wife scolded him for leaving the child alone. He quickly returned to the room and when he approached the child’s bed, he had the thought of strangling her for the first time.
During a session, when he began to draw his genossociogram, he had great difficulty confirming the number of siblings he had. Initially, he stated that his mother had not had any miscarriages and that no siblings had died. However, given that there was an age difference between him and his siblings, both older and younger, I insisted on the possibility of stillbirths. He then said: ‘They say that before me there was a baby who was born and died a few days later, but I don’t know how or when.
At the end of drawing up his genosociogram, while he was filling it in, he said: ‘Ah! There was Maria Alice, who was younger than me and died a few months later’. I asked him if he knew how, and he replied with difficulty that they said his parents, once drunk, had fallen asleep on top of her, suffocating her. At that moment, he was moved, as if a light had been lit in his soul. He completed the story: ‘But my parents argued a lot… So, after a moment of silence, I asked him what he thought had really happened. He shook his head and said he didn’t know. In light of what he had told me, I asked him if it was possible that, while drunk and during an argument, they had strangled the baby. He replied yes, because he had already seen his father almost strangle his mother.
Up to that point, it was all speculation. But immediately afterwards, I realised that his daughter had the middle name of his dead sister:
Alice. I asked him if he had given his daughter that name in honour of his dead sister. He replied no, because he didn’t even remember having a sister.
This part of a genosociogram session leads us to understand that:
- the individual, as the essence of the family system, has access to information about family events and traumas;
- they have the reality of the present and a reality that comes from another place: the past;
- we know that stored negative information resonates in the body or in situations in the person’s life;
- it may also be something that the person has seen and not experienced, that they have only witnessed (mirror neurons) and have not been able to process.
MIRROR NEURON –
It is a neuron that is activated both when an animal performs a certain act and when another animal (usually of the same species) observes the same act. In this way, the neuron imitates the behaviour of another animal as if it were performing that action itself. These neurons have already been observed directly in primates and are believed to also exist in humans and some birds.
PSYCHOGENEALOGY AND PSYCHOTHERAPY –
When a client comes to us with any question or symptom, they bring us a lot of family information. We must explore together with them how we can complete this picture. Some of the information is not yet available to us. We can explore it through resources such as: the genossociogram, the social atom, the photographic genogram, the metaphorical genogram, phenomenological family sculpture, family constellations and other work.
Como terapeutas não precisamos devolver nada para o cliente, porque não é possível devolver o que já é dele. Mas devemos ajudá-lo dizer sim à sua realidade. Jaqueline Cássia de Oliveira |
Partes de textos do material didático Psicogenealogia Sistêmica - O romance familiar contado pelo genograma - Páginas 12 a 15 Interação Sistêmica Edições - Brasil