The Family Crucible: The Intense Experience of Family Therapy

“It’s important to search for your own unconscious agenda.”

Whitaker and Napier’s work is rooted in Freud’s theory of the unconscious mind. The idea that most of people’s actions and emotions are motivated by underlying processes carried over into family therapy, where it was applied to the whole family as one unified unconscious.

“But however faulty, the family counts on the familiarity and predictability of their world. If they are going to turn loose this painful predictability and attempt to reorganize themselves, they need firm external support. The family crucible must have a shape, a form, a discipline of sorts, and the therapist has to provide it. The family has to know whether we can provide it, and so they test us.”

Napier draws on simile and metaphor to describe the nature of therapy and the difficulties that families face in confronting the need for change in their carefully crafted lives. A family relies on the way they have always been, and changing the entire structure of a family is a daunting task. The family must therefore be assured that the therapist is up to it.

“The whole family stumbled into an approach that called into question some of their most basic assumptions about individual autonomy, about causation and motivation in human relationships, and about the nature of psychological growth.”

Family therapy was a developing field in the 1970s, and families who underwent this new process were part of a learning curve for therapists as well as courageous in their decision to try something not yet well researched. The family structure must be undone and reworked, and this is done by examining unconscious processes in each individual member.