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Family System Perspective and Handling Depression |
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As Nichols and Schwartz point out (2000, p. 132), "the issue of family complicity" in the scope and limit and character of individual experience has been identified as decisive by some theorists and as marginally relevant vis-à-vis the dominant culture by others. But so much analysis of the dynamics of interaction between individuals and their surroundings has revealed the multiplicity of agency in neuroses and emotions that it is difficult not to accept that depression can feed and be fed by family dynamics. For example, even if, in the nuclear-family context, one accepts Bowen's view of the "absence of differentiation of self" (Nichols & Schwartz, 2000, p. 118), or failure of reason over emotion, as the principal source of an individual's depression, one need not go far for Bowen's hypothesis of the "undifferentiated family ego mass" and see that there may be plenty of destructive emotion, and perhaps even depression, to go around in a family, thus making it difficult for one individual member to break the cycle of depression. Indeed, as Bowen explains elsewhere (1978), failure of an individual to make (rational) choices in behavior or attitude that have the effect of allowing differentiation from this ego mass, or alternatively, the fusion of subject with the family mass, may foster pathology or indeed schizophrenia if the way in which the family functions as a whole is pathological or dys |
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Just as the degree of individual self-worth and the confidence and trust to communicate on an individual level has implications for shape of a family unit, so openness, communication, and high self-esteem among family members has an effect on how it links as a unit or, via individual members' experiences, how it connects with the society as a whole. Nichols and Schwartz explain that family-systems therapy has only recently folded cultural influences and cultural critique into its theoretical armament. Writing in 1976, Satir describes society "put[ting] together all the current existing families . . . It is as simple as that" (1976, p. 290). According to Nichols and Schwartz's interpretation of the importance of external systems to the health of a family system, this idea of society is too simple. However, one does not need to reject Satir's emphasis on the primary need for open and efficient communication in a family system in order to arrive at the possibility that an individual's depression may stem from cultural as well as family sources. On the other hand, it would seem that family communication patterns can be decisive for the depressed individual even if the incipient cause of depression originates outside the family. For example, an ambitious student who is the first in the family to go to college and who is a racial minority may be depressed at being unfairly denied a job after graduation. One does not have to endorse the values of a racist society to see that it is not ipso facto racism's fault if an individual who has been the victim of racial discrimination cannot voice his or her depression about the fact within the family unit without feeling emotionally unsafe. If it is true that, given the social pathology of racism and violence that is so widespread today, there is no guarantee that nurtured and nurturing families will guarantee a nurturing society, it is equally true that troubled, miscommunicating families do nothing to relieve the depressive anxie |
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