Family Myths

In the ongoing drama of family life, children often assume--or are assigned--roles based on their parents' unspoken needs, fears, or desires. Now, for the family "Brain", Ne'er Do-Well, Wild Child, Responsible Daughter or Prodigal Son, here's a fascinating look at how childhood roles endure and distort perceptions as we become adults. Serial to Psychology Digest.

Therapists can broaden their point of view and expand their options for treating individuals, couples, and families by understanding family myths. Here is a thorough and unique compilation of current studies on the development, evolution, and clinical implications of family myths. An outstanding group of international experts offers a variety of formulations regarding both personal and family myths in an attempt to bridge the chasms between individual, couple, and family systems dynamics. They focus on the conscious and unconscious elements of families’shared perceptual experiences and their relationship to behavioral, interactional patterns of individuals, couples, and family systems. The detailed descriptions of various clinical approaches to re-editing clients’personal, conjugal, and family myths will be enormously helpful to clinicians, theorists, trainers, and educators.

A Vogue Best Book of the Year "What Ferrante did for female friends—exploring the tumult and complexity their relationships could hold—Spiegelman sets out to do for mothers and daughters. She’s essentially written My Brilliant Mom." —Slate A memoir of mothers and daughters—and mothers as daughters—traced through four generations, from Paris to New York and back again. For a long time, Nadja Spiegelman believed her mother was a fairy. More than her famous father, Maus creator Art Spiegelman, and even more than most mothers, hers—French-born New Yorker art director Françoise Mouly—exerted a force over reality that was both dazzling and daunting. As Nadja’s body changed and “began to whisper to the adults around me in a language I did not understand,” their relationship grew tense. Unwittingly, they were replaying a drama from her mother’s past, a drama Nadja sensed but had never been told. Then, after college, her mother suddenly opened up to her. Françoise recounted her turbulent adolescence caught between a volatile mother and a playboy father, one of the first plastic surgeons in France. The weight of the difficult stories she told her daughter shifted the balance between them. It had taken an ocean to allow Françoise the distance to become her own person. At about the same age, Nadja made the journey in reverse, moving to Paris determined to get to know the woman her mother had fled. Her grandmother’s memories contradicted her mother’s at nearly every turn, but beneath them lay a difficult history of her own. Nadja emerged with a deeper understanding of how each generation reshapes the past in order to forge ahead, their narratives both weapon and defense, eternally in conflict. Every reader will recognize herself and her family in I'm Supposed to Protect You From All This, a gorgeous and heartbreaking memoir that helps us to see why sometimes those who love us best hurt us most.

The challenge faced by family businesses and their stakeholders, is to recognise the issues that they face, understand how to develop strategies to address them and more importantly, to create narratives, or family stories that explain the emotional dimension of the issues to the family. The most intractable family business issues are not the business problems the organisation faces, but the emotional issues that compound them. Applying psychodynamic concepts will help to explain behaviour and will enable the family to prepare for life cycle transitions and other issues that may arise. Here is a new understanding and a broader perspective on the human dynamics of family firms with two complementary frameworks, psychodynamic and family systematic, to help make sense of family-run organisations. Although this book includes a conceptual section, it is first and foremost a practical book about the real world issues faced by business families. The book begins by demonstrating that many years of achievement through generations can be destroyed by the next, if the family fails to address the psychological issues they face. By exploring cases from famous and less well known family businesses across the world, the authors discuss entrepreneurs, the entrepreneurial family and the lifecycles of the individual and the organisation. They go on to show how companies going through change and transition can avoid the pitfalls that endanger both family and company. The authors then apply tools that will help family businesses in transition and offer their analyses and conclusions. Readers should draw their own conclusions from careful examination of the cases, identifying the problems or dilemmas faced and the options for improved business performance and family relationships. They should ask what they might have done in the given situation and what new insight into individual or family behaviour each case offers. The goal is to avoid a bitter ending.

First Published in 1992. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Therapists can broaden their point of view and expand their options for treating individuals, couples, and families by understanding family myths. Here is a thorough and unique compilation of current studies on the development, evolution, and clinical implications of family myths. An outstanding group of international experts offers a variety of formulations regarding both personal and family myths in an attempt to bridge the chasms between individual, couple, and family systems dynamics. They focus on the conscious and unconscious elements of families’shared perceptual experiences and their relationship to behavioral, interactional patterns of individuals, couples, and family systems. The detailed descriptions of various clinical approaches to re-editing clients’personal, conjugal, and family myths will be enormously helpful to clinicians, theorists, trainers, and educators.

Presenting a collection of classic and recent papers reprinted from the Journal of Individual Psychology and Individual Psychology that represent the purpose, methods and spirit of techniques in Adlerian psychology. The editors have prefaced the text with a statement of the goasl of Alderian theory, as well as the goals of the techniques presented.