II International Congress – Montreal 2006

Second International Congress
for Psychoanalytic Family Therapy

The Ancestors’ Share
The Transgenerational in psychoanalytical couple and family therapies.

Montréal (Québec) Canada
August 3-6, 2006

The transgenerational concept is at the heart of our practice and our theoretical elaboration. However, what are the elements remains to be worked through, explored and unearthed in psychoanalytic couple and family therapy (PCFT)? These include exploring the impact of trauma that affected our ancestors and that were repeated, along with secrets and ambiguous gifts between generations. These create symptoms against a background of shame, confusion and feelings of indebtedness, in the measure that such trauma remains un-named, unsaid, unthinkable or un-representing.

In successive generations of families, ancestor’s order may assign places that each one can occupy or defend itself from occupying. The group sets up narcissistic contracts or pacts that relate to these personages who created the shared history. In this scenario, the ancestor’s share creates the subject and sets up group relationships in a structuring way.

In PCFT, the treatment addresses what ails the generational link and consequently what causes pain in the family and couple links. Thanks to the frame and the psychoanalytic setting, this “neo-group”, composed of the couple or family group along with the therapist, embarks on a regressive journey towards the generational legacy and its ideologies, tears, myths, founding moments. The emerging generational material, the re-writing of the family romance, the analysis of the transferences (transference, counter transference and intertransference) the teasing out of filiation links, allows the reorganization of each person’s space as well as access to their differences, particularly of sexes and generations.

The current renewed interest in genealogy and origins as well as the acknowledgement of historical tragedies that collective memory tried to put aside, highlights the importance of these facts and events in providing anchorage and structure for the subject as a basis for their relationships in the groups to which they belong.