Textbooks provide us with a great deal of information that has been substantiated by scientific study regarding how human societies are organized and how this affects the individual. To really gain an understanding of these concepts, though, it is helpful to see these theories in application in real-life situations. This was the case with the film “The Family” produced by Jack O. and Judith K. Balswick (2007). In this film, the progression of events is shown as a psychologist helps a family consisting of a father and his two children as they work through the death of the mother. As we watched this film, a number of parallels could be drawn between the information provided in the readings and the events seen in the film.
One of the first things we read in the book Family Interaction (Anderson & Sabatelli, 2007) was that there are some predictable tasks that families must meet. The first of these is to “establish a clear identity for the family as a whole and for each individual member” (Anderson & Sabatelli, 2007: 1). Although this had been accomplished in the family seen in the video, these identities were necessarily disrupted by the sudden disappearance of one member, leaving her allocated family roles unattended so the family had to make long-term adaptations to how they would execute their tasks as well as how they identified themselves within the smaller family unit.
By suggesting a project that the newly constituted family could work on together, the psychologist was emphasizing the point that they were still a family, they were still linked by a common history, they were still capable of interacting with each other to bring about results and, while they were unique from all other types of families, this was not the result of a missing mother, but was instead a natural part of being a family unit.
In the video, the psychologist had the family bond through a project of gathering information about the family’s genealogy on both sides of the family – the father and the deceased mother. One of the main features of a family system is the factor of interdependence in which each family member depends on other family members to perform specific tasks or take up specific roles. In the absence of the mother, one of these supports had been removed and the family was experiencing a period of transition in which all of the old associations no longer worked.
By working on a project together, they were forced to begin making new associations and learned how to look to each other, rather than to somewhere outside, to meet the needs of the collective whole. In addition, as they worked through their issues, the father and his children began to develop new strategies for how to work with each other within the softening or buffering system once provided by the mom. Through this process, it could be seen how the family’s metarules were effective in helping the family cope with their issues and begin redefining their identities.
As the book illustrates, a great deal of how individuals identify themselves is in relation to the other members of their family. While daughters may identify more with their mothers and sons may identify more with their fathers, this is not always the case and often varies depending upon the particular trait or ability then in question. However, when one of the parents is suddenly missing, the children must find other ways of identifying themselves within the family unit.
By tracing through the family’s genealogy, the psychologist in the film was able to help the children discover other members of the family who had passed their traits on down to their father or their mother. This illustrated how, even though these other individuals were dead, like the mother was now dead, this didn’t mean that the specific traits that they shared with their descendents stopped. There remained a solid connection through the generations that the children could identify with and this opened up their perspectives regarding their associations within the family.
References
Anderson, Stephen A. & Ronald M. Sabatelli. (2007). Family Interaction. New York: Pearson Publishing.
Balswick, Jack O. & Judith K. (2007). Michigan: Baker Academic publishing)