Family Games: General Models of Psychotic Processes in the Family

What is the origin of psychosis? What is the complex relationship between so-called 'mental illness' and the problems which afflict families? The attempt to provide an answer to these questions began with the courageous decision to transform a professional practice into a centre for research. To this end, Mara Selvini Palazzoli conducted family therapy sessions in a highly original context, characterized by the unusual length of time devoted to the sittings (half a day); by the presence of a team of therapists drawn from the different working backgrounds and orientations; by direct observation, made possible by the use of a one-way mirror; and by a systematic investigation of the effects of the therapies based on written transcriptions of all the sessions, in addition to audio and visual recordings.Pursuing this line of qualitative research, founded on an intensive examination of single cases, Selvini Palazzoli and her colleagues experimented with something totally unprecedented in the field of psychotherapy. Over a period of eight years they issued a series of 'invariant prescriptions' to be followed by one hundred and forty nine families with severely disturbed children. By recourse to this programme the therapies, in turn, could be subjected to rigorous testing, allowing a complex work of comparison to be carried out, not generally available to the more conventional therapies.Through the experimental therapy, the authors of this book have been able to construct models of the interactional processes (called, metaphorically, 'Games') which operate in the family, and which lead a child to psychosis-and they invite readers to subject these models to critical scrutiny, either to verify or reject their conclusions.