Commentary on David Scharff’s family session material and on the concept of link.

Commentary on David Scharff’s family session material and on the concept of link.

Hugo Bleichmar

I would like to thank David Sharff for providing the opportunity for us to examine a video of family therapy in which he shows us the use of his reading of unconscious phantasy, both through the children’s play as well as in the discourse of the members of this family.

What first struck me is that the mother opened the subject of the couple’s sexual relations in front of children aged ten, seven and five. My questions are: does the mother have in mind the impact this may have on the children? Does this worry her? The father also participates in these revelations. One wonders about the capacity of these parents to establish areas only for them and other areas for the whole family; that is, boundaries between the couple and their children, which might in some way protect the children from their conflicts.

Does this non establishment of boundaries have something to do with the rupture of boundaries in the couple’s original families? Lars was sodomized by his father and he did the same with his brother. Silvia had incestuous sexual play with her brother.

The children’s play is skillfully read by David Scharff as a sample of a state of unrecognized aggressiveness, including the parents’. The analyst is the target of this aggressiveness, since it is his figure that is attacked, represented by elements of the game. A question that arises is whether this aggressiveness is towards the therapist or whether it might also be a displacement onto him of aggressiveness towards the parents because of the conflictive atmosphere in which the children feel involved? Or even because of the mother’s somewhat aggressive behavior, for example when she says to David, “stop trying to imitate your father,” a disqualification of both

Eric and the father. To this, the father answers nothing: is he a  passive-aggressive person, with ulterior repercussions in sexuality? The mother takes pleasure in stressing the father’s aggressiveness towards the therapist, which may be considered the use of projective identification to put something unacknowledged of her own into her husband. With this she proposes a kind of alliance with the analyst, since she is the one who recognized a Freudian slip. The patients accept the analyst’s interpretations. Is it because of the truth contained in these interpretations or is it a form of appeasement? The laughs with which they accept them may be a way to try to soften the first shock they produce, giving way to ulterior reflection, and thus part of the way in which these patients gradually work through what was previously unrecognized. That is to say, stages in a process of personal change. Or they could be the opposite: an attempt to rid themselves of feelings of persecution and inadequacy before the therapist.

Returning to the mother’s first intervention, when she introduces the subject of sexuality without showing signs of reflection with respect to the impact on her children, or when she tells Eric to stop imitating his father: might it be useful to work not only with her but also with the rest of the family, so that besides finding out about her feelings they might grasp the subjectivity of the others, the emotional impact produced by their behavior, reading the others’ minds. In other words, increasing what those who work on mentalization call the reflective function.

In the session presented, the type of analysis centers on the family group’s transference with the therapist. It is evident that this is part of good analytic work: the shared transference common to all the members of the family. I am sure that at other moments in this treatment, David Scharff has worked, in order to encourage the process of individuation, on what pertains to each of them.

All I wish to add is thanks again to David Scharff for his contribution of material and for his fine work of reading unconscious phantasies.