Re-experiencing the Family Constellation

To those of us who share the Adlerian heritage, the concept of the fam£ly constellat£on as a cornerstone and key to human growth and development is basic. However, frequently such basic insights must be rediscovered in a new context to grant us a full realization of their depth and significance. Group psychotherapy affords us a special opportunity to observe the significance and validity of the concept of the family constellation in its developmental and therapeutic implications. In a therapeutic group where anywhere from eight to ten individuals meet and try to work out their problems, the re-experience by each individual of his own entire network of relationships in the group becomes an inescapable fact. Even therapists of different theoretical persuasions feel forced to explain the behavior and feeling of their patients in terms of the original household rather than in terms of the traditional two-way relationship between parent and child (3). In individual therapeutic sessions the presence of only two persons, therapist and patient, limits the patient's reactions; the presence of numerous people in the group, peers and elders, male and female, makes more feasible the re-experience in each person of his first group-his own family. Three significant aspects of the group psychotherapeutic process will now be selected in an attempt to show how individuals reveal and reexperience their own family group climate: