It’s a central tenet of systems-based psychology that each personality develops in the force field of a community of origin, usually a family, seeking his or her own position in a pre-existing group, or “system,” most likely made up of mother, father, brothers and sisters, then aunts, uncles, grandparents, and so on. The leading Italian psychologist, Valeria Ugazio, further suggests that this family “system” also has “semantic content”; that is, as conversations in the family establish criteria for praise and criticism of family members and non-members, one particular theme or issue will dominate.
In my family, for example, the quality that mattered most was never courage or independence, success or community spirit, but goodness, usually understood as renunciation. My father was an evangelical clergyman and both parents were involved in the Charismatic Movement. Every person, every political issue, was understood in terms of good and evil. In another family, appraisal might revolve chiefly around, say, the courage and independence someone has shown, or the extent to which another person is timorous and dependent. In such a family it’s a fair bet that one member will have shown a remarkable spirit of adventure while another rarely takes risks of any kind.
That is—according to Ugazio’s theory—family members tend to manifest the qualities, positive and negative, around which the group’s conversations revolve.
Ugazio offers examples of this process from celebrated novels: all members of the Karamazov family, she points out, can be understood by placing them on the good-evil axis: the wicked Dimitri, the saintly Alyosha, and the more complex and untrustworthy Ivan who oscillates between the extremes. In Tess of the D’Urbervilles, on the other hand, the characters are fearful or reckless, patient or courageous, pusillanimous or bold. Of course they have other qualities too; they are complex, fully-drawn people, but it is their position along the fear-courage axis that is decisive as the plot unfolds. Moral issues in Thomas Hardy’s work usually present themselves in the form: Do I have the courage/recklessness to break this conventional moral rule?Parks suggests that our emotional response to books may have something to do with how well the writer's and reader's personalities mesh. Maybe they don't mesh at all, or they might mesh but in disharmony rather than harmony. He cites the example of enjoying Dostoevsky's work because it parallels his family's focus on good vs. evil, but being upset when at the end of the novel, the sinner always repents and sees the error of his ways.
What interested me even more was the idea that this sort of positioning in the family structure can cause problems when the person moves out into the larger world. As Parks relates it,
Some systems theorists go so far as to say that identity is no more (no less!) than the position one consistently adopts, or seeks to adopt, in each new situation. As a result misunderstandings may occur—at work perhaps, or in a newly formed couple—between people who have grown up with quite different criteria for assessing behavior. Hence expressions like: “I don’t know where she’s coming from”; “He really doesn’t get it, does he?”As my kids go out into the world to make their own lives, I wonder if their "family conversations" will match the people they choose to live with and be friends with. Maybe it does naturally, and that's why they end up choosing those spouses or friends. A very interesting topic, and one I'm looking forward to reading more about over the next few months.
