THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PSYCHOANALYSIS 34:347-350 (1974)

THE FAMILY AND DEFENSE MECHANISMS*

Mario Rendon

Many principles and practices in psychiatry have moved from the abstract to the concrete, from the obscure to the obvious. Freud moved in a centrifugal fashion from the unconscious and dreams of the individual to the analysis of social institutions and social phenomena such as culture, religion, and war. Post-Freudians directed their attention to the ego, and the neo-Freudians to the social. Harry Stack Sullivan focused on the con- cept of interpersonal factors, akin in certain respects to the Kleinian school in England; Homey and other "culturalists" studied the influences of society in the determination of mental illness. Family therapy has been a necessary and almost unavoidable outcome of this process.

Psychiatry has not remained detached from politics, and thus we hear about selfi, family, and group therapy and other psychiatric phraseologies in political terms. Politics has to do with government and control and with the use of power. In this sense it applies to all levels of existence, from the intrapsychic to the international. Freud's so-called defense mechanisms may be considered in political terms as strategies or operations that aim at maintaining the self's homeostasis (or order) by using power (Freud's libido, Horney's growth forces) through channeling, converting, suppressing, repressing, denying, and so on. Used optimally, freely, and under one's control, these operations would lead to health and growth. But when used arbitrarily, blindly, indiscriminately, and compulsively, they lead to illness.

Why do individuals use their power in such arbitrary and blind (unconscious) ways? It is at this point that we enter into the arena of the family, and of a broader society as well. The answer is obvious to those who recognize that the individual has I~o main- tain the homeostasis of larger groups, and not just his own personal homeostasis. [n other words, today we must think not only in terms of an Oedipus complex, but also in terms of the Jocasta complex, the Agamemnon complex, the Electra complex, and so on. All these are subsystems of a larger system or complex, the family complex,

*This paper was presented in the Program of Public Education Lectures, 1973--1974, at the Karen Horney Clinic.

Mario Rendon, M.D., Faculty, American Institute for Psychoanalysis of the Karen Horney Psychoanalytic Institute and Center; Clinical Instructor in Psychiatry, New York Univeristy.

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348 MARIO RENDON

which is more than iust the sum of its individual components and has its own laws and rules.

There was a time when the "soul" was defined as ineffable, meaning it was not sus- ceptible to analysis or description. The "psyche" is the scientific equivalent of the soul, and psychology has studied it with respect to its organs (brain, nervous system), its structure (parts of the psyche), its functions (psychological functions and operations), and its substratum (manifest and latent content, meaning, etc.). The last involves a number of items that have been somewhat neglected by psychology until recently and which include such factors as values, beliefs, sentiments, etc. These are closely related to the subject of politics; they also seem obvious and are therefore taken for granted. The psyche and all its divisions are really arbitrary abstractions that we define for scientific purposes (analytic). But what we really have to deal with is a whole person, immersed in a natural and socioeconomic context: the concrete human being.

One of the last psychological discoveries of the "obvious" kind is that psychological aliment, necessary for the psyche to grow, is gathered within the family (the family cannot be isolated from its socioeconomic context), and it contains not only objects and images, modes, rhythms, or defensive styles, but also ideas, feelings, values, beliefs, myths, traditions, and ideologies. Like the soul, the family was taken for granted until the middle of the last century when anthropologists initiated its study. A phychotogical study of the family was seriously undertaken only two and a half decades ago.

While Freud laid the foundations for initial developments in the theory of family therapy, post-Freudian and neo-Freudian thinking was probably necessary for the de- velopment of family-therapy practices. I do not mean to suggest that family therapy may supersede psychoanalysis or that one is better than the other; there are differing criteria for both. Both are applicable at their level and they complement each other. If they are still considered by some as antagonistic to or exclusive of each other, it is only because they have become "ideologized," that is, charged with ideological or "polit ical" value. I refer here to the politics of the "psychoanalytic" or the "family therapy" groups insofar as they may oppose each other in terms of "we" and " they."

The concept of transference was defined by Freud: "The patient sees in the analyst the reincarnation of some important figure out of his childhood and subsequently trans~ fers to him feelings and reactions that applied to his model." Defense mechanisms in- volved in this maneuver are displacement and projection. Once the process and mechanisms are identified, the analyst proceeds to correct the resultant distorti0n_lf two words are substituted in Freud's definition, we have: "The father sees in the child the reincarnation of some important figure out of his childhood and subsequently transfers onto him feelings and reactions that applied to his model." We are dealing here with one of the most common of family defense mechanisms, which will be called projectiue identification. One can note an inversion here. In the first situation it is the analyst who is going to influence the patient to change while the patient is the one who is projecting; in the second case, the father is the one who influences the child and he himself is projecting. This situation is, of course, hypothetical; we know that there is always mutual influence, and that although it is unlikely that the analyst will be markedly changed by the projection, the child will definitely be shaped by it.

THE FAMILY AND DEFENSE MECHANISMS :]49

Politics involves loyalty, merit, alliances, "pay-offs," and other ingredients that we know mostly from our study of public or national life; but all these are also contained in small groups, including the family. Politics also involves punishments, exploitation, ostracism, scapegoating, and even worse patterns of dealing with power. Taking the father-child projective identification mechanism, let us suppose that the projected material is "good." Then we have rnysti[ication as an outcome. The mystified child would be the victim of the father's projected idealized image. In the embodiment of that image, the child would have to become the "good" child. In this way, the child would be deprived of any "bad" qualities. Because of the patent impossibility of that state, the child's reality is distorted. Those elements of reality which are supposed to be "bad" are excluded from the child's perceptive or experiential range. Nevertheless, mystification often operates in such a way that the parent is the mystified one. This means that the child is presented with an idealized image of his parent, rather than the totality of the parent. Often, when a child is mystified, he or she is the object of parentiflcation. That involves a role inversion within the family system. Parentification is a lower-grade mystification, often accompanied by exploitation of the child as parent.

Let us take the case of a child who is, contrary to the above example, presented with a despised image or a projection of the "bad." Similar to the previous case, the child, in assuming that image, is a victim in this case ofscapegoating. Classically, scape- goats were animals or human beings who were sacrificed to appease the gods for sinful acts that groups or group members had committed. In the family, the scapegoat is that member who is sacrificed in order to maintain a family homeostasis. The scapegoat may include several members, and, ultimately, all those involved suffer. The scapegoat is the "bad" one, the "mad" one, or both.

Induction is the mechanism by which a child is fed the images that will ultimately result in his being mystified or scapegoated. Induction is a strategy similar to hypnosis; strong messages are communicated to the child in terms that tell (not asking or ordering) the child who he " is" or what he is feeling or doing. That message may take the form of announcing who the child looks like or who he or she takes after. In this way family members "delineate" the child and induce the desired behavior. Once the chiid is de- fined, a particular set of expectations, demands, and shoulds follow, a set that is compatible with the definition.

If parents project onto the child their idealized image (or their despised self), with all its shoulds (demands, expectations, distortions, etc.), and if the child embodies this image, he becomes implicated in a process of vicarious /iving. He acts out the parents' wishes and the parents realize themselves in the child, or, better, the self is actualized through symbiosis. Attempts to deviate from the pattern determined by parents sub- ject the child to what family therapists call invafidation. Those parents deny, ignore, confuse, or obscure all behavior that does not fit their desired pattern. By means of consensual validation the child learns to interpret reality in agreement with others' experience; he makes sure that what he experiences is confirmed by those who have been through similar situations and that his behavior is as congruous to others as it is to him. This validation, so necessary to the growing child, is denied to him in some families. As a result the child remains confused, mystified, and exploited.

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The family is a "we" unit, and it is probably the strongest "we" that exists. "We," as opposed to " they," is based on belonging and loyalty. "We" are usually "good," sometimes better, sometimes the best or superior, and if there are some facts that tend to disprove this, they are maintained as family secrets. Family secrets help keep the family together. Loyalty and belonging are learned in the family, but these qualities may degenerate into symbiosis. In that case, the concept of we-hess contains the ele- ment of nonindividuation. In symbiotic families individuation may be clearly viewed as disloyalty.

Mechanisms that tend to group or agglutinate, that is, the centripetal mechanisms, are binding mechanisms. Binding is usually accomplished by love and care, but some- times it may take bizarre forms. The mother who still sleeps with the fourteen-year-old boy is binding him through forbidden incestuous gratification. The father who instructs the girl to avoid men because "They're just out to get you" is binding his daughter through cognitive distortion and fear. A common form of binding is the fostering of guilt. This quite often involves guilt over separation and individuation. Although some families tend to expel their members, most families seem to foster moves that range from belonging and closeness to dependency or, in extreme cases, to symbiosis.

Coalitions or alliances are also frequent in families. Some forms of those alliances may be quite pathogenic, particularly when they involve splitting the family into opposite factions. Contrary to the horizontal or generational alliances that are con- sidered "natural," families sometimes ally in vertical fashion, as in cases of parent-child incest or in cases of parentification of the child of the opposite sex against the parent of the child's gender. The two factions of split families attack or undermine the other, and one parent usually undermines the other. Splitting may involve several generations and sometimes has to do with reluctance to "leave" the family of origin and "enter" the family of procreation. In this case, even though a marital bond may have been created, the primary loyalty remains with the family of origin.

Individuation is that process which leads to the assuming of one's own identity and of autonomy. Loyalty to one's group is part of being autonomous. A true ideology with a coherent system of values and beliefs has been called the "guardian of identity." There is a dialectical relationship between self and others, between individual and society. Exploitation leads to formation of paranoid groups among the exploited, who develop defensive ideologies or pseudoideologies based on fear. Under those circum- stances, individuation and separation become impossible because that could constitute the threat of leaving the group ("we") and becoming part of " them." Families in this situation struggle to keep their members pathologically bound by using the various mechanisms I have described. Families, however, comprise only one level of a complex set of human phenomena. If we overlook this, and pretend that family therapy is the answer, we would then only run the risk of mystifying or scapegoating the family for the sake of other similar nongrowth-encouraging institutions.

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