The System, The Past, Alcoholism, Schizophrenia and Us

– Way back when I started family research back in the early fifties at NIH, before you could start there you have to have a pretty well-developed hypothesis. And in the previous 10 years I had developed a hypothesis which I spelled out in detail to get the original research started. And today I talked about how my original goal had been to work with alcoholics, not because their drinking problems or anything else, but merely because it presented what I considered the best medical evidence of a relationship. And then I moved to second best, which was schizophrenia. And schizophrenia and alcoholism are first cousins, only with a different symptom manifestation. One acted out and one acted in. One acted out more against the people out there. The other acted in more against self. And I started with a working hypothesis which I have not changed and that has now been over 30 years. And the working hypothesis would say that in the human, the young grows inside the mother, and when it’s inside the mother, it is part of the being of the mother. And when that embryo grows to a certain age, it separates itself physically from the mother, but there are those mothers determined more by the mother than the infant and by the father’s relationship to the mother, the father’s important in all of this. So he can’t say his mother or father because the mother’s functioning is a mere image representation of the father’s, so it goes back and forth. So he’s in all of it. It would say that some infants separate themselves, well all separate themselves physically from the parent and grow up physically. Some separate themselves psychologically and grow up, and others remain forever emotionally attached to the parental figure. That the human phenomenon extends itself according to it on a spectrum from those who separate themselves entirely from the parent and they grow toward adulthood physically and emotionally. All of us to some degree do not separate self from the parental figure and we extend from one end of the scale to another, including those who remain forever infants. So that is on a scale. I have never seen a person that I would consider totally separated emotionally from the parents, that includes me and you. So there’s a big hunk of you whose connected to your parents. You’re not a whole person, you’re a shadow from the past that’s walking around representing the past. Most people in the growing up process beginning in adolescence are forced to pretend that they are autonomous and they can exist without the parents. Alcoholism is one of those, it gets close to schizophrenia. This applies to everybody. Now the degree to which you are attached to the past is a degree to which you are not a whole person. A degree to which you are not a whole person. makes you vulnerable to the future and connects you with the past whether you deny it or not. In the long history of the world, people separate themselves from the past, they tear it loose by the roots, pretend the connection is not there and plop it immediately into the spouse. That becomes Prince Charming, a right man. It puts the life into the future while it’s left dangling to the past. And the more you put into the future, the greater the vulnerability for the future. So that in kids growing up you see manifestations all over the place with the kids feeling attached, but denying it. We talked about denial early today. Denial is a hallmark of alcoholism, of schizophrenia, of criminalism, of all these things. This has to do with what is the nature of an emotional system. In other words, nobody is a complete person alone, the past is hanging on to you. The only thing is you deny the existence of the past and this has to do with running away from home and not having to do with it finding yourself removed from it, all kinds of things. And of course then I would say the average in our society is people who go through the emotions of maintaining a contact with the past, which is infrequent visits home in which we pretend to keep it up. Well how do you know you’re not in contact with the past? So it’s average for two people whether they live close, whether they live in the same block. I met one family that had an aunt who lived next door and they grew into middle age before they knew the were related to the woman next door. How did that come to be? That would be an extreme example. These examples are everywhere. If you became aware of the extent of your own families, you would be amazed at how many of them there are. And we live lives pretending we never knew them. And we take our lives and commit them to some person we never knew, namely a spouse. And you go off into the sunset pretending that the future is ahead of you and the past is behind you. The degree to which people do that is the degree to which they make themselves vulnerable for psychiatric problems in the future. And a large part of that runs on denial, denial of the past. I believe that the whole business of migration, emigration and immigration, emigration going away from, immigration going to, is part of that. That is part of the pretense of song and story. You found Prince Charming and you went off into the future and had your own life. Everybody does this to a degree. You have things with the past which you didn’t like and you resolve I’m going to correct that by doing the opposite, only you over correct and do the same thing. And you create the very thing you’re trying to get away from, that is average for society. If you’re better than average, you might put it off for a generation or two, but your cutoff with the past is gonna surface in the future. I’ve told people now the extreme of those who separate themselves physically, but not emotionally, are those who become psychotic, those who become criminals, those who get in institutions and cannot live outside of institutions are the most impaired people. And those are the ones I’ve said we are all a part of everything that happens in our family, schizophrenia is on its way into your family in the present generation, in the future. You are schizophrenia and schizophrenia is you. Deny it as long as you can, but it’s coming. And all you have to do is just the more you deny it, the more it’s on its way. Schizophrenia is part of the human condition. You’re human beings, you’re going to act like humans. Now there are certain things you can do, you cannot take this away, but there are certain things you can do. And I would say that would be to understand the situation and to do the best you can with it. Let me tell you that I grew up in the psychiatric community of the Menninger Foundation and as far as I’m concerned, there is no better psychiatric institution than the Menninger Institution in the whole world as recognized as that in itself. Primarily an analytic place, it was the first hospital that went psychoanalytic. Anyway, in the early days there, in the early time it was considered that if both spouses were psychoanalyzed, they would have normal children. I think if there’s anything that people work for and that their lives are dedicated to, is having normal children. A percentage of families of mental health professionals that create psychosis is no different than the rest of people. How do you account for the fact that knowledge about mental health does not protect you from this process? How do you account for that? And I grew up there in which staff people and their spouses were both analyzed. And a longterm goal would be to have normal children. And I’ve lived long enough and only 40 years, 45 years, and the incidents of psychosis, and suicide, and everything else, is essentially the same in the descendants of that group as in society. And I knew those people and they were intent on their children being normal. What happened? I remember one from that group in which the father was a psychoanalyst and the mother a psychologist. And their first child, a son, was schizophrenic. It hadn’t to do with people ever try harder to have normal children and there it is, dead end schizophrenia. What happened? Can knowledge alone do this? I don’t think it can. So it’s that kind of thing, and you could ask what happened and what am I gonna do about this? Now the professional world, if you get completely away from that, what creates schizophrenia? If you get completely away from that and think about the schizophrenic, or the near, people are all around the spectrum. I don’t think schizophrenia is removed from any kind of neurosis or phobia or anything else, it’s just all a matter of degree. Everything is on the same spectrum. And I would say we’re part of all of that spectrum, including the schizophrenic end of it. And unless you get interested in the schizophrenia in you, you’re in jeopardy. You can deny that it’s part of you, but it is part of you. There is not one thing in schizophrenia that is not present in all of us. It’s all a matter of degree, so what are you gonna do about it? In terms of the therapy of it, you can take the isolated schizophrenic person, and the family works to do this over and over and over in spite of the presence in the hospital of some character who calls himself a family therapist. That didn’t slow down the incidence of it. The process is bigger than all of them characters. That’s why I put in that business about the satellite this morning. The process is the process. A solar wind is a solar wind, and you’ve gotta deal with what’s there. Now if you think of a process in which we’re all interconnected and we all have varying degrees of connectedness to the past, and we all have varying degrees of immaturity, and the immaturity in all of us is a degree to which we are connected to the past in which we are not autonomous people. I developed a scale of Differentiation of Self and when I developed it, I could see very well here is schizophrenia and you can define the characteristics of that. You can put it alongside of criminalism and it’s just the same. Put it alongside essential alcoholism and it’s the same. Put it aside whatever, put it aside hypochondriasis, it’s the same. So… I lost my thought, I’ll come back to it. In individual psychotherapy, you say this does not, this interconnectedness, this is a system. How far back does this system go? The system is alive and well in all of the ancestors alive today. It goes beyond that and it is alive and well in everybody alive today, or everybody remembered by anybody alive today, or anybody who you knew whose already dead who knew somebody in the past. This system goes way back and it’s not just the people alive today, that is the people who are long since dead who are remembered by those who have died in your lifetime, or have been remembered and remembered by, the same thing goes back generations. And that is what the emotional system is about. You cannot escape from your ancestors. You cannot escape from the stories that have been known about them, you just try to escape them. You try to if you’re a descendant of Wild Bill Hickok or Buffalo Bill, try to act like you ain’t. Your family knows it. And as long as your family knows it and that story is alive, you’re part of it.