Ordinary People

The upper-middle-class Jarrett family presents with their son Conrad a late-adolescent parasuicide whose only sibling, older brother Buck, drowned in a boating accident in which the younger brother was also involved. What must be first recognized is that there is no question of Conrad's resisting psychotherapy for the reason that he slashed his wrists. As a parasuicide he would be obliged not only by concerned parents but also by the state bureaucracy to be monitored by a psychiatrist or other psychotherapy professional. What is striking about the psychological intervention to date, however, is that Conrad alone has been sent into psychotherapy and that his parents (Beth and Calvin) have not entered treatment of any kind. The purpose of this research is therefore to set forth an intervention model. The theoretical foundation for this intervention will be Bowen Family Systems Therapy.

The manifest experience of the Jarrett family is that it is the very model of well-balanced togetherness. Calvin's law practice positions the family in material but not particularly ostentatious comfort, which means that financial problems are not at issue in the family. There is also no evidence of adolescent or adult deviance vis-�-vis the social structure, such as substance abuse, in the household. Initial review of the family history suggests that the parents have a pattern of exercising reasonable control and discipline without over

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-reliance in a perilous situation (Redford & Sargent, 1980). In any case, for Beth, Buck's death has withdrawn the palpability of that emotional condition and simultaneously forced other, latent processes in the family toward the surface. What does seem apparent is that Beth's attitude toward Buck has not been transferred to Conrad. But whereas Beth's overweening concern might have emotionally crippled Buck, her apparent inability to bond in a remotely similar manner to Conrad--indeed, her scarcely concealed antipathy for him--has had the unintended consequence so emotionally crippling him that his recourse was suicide. A core idea of Bowen's is that influences on individual emotion can as it were trickle down through family history, across generations, in an "undifferentiated family ego mass" (Bowen, 1978), to become part of the psychological and behavioral apparatus of the subject. There are mental, physical, and social components of this influence, and they have as much to do with how a family operates or behaves as with the subject's idiosyncratic behavior. However, in Conrad's case, the withdrawal of Buck from the family unit showed how out of balance the family ego mass was, with the most significant mass belonging to the u

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