This research examines the issue of individual depression from the family-systems perspective. The research will set forth the family context in which an individual's depression may surface and affect individual behavior and feeling, and then discuss ways in which the family of the depressed individual may be a factor in his or her behavior and feeling.
Tolstoy's (1970) observation that all happy families are alike and that each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way provides a means of setting out an endorsement of the family unit as the highest and best expression of human experience. The conflict created by Anna's elopement with Vronsky has its source in the fact of their violation of the integrity of the family structure. In great contrast to her cousin Levin, she forgoes the social protections of the family when she steps outside the familial structure to pursue emotional sustenance available from Vronsky, as she thinks, but not from Karenin. She also falls into a profound depression when emotional life with Vronsky cannot compensate for separation from polite society and from her son. But nothing about Anna's tragedy (it is the fate of her intensity of passion to be overlooked by the very men who love her) proves that she would have escaped depression or indeed tragedy had she remained faithful to Karenin and remained inside the Karenin family circle.
The possibility that an individual who is in a state of depression is also solely culpable in that depression has in recent decades fallen before various theories of the family and of family therapy. As Nichols and Schwartz point out (2000, p. 132), "the issue of family complicity" in the scope and limit and character of individual experience has been identified as decisive by some theorists and as marginally relevant vis-à-vis the dominant culture by others. But so much analysis of the dynamics of interaction between individuals and their surroundings has revealed the mult...