h to him and to her husband.
Murray Bowen one of the pioneers of family therapy, would explain Beth's reaction as "emotional cutoff" a term for flight from an unresolved emotional attachment (Peterson and Nisenholz 224). In Beth's case, her unresolved emotional attachment appears to involve both her surviving son, Conrad, and her older son Buck. Regarding Buck, she appears not to have dealt with her grief (her husband notes that neither she nor Conrad cried at the funeral) or with the fact that she blames her son Conrad for the death of Buck who was her favorite).
Regarding her unresolved feelings for Conrad, in addition to the blame (which Conrad has internalized) Beth appears to have projected onto him her own sense of emotional need because she can't deal with being needy; further, as is often the case with projection, she seems to actively dislike her son for that very quality. In the movie, she describes Conrad as the type who says, "I got an A on my test; Love me," and explains to her husband that she was never good with "people like that." Conrad has tried to kill himself and is, at the point when the story opens, recently back from spending several months in a psychiatric hospital. However, he remains very uneasy and agonized, experiencing difficulties eating and sleeping.
Calvin, Conrad's father, is the only family member who remains emotionally open. However, he seems confused and befuddled as to the psychoemotional and behavioral dynamics of the family, findings himself increasingly caught between his wife and his son---both of whom show a proclivity for talking about things that don't matter and avoiding any and all discussion of their real feelings. It is within this family environment, that both the book and the movie tell the story of Conrad's attempts to deal with the guilt he feels after his brother's death by seeing a psychiatrist.
With respect to family dynamics both before and after the trauma in...