C.G. Jung – Family Constellation
C. G. Jung's article "Family Constellation," translated by Elena Kruglyakova, is published in the second volume of his collected works. This volume contains Jung's works, which reflect on his experimental research using word association tests. The volume covers the research period from 1904 to 1911.
This article, written in 1909, contains some of Jung's ideas about the influence of family on individual development. It reveals the beginnings of object relations psychology, transgenerational transmission, constellations, and, I believe, many other fields that today are independent fields. I'd particularly like to highlight the ideas about the influence of couples on each other, that is, the idea that not only parents influence children, but also the development of husband and wife within a couple. Moreover, this article is a reflection on the results of associative experiments; Jung draws on figures and graphs for his reflections, but in his reflections, he essentially describes elements of the family's emotional field, or, as we might say today, elements of the family unconscious.
The word constellation is from the Latin constellatio, which literally means “constellation” (con- “together” + stella “star”); in analytical psychology, they usually talk about the constellation of a complex.
Ladies and gentlemen, as we have seen, there are various ways in which the association experiment can be used in practical psychology. Today, I would like to discuss another way of using this experiment, which is primarily of purely theoretical significance. My student, Emma Furst, a staff member at the Psychiatric Clinic of the University of Zurich, conducted the following research: she applied the association experiment to twenty-four families, consisting of a total of one hundred subjects. The resulting data consisted of 22,200 associations.
This material was processed in the following way: fifteen clearly defined groups were formed in accordance with logical-linguistic criteria, and the associations were grouped as follows:
| Husband | Wife | Difference | ||
| I | Coordination | 6.5 | 0.5 | 6 |
| II | Subordination and superordination | 7 | - | 7 |
| III | Difference | - | - | - |
| IV | A predicate expressing a personal judgment | 8.5 | 95.0 | 86.5 |
| V | Simple predicate | 21.0 | 3.5 | 17.5 |
| VI | Relationship of the verb to the subject or object | 15.5 | 0.5 | 15.0 |
| VII | Time indication, etc. | 11.0 | - | 11.0 |
| VIII | Definition | 11.0 | - | 11.0 |
| IX | Coexistence | 1.5 | - | 1.5 |
| X | Identity | 0.5 | 0.5 | - |
| XI | Motor-speech combination | 12.0 | - | 12.0 |
| XII | Composition of words | - | - | - |
| XIII | Ending of words | - | - | - |
| XIV | Sound associations | - | - | - |
| XV | Incomplete reactions | - | - | - |
| Total | 173.5 | |||
| The average difference is 173.5/15 = 11.5 |
As this example shows, I use difference to demonstrate the degree of analogy. To find the basis for the similarity sum, I calculated the differences between all of Dr. Furst's unrelated subjects by comparing each female subject with all other unrelated females; the same comparison was made for male subjects.
The most significant difference is observed when the two compared subjects do not share a common associative quality. All groups are calculated as percentages; the maximum difference can be 200/15 = 13.3 percent.
| I | The average difference between unrelated male subjects is 5.9 percent, while the same parameter for women in the same group is 6 percent. |
| II | The average difference between male and female related subjects is 4.1 percent, while for female subjects it is 3.8 percent. These figures indicate that related subjects tend to agree on their response patterns. |
| III | The difference between fathers and children = 4.2, mothers = 3.5. The types of children's reactions are closer to the type of the mother than to the father. |
| IV | The difference between fathers and their sons = 3.1, daughters = 4.9, between mothers and sons = 4, daughters = 3.0. |
| V | The difference between brothers is 4.7, and between sisters is 5.1. Omitting married sisters from the comparison procedure yields the following result: the difference between unmarried sisters is 3.8. These observations clearly demonstrate that marriage, to varying degrees, disrupts the initial association, as the husband belongs to a different type. The difference between unmarried brothers is 4.8. Apparently, for men, marriage has no effect on the type of association. However, the data we have are not yet sufficient to draw definitive conclusions. |
| VI | The difference between husband and wife is 4.7. This figure is not a reliable sum of different and highly unequal values; that is, there are some cases showing extreme differences, as well as others showing complete agreement. The graphs show the various results (Figs. 1-5). I have marked the quantitative values of the associations on the vertical axis as percentages. Roman numerals on the horizontal axis represent the forms of associations given in the table above. |
Fig. 1. Father (thick line) demonstrates the object type, while mother and daughter are pure predicates with a pronounced subjective tendency.
Fig. 2. Husband and wife are in good agreement on the purely predicate type, with the predicate subjective type being somewhat more pronounced in the case of the wife.
Fig. 3. Very good agreement between the father and his two daughters.
Fig. 4. Two sisters live together. The dotted line represents the meaning for the married sister.
Fig. 5. Husband and wife. The wife is the sister of the women in Fig. 4. She is very close to her husband's type. Her drawing is the direct opposite of that of her sisters.
The similarity of associations between related individuals is often striking. Here's an example of a mother and daughter:
| Incentive word | Mother | Daughter | |||
| pay attention | hard work | student | |||
| law | God's commandment | Moses | |||
| Expensive | child | father and mother | |||
| great | God | father | |||
| potato | tuber | tuber | |||
| family | a lot of people | five people | |||
| stranger (alien, unfamiliar) | traveler | travelers | |||
| Brother | dear to me | Expensive | |||
| kiss | mother | mother | |||
| burn | severe pain | painful | |||
| door | wide | big | |||
| hay | dry | dry | |||
| month | many days | 31 days | |||
| air | chill | wet | |||
| coal | sooty | black | |||
| fruit | sweet | sweet | |||
| funny | happy child | small children | |||
Indeed, one might expect that in this experiment, with its wide-open door to so-called chance, individuality would be a primary factor, and that a rich diversity and freedom of association would therefore be expected. But, as we have seen, the results indicate the opposite. The daughter shares her mother's way of thinking not only in her ideas but also in the way she expresses them; so much so that she even uses the same words. What could be more free, fickle, and inconsistent than a fleeting thought? Here, however, the thought is not inconsistent, nor is it free; on the contrary, it is strictly determined by the boundaries of the environment. Consequently, if even the most superficial and apparently most fleeting mental images are completely conditioned by the environmental constellation, what should we expect for more significant mental activities, for emotions, desires, hopes, and intentions? Consider the specific example presented in Figure 1.
The mother is forty-five years old, and the daughter is sixteen. Both clearly belong to the predicate type, according to the assessment results, and are markedly different from the father. The father is a drunkard and demoralized. It is therefore understandable that his wife is emotionally starved and betrays him with her harsh evaluative judgments. However, the same arguments cannot be applied to the daughter, since, firstly, she is not married to a drunkard, and secondly, life with all its hopes and promises still lies before her. It is completely unnatural for the daughter to fall into the group of a pronounced predicate type. She reacts to environmental stimuli exactly as her mother does. But while for the mother this type is, to some extent, a natural consequence of her unfortunate situation, this is completely unrelated to the daughter. The daughter simply imitates her mother; she follows her mother's pattern. Consider what this might mean for a young woman. For her, this is unnatural and causes her to react to the world as an older, disillusioned woman would. But the consequences could be even more serious. As you know, representatives of the predicate type openly express strong emotions; for them, everything is emotional. If such people are close to us, it is difficult to avoid reacting, at least internally; we can become infected with their emotions and even be carried away by them. Originally, affects and their physical manifestations had a biological significance, that is, they served as a defense mechanism for the individual and the entire herd. If we demonstrate our feelings, we can be sure to evoke feelings in others. This is the experience of the predicate type in question. What a forty-five-year-old woman does not receive emotionally, namely, love in marriage, she seeks as compensation in the external world, and for this reason she is an ardent follower of the Christian Science movement. If a daughter follows this pattern, she behaves in the same way as her mother, seeking emotional satisfaction externally. But for a sixteen-year-old girl, such an emotional state is very dangerous, to say the least; like her mother, she reacts to her environment, requesting sympathy for her suffering. This emotional state is no longer dangerous for the mother, but for obvious reasons, it is dangerous for the daughter. Once she is freed from her father and mother, she will become like her mother—a suffering, internally dissatisfied woman. Thus, she will be at great risk of becoming a victim of violence and marrying a boor and drunkard like her father.
I believe this consideration is important for understanding the influence of environment and education. This example demonstrates what can be transmitted from mother to child. It is not pious commandments or the repetition of pedagogical truths that influence the character formation of a developing child; rather, it is the unconscious personal affective states of their parents and teachers that exert the strongest influence. Hidden conflicts between parents, secret anxieties, repressed desires—all these factors generate a characteristic emotional state in the child, which slowly but surely, albeit unconsciously, seeps into their psyche, resulting in the formation of exactly the same attitudes and, consequently, the same reactions to the environment. We all know that when we associate with capricious and melancholic people, we ourselves become depressed. A restless and nervous person infects others with anxiety, whining, discontent, and so on. Since adults are so sensitive to environmental influences, we should certainly expect that for children, whose psyche is as soft and pliable as wax, this sensitivity will be even more pronounced. Fathers and mothers deeply imprint their personalities on the psyche of their children; the more sensitive and receptive the child's psyche, the deeper the imprint. Everything is unconsciously reflected, even things never spoken aloud. The child imitates gestures, and the parents' gestures are an expression of their emotional states, and, in turn, the gesture gradually forms a certain emotional state in the child as the child appropriates it. The child's adaptation to the world is exactly the same as that of his parents. At puberty, when the child begins to free himself from the family curse, he emerges into life with virtually the same set of impaired adaptation mechanisms as his parents. This may be the cause of frequent and very severe adolescent depressions; their symptoms are rooted in the difficulties in developing new adaptation mechanisms. A teenager initially tries to separate himself from his family as much as possible, even to the point of complete alienation, but internally this only serves to bind him even more tightly to the image of his parents. I recall the case of a young neurotic who ran away from home. He became alienated from his family to the point of cruelty, yet he confessed to me that he possessed a very special talisman: a box containing his old children's books, dried flowers, stones, and even small bottles of water from the well at his home and from the river along which he used to walk with his parents.
The first steps toward friendship and love are most rigidly determined by the nature of our relationships with our parents, and this, as a rule, perfectly illustrates the powerful influence of the family constellation. For example, it is not uncommon for a healthy son of a hysterical mother to find a hysterical wife, and the daughter of an alcoholic to choose an alcoholic husband. I once spoke with an intelligent and educated twenty-six-year-old woman suffering from a peculiar symptom. She complained that her gaze would constantly acquire a strange expression, which had an undesirable effect on men. If she looked at the man next to her, he would become embarrassed, turn away, and suddenly begin to say something to the man next to him, after which they would either laugh or feel ashamed. The patient was convinced that her gaze aroused indecent thoughts in men. It was impossible to dissuade her from this belief. This symptom immediately aroused my suspicion that I was dealing not with a neurosis, but with paranoia. However, after only three days of treatment, I discovered I was mistaken, as the symptom, once analyzed, disappeared immediately. It had arisen as follows: the woman had a lover who publicly rejected her. She felt completely abandoned, stopped appearing in society, gave up her entertainment, and developed suicidal thoughts. In this isolation, unconscious and repressed erotic desires accumulated, which she unconsciously projected onto men whenever she found herself in their company. This formed the belief that her gaze aroused erotic desires in men. Further investigation revealed that her unfaithful lover was mentally ill, a fact of which she was apparently unaware. I expressed my surprise that she had made such an inappropriate choice and added that she must have had a certain inclination to love mentally ill people. She denied this, but she did say that she had once, before this incident, been engaged to a completely normal man. He, too, had left her; and upon further investigation, it turned out that he, too, had recently spent a year in a mental hospital—another psychotic! This seemed sufficient to confirm my suspicion that she had an unconscious tendency to choose insane men. Where did this strange taste come from? Her father had been strange, eccentric, and in later years had become completely estranged from his family. The patient's love had thus been displaced from her father figure to her brother, who was eight years older and whom she loved and revered as a father. At fourteen, her brother became hopelessly insane. This, undoubtedly, was the very pattern from which the patient could never free herself, according to which she chose her lovers and through which she was destined to become unhappy. The particular form of her neurosis, which gave the impression of insanity, probably arose from this same childhood pattern. We must take into account that in this case we are dealing with a highly educated and intelligent woman, who did not neglect her inner experience, who really thought a lot about her unhappy fate, without, however, having any idea what was the cause of her misfortune.
We unconsciously take such things for granted in ourselves; for this very reason we cannot see what is really going on, but assume that our innate character is to blame. I could cite countless similar examples. Patients constantly illustrate to me the determining influence of family history on their destiny. In every neurosis, we can see how the emotional environment formed in infancy influences not only the nature of the neurosis, but also the patient’s fate down to the smallest details. Years later, we can detect traces of such family constellations, which have been the cause of numerous unfortunate career choices and disastrous marriages. There are, however, cases in which the profession was chosen successfully, where the husband or wife is blameless, and yet the patient feels ill and lives and works in constant tension. A similar situation often appears in the case of chronic neurasthenics. Here the difficulty lies in the fact that the mind is unconsciously split into two parts, representing opposing and conflicting tendencies; One part lives with the husband or profession, while the other lives unconsciously in the past with the father or mother. I treated a woman for many years who suffered from a severe neurosis, which eventually progressed to dementia praecox. The neurotic syndrome began to develop at the moment of marriage. The patient's husband was a kind, educated, wealthy man, suitable for her in every way; there were no apparent reasons in his character that could in any way interfere with marital happiness. And yet, the marriage was unhappy, because the wife was neurotic, and an easy relationship seemed impossible. A heuristically important principle of any psychoanalysis is: If a patient develops a neurosis, this neurosis contains a negative aspect of this patient's relationship with a loved one. Neurosis in the husband clearly shows that he has strong resistance and negative attitudes toward his wife; a neurotic wife has attitudes that alienate her from her husband. In an unmarried patient, the neurosis turns against her lover or parents. Every neurotic naturally resists such a merciless interpretation of the content of their neurosis and often refuses to acknowledge it under any circumstances, yet this is always the crux of the matter. Of course, the conflict is not obvious and, as a rule, can only be revealed through painstaking psychoanalysis.
Let me tell you the story of our patient: her father was a deeply impressive figure. She was his favorite daughter and treated him with boundless respect. At the age of seventeen, she fell in love with a young man for the first time. During this time, she had the same dream twice, the impact of which never left her; she even attached a certain mystical meaning to it and often recalled it with religious awe. In the dream, she saw a tall male figure with a beautiful white beard, and at the sight of him, she was filled with a sense of awe and delight, as if experiencing the presence of God himself. This dream made a profound impression on her, and she was forced to think about him constantly. The love affair turned out to be frivolous and soon ended. The patient later married her current husband. Although she loved her husband, she constantly mentally compared him to her late father, and the comparison always turned out to be unfavorable. Whatever her husband did, said, or intended to do was condemned according to the same script and always with the same result: "My father would have done all this differently and better. It's not like that." Thus, our patient was unable to enjoy life with her husband. She could neither respect nor love him sufficiently, and he was internally disappointed and dissatisfied. Gradually, she developed strong religious feelings, while simultaneously exhibiting symptoms of hysteria. She began to develop sentimental attachments to one priest after another, becoming increasingly estranged from her husband. The psychiatric syndrome manifested itself ten years after the marriage, and in this state, she refused to have anything in common with her husband and child, imagining herself pregnant by another man. Her resistance toward her husband, which had hitherto been carefully suppressed, became quite pronounced and manifested itself in various ways, including severe violence.
This case demonstrates that the neurosis began to develop around the time of her marriage and manifested itself in a negative attitude toward her husband. What was the nature of this negative attitude? It was the patient's relationship with her father; day after day, she proved to herself that her husband had never lived up to her father's standards. When the patient first fell in love, a symptom appeared—an extremely striking dream or vision. She saw a man with a beautiful white beard. Who was this man? When her attention was drawn to the beautiful beard, she immediately recognized the image. Of course, it was her father. Every time the patient fell in love, the image of her father arose, thus preventing her from adapting to the relationship with the man in question.
I have deliberately cited this case as an example, as it is a simple and very typical illustration of how a marriage can be crippled by the wife's neurosis. I could overwhelm you with similar examples. Misfortune always has an overly strong attachment to parents, and the child remains imprisoned in the prison of his parent-child relationship. One of the most important goals of education should be to free the growing child from his unconscious attachment to the influences of his childhood, so that he can retain what is valuable in himself and discard what is not. It seems to me impossible at present to resolve this difficult question from the child's perspective. We still know too little about children's emotional processes. The first and only contribution to the literature containing factual evidence on this topic was published this year. It is Freud's analysis of a five-year-old boy.
Children's problems are very great. Parents' problems, however, should not be so great. Parents could be much more careful and patient in their love for their children. Many of the sins committed against beloved children by their overly indulgent parents could probably be avoided if the parents had a deeper understanding of the child's consciousness. For many reasons, I consider it impossible to make any universally valid statements regarding the educational aspect of this problem. We are still far from general commandments and rules; we are still performing the fieldwork illustrated by case histories. Unfortunately, our knowledge of the subtle processes of a child's consciousness is so insufficient that we are not yet able to say where the greater fault lies: in the parents, in the child himself, or in the relationship, in the environment. Only psychoanalytic examples, such as the one published by Professor Freud in our Jahrbuch, 1909 (5), will help overcome this difficulty. Such detailed and meticulous observations should be a powerful incentive for all teachers to familiarize themselves with Freud's psychology. This psychological approach to education can be much more beneficial than all the current physiological psychology.